Game addiction is linked to the upbringing of the child. Parents have need to put in a lot more effort into influencing their children and in teaching them the morals and values of living in the society. With the Internet, the whole world’s information is out there, parents can no longer “lock in” their children. Then there’s peer pressure, and many other exposures through the media.

Controlling game time is one method in preventing game addiction, but helping young gamers understand is far more important. It’s like the story about whether you should teach someone to fish or whether you should just feed them fish. The first step to ‘fixing’ an addiction is to find its underlying source, then tackle the problem from beneath… Anyway just read the article, I’m starting to not make any sense…

(from news.com.au)
1 in 10 young gamers shows signs of addiction, study finds
April 21, 2009 08:45am

• Study compares gamers with gamblers
• Looks at 1178 children and teens in US

ABOUT one in 10 young gamers shows signs of addictive behaviour that could have negative effects on family, friends and school work, according to a new study.

The US study of 1178 children and teenagers found some young gamers showed at least six symptoms reminiscent of a gambling addiction.

These included lying to family and friends about how much they play games, using games to escape their problems and becoming restless or irritable when they stop playing.

They may also skip homework to play games or spend too much time playing and do poorly in school.

The study was carried out by researchers at Iowa State University and the National Institute on Media.

“While the medical community currently does not recognise video game addiction as a mental disorder, hopefully this study will be one of many that allow us to have an educated conversation on the positive and negative effects of video games,” said Dr Douglas Gentile, an assistant professor of psychology at the university.

Dr David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family which strives to minimise the harm of media on the health and development of children and families, said the findings were a wake-up call for families.

“This study gives everyone a better idea of the scope of the problem,” he said.

The study of 1178 children and teenagers aged 8 to 18 found some displayed at least six of 11 symptoms of pathological gambling as defined by the American Psychiatric Association.

Addicted gamers played games 24 hours a week, twice as much as casual gamers.

Some addicted gamers even resorted to theft to support their habit, according to the findings that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

“While video games can be fun and entertaining, some kids are getting into trouble. I continue to hear from families who are concerned about their child’s gaming habits. Not only do we need to focus on identifying the problem, but we need to find ways to help families prevent and treat it,” said Dr Walsh.

Be Careful if You Access Gmail Through a Public Hotspot
http://mashable.com/2008/08/20/gmail-security/

If you check Gmail‘s settings, the last option under the “General” tab lets you “always use https” when accessing Gmail. It’s a fairly new option, and it might sound strange; isn’t Gmail secured by SSL (Secure Socket Layer) by default (hence switching to “https://gmail.com” when you type in “gmail.com” in your browser)?

Now, from a typical Queenslander’s point of view…

Some negative points:

• Say a thief wants to rob a house, he/she no longer needs to physically walk around the neighbourhood to observe the environment – because they can now do it virtually online using Google Street View. If they were to physically walk around, at least there’s a chance that someone would spot any odd activity. But now it’s like they can “walk” around the place invisibly.
• There are screen captures of children playing in the front yard. This one can become a serious privacy issue. It’s nothing to do with whether or not you can see their faces. The problem is that the message “children live here” is now published worldwide.
• Click here for Top 15 Google Street View Sightings – Some of these are quite funny :P But as you can see, even people walking in or out of adult shops were photographed. A thief in action was also photographed!
• In the past, say if someone gives you an address of where they live. An address is an address, so what. But now with Street View, people can actually look up your address, not just to see where it is on the map (well, there’s a refidex in nearly every car so that’s nothing private), but now they can actually see the HOUSE and the neighbourhood you live in; hence they can “judge” you by looking at what type of house you live in. Will this become a cause for discrimination or bullying?

Of course, if there are negative points, there has to be positive points too:

• It’s good to know that we now have the technology to virtually “tour” everywhere using the computer. It’s one more step towards the future.
• When you need to go to an address, as you drive on the street, you don’t need to slow down trying to read the number on each house – because you’ve already seen how the house looks like using Google Street View.
• From a real estate point of view, Street View can save tonnes of petrol. People no longer need to physically BE THERE to see a neighbourhood. They can see it first-hand online before deciding whether they want to actually GO to and review the neighbourhood or not.

Any other pros and cons?

Street View … a map of Australia showing where Street View is available (in blue), left, and the tool itself, right / Google

Google unveils Street View across Australia
By Andrew Ramadge, Technology Reporter August 05, 2008 12:01pm
(article from news.com.au)

AUSTRALIA will today become the third country to have its cities, streets and landmarks “scanned into” Google as the search giant unveils its most ambitious Street View project to date.
Google Street View is an online tool that lets users take a virtual tour of landscapes from their computer by perusing an interactive database of millions of 360-degree snapshots.

The snapshots are taken by a fleet of cars fitted with special cameras that drive across the country, capturing images on every street corner and along every highway.

The technology has so far been used to create virtual replicas of major US cities and the route of this year’s Tour De France, but Google will today unveil its most comprehensive Street View project to date – the mapping of virtually all of southeast Australia and much of the east and west coasts.

Users will be able to wander the streets of Australian cities and towns from Port Douglas to Perth and along the Stuart and Eyre highways that cross the country, as well as view icons such as the Australian War Memorial and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Google product manager Andrew Foster said that because the company’s mapping tool was based on technology developed in Australia, it was excited to bring Street View to the country.

“Google Maps has its origins as an Australian invention so we’re thrilled to bring Street View here as one of the first countries in the world,” he said.

Google Maps, the online mapping service that incorporates Street View, is based on a product created in Sydney by Where 2 Technologies that was purchased by Google in 2004.

Mr Foster said the company’s ultimate goal was to have every road catalogued on Street View. Australia will be the country most covered by the technology, but there are notable exceptions.

Uluru will be absent from Google Street View Australia at launch. Google spokesperson Rob Shilkin said the search giant had applied for the relevant permits to photograph the Northern Territory, but that images of some areas were still being processed.

Street View Australia would be updated in “a few months” with more images, and Street View in general was updated “from time to time”, Mr Foster said.

The Google Street View fleet of cars – which company representatives made a point of identifying as Holden Astras – began capturing images across Australia last November.

In response to security concerns raised in the US, Google said last year its Street View service would not identify faces or license plates in Australia.

The company has recently introduced an automatic face-blurring technology designed to obscure the identities of people caught in the lens of Street View. Mr Shilkin said that the low resolution of images would prevent vehicle number plates from being identifiable.

Users can also report any Street View images they believe to be inappropriate through a link on the website. Mr Foster said it would take anywhere between a few minutes to “a day or so” to remove to offending images once they were reported.

Flash and SEO: Like Oil and Water
By Scott Buresh (from Medium Blue July 2008)

We often deal with clients that are planning to “revamp” their sites with Flash, with SEO having already generated tremendous gains in their sales. The thing that we most dread to hear is that they’ve hired an experienced “Flash designer” that will be taking their websites to the “next level.” Unfortunately, that “next level” is often the basement – at least in terms of SEO results.

The bottom line here is that a site built entirely in Flash still faces huge obstacles. While there have been recent moves from Google and Yahoo! to try to index the content from combined Flash/SEO sites, those moves have not yet, from my experience, translated into SEO results or success (at least when compared to html sites).

We should make a distinction here between embedded Flash and sites built entirely from Flash. For example, a site that contains Flash elements but still contains basic html elements will not overly suffer, as the Flash element (usually a movie in a box on the homepage or elsewhere) is externalized. A search engine spider will generally not try to parse through any files that have been externalized in the code – they will only index the code that is readily apparent on the source page.

However, from an SEO results perspective, there are still major issues with sites that are built entirely in Flash, and SEO is normally the first thing that suffers. First of all, the URL generally never changes no matter where people navigate on the site. As any decent SEO practitioner will tell you, every page of your site is a potential entry page for a search engine. With a site built in Flash, SEO suffers even more as you only have one potential entry page, which is the main URL. This cuts off dozens, hundreds, or thousands of potential pages that could otherwise be indexed in Google and Yahoo! (and all other engines). When your only potential entry page in the search engine listings is your home page, it is very difficult to target a wide assortment of keyphrases, potentially eliminating SEO results or rankings.

Content is another very large issue. Search engines rank pages based upon a number of criteria, but one of the most important to SEO results is the text that they can “understand” on individual pages. At present, search engines read primarily html text (although some also read text in the PDF format) – which means that if you decide that you want to use a rare and fancy font that must be displayed in graphic form (since the visitor may not have that particular font available on his or her computer while browsing), the engine will not read the text and therefore will not know what the page is about, which could harm SEO results. Naturally, this also includes any of the text included in Flash. While Yahoo! and Google have recently announced enhanced capabilities in reading content within Flash, I have not personally seen that translate into great SEO results for competitive keyphrases.

One other emerging aspect is that as search evolves, more and more people are looking for information while they are away from their computers. Many mobile devices are currently incapable of displaying Flash content, although recent moves by Adobe to make “Flash Lite” available may change this. However, it remains to be seen whether people that are seeking information on a mobile device will even want to navigate through Flash, especially if they can get the information that they seek from a fast-loading html page. In my opinion, lean html content will be at a premium when a company is trying to target a mobile audience.

Despite the difficulties, it is not the intent of this article to assert that Flash and SEO will always be incompatible – merely that it is the state of the current situation. You can find many differing opinions on mixing Flash and SEO on the internet, but the true test is to try to find a Flash site (that is to say, a site built entirely in Flash) that you admire and see if it ranks well in SEO results for 50+ competitive terms that are related to the specific business (in Google or Yahoo!). In my experience, such sites that combine Flash and SEO are nearly impossible to find. If anyone out there knows of one, please let me know.

Flash can be, and often is, used for great effect on the internet, in interactive kiosks, and in many other applications. I’m not from the “any Flash is bad” school, although I do think that many Flash practitioners tend to get a little carried away and often ignore basic usability issues. However, sites built entirely in Flash with SEO elements are still, again in my opinion, like oil and water – Flash and SEO are obviously individually useful, but they don’t mix well. Until they do, I will continue to advise my clients not to build sites entirely out of Flash – or, at the very least, to have an alternate html option for search engine and user preference purposes. At the end of the day, you many clients are surprised to find out how many visitors actually prefer “old school” html.

(C) Medium Blue 2008

(from news.com.au)
Most Australians unable to fix their computer
By Darren Osborne
April 04, 2008 10:43am

• Survey finds Australians struggling with technology
• Computer skills “5-10 years behind” the gadgets we own

TWO out of three Australians have admitted to putting up with technology they believe was not performing as well as it could.

The finding comes from a survey of 514 computer users conducted by Galaxy Research for computer support company Gizmo.

“Consumers are buying up big on new technology but many are struggling to get the most out of these investments,” Gizmo chief executive Brett Chenoweth said.

He added that many didn’t know how to fix minor problems or get the most out of their computer.

“The computer skills of many Australians are lagging between five and 10 years behind the technology features they have in their homes,” Mr Chenoweth said.

The most common complaints from those surveyed included: too slow to boot up (35 per cent); frequent pop-ups and error messages (25 per cent); and not able to “talk” to other devices such as printers or other PCs (22 per cent).

Other complaints included: equipment being old or broken; not being able to stream music; and losing data.

The report also revealed that most people aren’t aware of how to set up wireless networks, resulting in many buying duplicate equipment or services they do not need.

“Many are just buying the latest technology because they are captivated by a few key features, not realising those features might already exist in their homes,” Mr Chenoweth said.

Forty per cent of those surveyed with two or more computers did not have file sharing enabled, and 11 per cent admitted to paying for two or more internet connections, instead of using a network server.

One in three Australians surveyed admitted to having two or more printers in their household, yet less than half (46 per cent) were not able to print from all computers to all printers, without swapping files or cables.

If you want to understand an issue without biase, make sure you do thorough research and read from more than one source. You can never be too careful in this information age.

Wikipedia’s neutrality is a ‘facade’
By Marcus Browne, ZDNet.com.au | 2008/02/12 12:53:02
Original article here

An Australian academic has accused Wikipedia of “US-centric bias” over the way the online encyclopaedia’s administrators edit user-generated entries.

In an entry published for e-journal The National Forum, Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, claims Wikipedia displayed a US-centric bias in its administration of user-edits and which sources it considers appropriate for use on the site.

Anderson’s claims come after an edit he made on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s entry in the encyclopaedia was deleted by Wikipedia administrators on the basis that it exhibited a “lack of objectivity” and used “illegitimate sources”.

“Wikipedia has come to play an important role in informing and also shaping public debates. Yet as a Florida-based, US creation, it brings its own baggage to those debates,” said Anderson in the entry.

The academic was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits — including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine, were deemed not to fall within the encyclopaedia’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, making them “unusable”.

Anderson claims that information attributed to US corporate media conglomerates such as Fox and Time Warner were potentially as biased as any of these sources.

Anderson said the only source that administrators considered legitimate in his edit was the BBC.

The administrator told Anderson that his edit had some “clear POV and sourcing issues” after its content was summarily removed from the site. A statement on Wikipedia’s policy page describes NPOV as “an absolute non-negotiable”, and contains a set of guidelines instructing users on how to adhere to the policy.

Wikipedia’s policy states that “all editors and all sources have biases — what matters is how we combine them to create a neutral article”.

“Many editors believe that bias is not in itself reason to remove text, because in some articles all additions are likely to express bias. Instead, material that balances the bias should be added,” said the statement.

Anderson referred to his experience as an “example of the US worldview in Wikipedia” and criticised the administrator’s special powers to remove content arbitrarily.

He described the organisation’s NPOV policy to ZDNet.com.au as “a facade”.

“It hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials,” said Anderson. “They also say they are against independent analysis or research, which seems to mean you cannot re-organise information from a variety of sources,” he added.

Anderson does not stand alone in accusing the Web encyclopaedia of not living up to its own objective standards. But historically, criticism of the site has come not from liberals or academics but in fact from conservatives. An alternative to Wikipedia was set up in late 2006, for example, by a group of users under the banner Conservapedia — aimed against the “liberal bias, deceit and silly gossip” allegedly exhibited on Wikipedia. Conservapedia displays an outright pro-American, pro-Christian bias.

Anderson argues that even “a US ‘liberal’ view of the world happens to enforce a great exclusion of perspectives from most of the rest of the world”.

The academic’s comments come after it emerged last year that a graduate student at California Tech devised a tool — the Wikipedia scanner — enabling him to track the IP addresses of corporate and institutional contributors to the site.

Virgil Griffith, who built Wikipedia scanner, found that the CIA, the Vatican, Microsoft and even ex-Prime Minister John Howard’s office, had edited and in some cases removed, unfavourable content from their entries on the site.

其中一個測試中的程式叫做 Google Reader (按這).
基本上, 這是一個 web-based RSS reader.
可以把喜歡看的blog存進去, 也可以跟blog一樣存 folders or tags.
他就會每天自動去看看有沒有新的文章.
有的話, 那個blog的文章就會出現在 Google Reader 的首頁上, 方便閱讀.

市面上應該也有很多其他的 RSS reader, 不過我都沒試過.
因為…. 我怕其他的會越來越多廣告, 所以只相信 Google’s quality…. LOL… XD