tech-tonics

[tech-tonics]

Robocalls can threaten privacy

Posted: October 23, 2019 by Kayla Matthews, Malwarebytes contributor                        Last updated: November 18, 2019              

When a person sees a call from an unknown number and picks up to hear a recorded voice on the other end, they’ve received a robocall. Some are helpful, such as reminders of upcoming doctor’s appointments or school announcements.

However, the vast majority are from unsolicited parties trying to convince people to purchase products or services, or to disclose personal information.

Robocalls are undoubtedly annoying, especially when they disrupt meetings, meals, or quality time with loved ones. But these intrusive calls pose serious threats to data privacy, too. And they’re on the rise.

How common are robocalls in the US?

The problem with increasing numbers of robocalls in the United States is well documented. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) receives over 200,000 complaints about robocalls each year, representing about 60 percent of their total complaint volume.

According to the YouMail Robocall Index, which measures robocalls placed and received nationwide, 43.3 billion robocalls were placed so far in 2019, with an average of 131.9 calls received per person. For comparison, YouMail’s data shows more than 48 billion robocalls for 2018—about 18 billion more than the 2017 total. If 2019 numbers hold, we’ll likely see at least 10 billion more robocalls than we did last year.

The YouMail Index also shows that each US person received an average of about 14 robocalls last month. However, the calls come much more frequently in some area codes. Households in the 404 area code of Atlanta, Georgia, and its surrounding suburbs, for example, received more than 60 calls in September 2019.

Robocalls are particularly unceasing for some high-profile people. One opinion writer for The Washington Post stated that she received more than 14 robocalls in a single day—by 10 a.m. Not surprisingly, 52 percent of people who responded to a survey carried out by B2B research firm Clutch said they received at least one robocall per day, and 40 percent got multiple calls.

Court rulings and formal complaints

Some people find their lives so disrupted by robocalls that they file formal complaints or take legal action. In 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) was signed into law prohibiting all pre-recorded or auto-dialed calls and texts to cell phones without explicit consent. In addition, the National Do Not Call Registry (DNC) was formed, allowing users to explicitly opt out of telemarketing calls.

Since 2017, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that 66.8 percent of complaints filed to the DNC registry relate to robocalls—totaling a little more than 12 million. Of all complaints filed, the most popular call topic was about reducing debt, while “imposters” was ranked as second.

While the TCPA states that consumers may receive monetary payout for individual violations, including robocalls, court cases haven’t always supported this literal translation. An August 2019 ruling on Salcedo v. Hanna, a TCPA-related case, stated a single unsolicited text message was not injurious enough to proceed with a lawsuit.  

Nuisance calls vs. high-risk

While users might be tempted to deduce they needn’t worry about data privacy with robocalls, a high number of imposters, fraud, scams, and spoofing activities associated with robocalls indicates otherwise.  

Transaction Network Survey looked at robocalls in a 2019 report and split them into two categories: nuisance and high-risk. Nuisance calls are not considered malicious and are often based on non-compliance, while high-risk calls center on fraudulent activity, such as scams delivered to collect money or personal details.

The report concluded that nuisance calls increased by 38 percent over the last year, while high-risk calls rose by 28 percent in the same timeframe. While nuisance calls are increasing at a higher rate than high-risk calls, continuing malicious robocall activity demonstrates the need for constant user awareness, as criminals are becoming more clever with their scamming techniques.

For example, robocalls don’t just arrive as unknown numbers. One in 1,700 mobile numbers are hijacked by robocall spoofers every month, more than double last year’s rate of one in 4,000 mobile numbers. As a result, 2.5 percent of people who have had their number hijacked have disconnected their phone. In addition, spoofed numbers easily trick users into picking up the phone, believing they’ll hear a recognizable voice on the other end.

Robocalls collect PII

A startling statistic from the Clutch survey revealed 21 percent of people accidentally or intentionally gave information to a robocaller. Various factors may compel them to do so. For example, the Clutch data showed health topics were a common subject for robocalls. Similarly, most of the FTC’s DNC call complaint data related to debt relief calls.

Scammers of all types focus on urgency. They convince people that if they don’t act quickly, they’ll face dire consequences. When a victim hears about something related to their health or money, they may offer personal details without taking the time to investigate. Also, a phone call requires in-the-moment communication, and many people instinctually respond politely to avoid conflict.

The time of day robocalls happen could also make individuals more likely to disclose their data in haste. Insider scrutinized five years of FTC call data and determined that unwanted calls most likely occurred on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.

That’s when many people are at work, or at least trying to be productive. If they answer the phone and hear a robocall recording, they may think the quickest way to get relief from the annoyance is to give what’s requested, especially if the robocall seems legitimate.

Scammers use real data

Another threat to data privacy from robocalls threatening is the growing trend of scammers using genuine data to make their calls seem realistic. First Orion conducted a study of scam calls—not restricted to the robocall variety—and described a tactic called enterprise spoofing.

It involves scammers using actual data—often obtained from large-scale breaches—to impersonate real businesses and convince victims to give up personal details and money. The company’s statistics showed three-quarters of people reported scam callers had accurate information about them and used those tidbits to put the squeeze on victims.

Indeed, most robocalls feature automated voices on the other end of the line, and people may never talk to humans. But, it’s not hard to imagine how scammers could create a robocall message applying to a large segment of users, then snatch up individuals fooled by the scheme in follow-up real-time conversations.

How to protect against robocalls

The robocall problem opened an opportunity in the marketplace to develop apps that could block robocalls, or at least identify them. Many security vendors, including Malwarebytes, offer programs that flag or block scam calls and filter unwanted texts. These programs work in part by blacklisting numbers of known scammers, but also by using algorithms that recognize spoofing techniques or block numbers by the sheer volume of calls they place.

However, research indicates some scam call-blocking apps send user data to third-party companies without users’ knowledge, or as specified deep within a multi-page EULA document. So we recommend users be critical about which apps they use to block unwanted calls.

Other ways to protect against robocalls include the following:

Add your phone number(s) to the FTC’s Do Not Call registry.

Manually add numbers from robocallers into your phone’s block list,  located in “settings” for most devices.

Don’t pick up the phone if you don’t recognize the number.

Sign up for your carrier’s call blocking service.

Data is king

If the last year of privacy scandals and data breaches from social media giants, educational institutions, cities and local governments haven’t demonstrated this fact enough, the growing rate of robocalls further confirms that personal data is a valuable asset worth protecting from cybercriminals’ greedy clutches.

Besides causing immense frustration for users, robocalls threaten user privacy by exposing victims to data-stealing scams. That reality gives users yet another reason to err on the side of caution when giving out personal information, even if the source seems authentic.

[tech-tonics]

10 things that require zero talent

By Molly Fletcher

CEO, keynote speaker, & author. Inspiring leaders, teams & organizations to kick-start growth.

How often do we equate success with talent? All the time. But the reality is, success isn’t created by talent alone. Just like we might see immense talent squandered, we also see underdogs unexpectedly overachieve. Here are 10 behaviors that we can always control that require zero talent yet have a huge impact on our success.

1. Being on time. Punctuality is a keystone habit that requires organization and planning ahead—both of which lead to greater success. Here’s a good primer on why being on time is important and how anyone can make it a habit.

2. Work ethic. This is the discipline of showing up consistently and making the best decisions that lead to peak performance. Even at the pinnacle of his career, basketball superstar Kobe Bryant’s work ethic was legendary. Kevin Durant recalls the message a veteran Kobe sent the younger players at Olympic Trials back in 2008, just after Durant’s first year in the league. The players were given a day off, but there was Kobe, the only veteran getting on the bus to go work out at a high school gym. “He made 50 shots at each spot around the 3-point line,” Durant recalls. “We just looked down there and said, man, he’s the best player in the league and he took a bus to a high school to get some work in. It’s that work ethic that Kobe embraced throughout his career to become one of the all-time greats. As Kobe said after getting drafted straight out of high school in 1996, “I don’t want (fans) to think I’m just a high school kid coming in here thinking the world owes me something. I’m going to go out there and I’m going to work.”

3. Effort. Few athletes worked as hard as major league pitcher John Smoltz, who is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame. As his agent, I saw him extend his career by years through sheer effort and commitment. He made up his mind to make changes along the way, like going from starter to closer, that kept him in the game as a valuable contributor to his team. Effort is a mindset as much as it is a behavior.

4. Body language. How you move and express yourself around others shapes who you are and how you are perceived. Anyone can improve, and here’s a TED talk that explains why and how.

5. Energy. Everyone has energy to devote to a goal, and the decision of how much to give. Be conscious about where yours goes.

6. Attitude. It’s up to you to keep going. No one else can decide that. A great attitude maximizes the talent that you do have and offsets what you lack.

7. Passion. Perhaps the single most important way each one of us can suffocate the fear that keeps us from peak performance.

8. Being coachable. Anyone can become a better listener, learn from feedback, and embrace the success of others.

9. Doing extra. Go the extra mile. I saw it all the time with the athletes I worked with. The ones who sustained their success were the ones who consistently worked at their craft beyond what was required. That extra work and preparation fosters confidence. We can all learn from this approach and exceed our own expectations.

10. Being prepared. Only you can give yourself the time and space to be as ready as you can be. Make it a habit, and you will make the most of your talent. There is great truth in the saying: Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

Your Game Changer Takeaway

Remember that talent is never enough. The best of the best don’t rest on what they were born with—they dig down to get the most they can. Try these 10 things (or just one!) and over time it will pay off.

Molly Fletcher competed for Michigan State’s women’s tennis team and is raising three daughters who play sports. She works to inspire and equip game changers to dream, live and grow fearlessly. A keynote speaker and author, Molly draws on her decades of experiences working with elite athletes and coaches as a sports agent, and applies them to the business world. Her e-learning courses spark both  personal growth for individuals and corporate development for organizations.

[tech-tonics]

Not good news for education funding in Kentucky

While 2018 was a year of economic revival with historically low unemployment and rising wage growth, demographic indicators stand in contrast, seemingly ushering in an era of population growth stagnation. (Since funding for education in Kentucky is based on enrollment and attendance, this isn’t a good prediction for school districts.)

By William H. Frey

Senior Fellow - Metropolitan Policy Program

This was emphasized this week as the U.S. Census Bureau released its population change estimates for the year ending in July 2018. Their data show that the national rate of population growth is at its lowest since 1937, a result of declines in the number of births, gains in the number of deaths, and that the nation’s under age 18 population has declined since the 2010 census. This is on the heels of recently released data showing geographic mobility within the U.S. is at a historic low. And while some states—particularly in the Mountain West—are growing rapidly, nearly a fifth of all states displayed absolute population losses over the past two years.

While some of these downward demographic trends reflect the delayed impact of the Great Recession, the aging American population is the broader cause, a factor that the nation will have to cope with for years and decades to come.

A historic low for U.S. population growth

The U.S. population growth rate of 0.62 percent for 2017-2018 is the lowest registered in 80 years. While the nation’s growth rate varied through wars, economic upheavals, baby booms, and baby busts, the current rate reflects a further dip in a trend toward a lower level of growth—below 0.80 percent—registered since the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

More reliance on immigration as a contributor to growth

These downward growth trends initially reflected declines in immigration as well as lower natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) because the economy was down. But over the past few years, as immigration gained slight momentum, reduced natural increase was more responsible for the overall decline in population growth—as it dropped from 1.6 million in 2000-2001 to just above 1 million in 2017-2018. There were fewer births than in recent decades and more deaths than in earlier years (download Table A).

The decline in births may have been accentuated by young adult millennials, who, still bearing the brunt of the Great Recession, may be postponing births. However, the long-term trajectory should yield fewer rather than more births as the population ages, with proportionately fewer women in childbearing ages. The rise in deaths is more directly related to the nation’s aging population. Census Bureau projections show their rise to be the major cause of reductions in the nation’s natural increase over time.

This leaves immigration as an ever-more-important contributor to national population growth. In 2001-2002, natural increase exceeded immigration by 50 percent and that was when immigration was slightly higher than this year (1.05 million vs 0.99 million). Because of the recent decline in natural increase, immigration now contributes nearly as much to population growth, and is projected to be the primary contributor to national population growth after 2030 as natural increase continues to decline. Thus immigration—its size and its attributes—will be an important contributor to the nation’s future population that is growing slowly and aging quickly.

The child population is declining both nationally and in 29 states.

One consequence of fewer births in concert with an aging population is the slower growth of the nation’s younger population. The just-released census estimates show that between 2010 and 2018, the nation’s under-age 18 population declined by 780,000 (1 percent), while the adult population grew by 19.2 million (8 percent). The child population declined in 29 states: by more than 10 percent in the New England states of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut; and by more than 5 percent in 11 states located in parts of the Northeast, industrial Midwest, and in Mississippi, West Virginia and New Mexico (download Table B).

Those states which gained children include Texas, Utah, Florida, Washington, Idaho, and North and South Dakota. Most of these states recently gained migrants from other states or abroad, which added to their youth populations. Nonetheless, these data for the past eight years foreshadow another aspect of aging that census projections show: a long-term decline in the nation’s younger population share.

Geographical mobility hits a postwar low

If there is one demographic indicator that might be expected to pick up in a rebounding economy, it should be geographic mobility within the U.S. Yet the latest data for 2017-2018 released by the Census Bureau shows that the percentage of Americans changing residence is at a post-World War II low of 10.1 percent—continuing a slowdown observed last year (See Figure 3). This is less than half the rate the nation experienced in the highly mobile 1950s and substantially lower than in the 1990s.

The bulk of this downturn is attributable to local (within-county) moves, which also registered a postwar low, and could possibly be related to the “stuck in place” millennials, or specifically, the “older millennial” 25-34 year old age group, which particularly exhibits this mobility decline. But a new finding this year was the downward trend in inter-county and interstate migration—the types of moves that should accompany a rising labor market. Hence, the nation’s demographic stagnation appears with this indicator as well.

Nearly one-fifth of all states lost population in recent years

The national population growth slowdown did not occur in all parts of the country. Two states, Nevada and Idaho, grew by more than 2 percent between 2017 and 2018—continuing a recent boom in the Mountain West, which like other regions, took growth hits earlier in the decade. Among the 14 states which grew by more than 1 percent, all except South Dakota were located in the South and West (see Map 1).

Yet all is not upbeat even for the high flyers: Among those 14 states, 10 grew more slowly than in the previous year (download Table C). An interesting example is Texas, a state which weathered the earlier growth slowdown of the 2007-2009 recession relatively well. While Texas’s growth peaked this decade at a rate of 1.9 percent in 2014-2015, it dropped to 1.3 percent this year. Similarly, Florida, which took a hit during the recession, rebounded to grow by 2 percent in 2015-2016, only to fall to 1.5 percent growth this year.

The bigger story in the past two years is the number of states which lost population: 10 in 2016-2017 and nine this year, compared with only one or two earlier in the decade. These are states where current natural increase along with immigration could not counteract migration to other parts of the country. They include small-population states like Wyoming, Alaska, and Hawaii in the West; Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia in the South; and large urban states such as New York and Illinois—the latter losing population for the fifth straight year. As natural increase dwindles, all states will rely more heavily on in-migration from the rest of the U.S. and abroad to fuel growth or stave off declines.

An aging, slow-growing future

This week’s release of census estimates appears to put an exclamation point on what we should be preparing for as the country ages and grows less rapidly from natural increase.  The latest national growth rate of 0.62 percent is noticeably below what we have experienced in decades prior. While it is still far higher than in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, it means that policymakers must place increased attention on caring for a larger and more dependent aging population, and dealing with the realities of a slower-growing labor force. In particular, it requires a more serious discussion of U.S. immigration policy because of the future contributions that immigrants will make to growing America’s society and economy.

[tech-tonics]

Five easy ways to recognize and dispose of malicious emails

By Pieter Arntz from the Malwarebytes Labs.

I suppose we all get our share of spam. Some more than others. But how do we differentiate between simple commercial spam and the types of emails that want to get us in trouble?

The unsolicited commercial spam email is generally easy to recognize, report, and discard, but what about more dangerous types of spam? How can you determine if an email contains a malicious link or attachment, or is trying to scam you out of money or your personal information?

And if you do discover you have malicious emails in your inbox, what then? Is reporting as spam and deleting the email enough?

Knowing what you are up against helps you determine what to do with all that spam—whether it’s simply a nuisance or a landmine waiting to detonate.

Five red flags for spotting malicious emails

Before we jump into determining what to do with a malicious email, there are a few general tricks users should learn to spot red flags for malicious activity. They are as follows:

1. The sender address isn’t correct.

Check if this address matches the name of the sender and whether the domain of the company is correct. To see this, you have to make sure your email client displays the sender’s email address and not just their display name. Sometimes you need to train hawk eyes at the address, since spammers have some convincing tricks up their sleeve. For example:

In this example sender’s address, the email domain does not match the actual bank’s domain, which is santander.co.uk.

2. The sender doesn’t seem to know the addressee.

Is the recipient name spelled out in the email, and are you being addressed as you would expect from the sender? Does the signature match how this sender would usually sign their mails to you? Your bank usually does not address you in generic ways like “Dear customer.” If the email is legit and clearly intended for you, then they will use your full name.

This one is not only in the wrong language, but it is addressed to no one in particular, and is not signed with an employee name you could contact for further information.

3. Embedded links have weird URLs.

Always hover first over the links in the email. Do not click immediately. Does the destination URL match the destination site you would expect? (Once again, train those eagle eyes.) Will it download a file? Are they using a link shortening service? When in doubt, if you have a shortcut to the site of the company sending you the email, use that method instead of clicking the link in the email.

When I hover over “Apply Now,” does that link look like something VISA would use?

4. The language, spelling, and grammar are “off.”

Is the email full of spelling errors, or does it look like someone used an online translation service to translate the mail to your language?

Does this look like it came from a native English speaker? In fact, it was a very intricate phishing attempt.

5. The content is bizarre or unbelievable.

If it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. People with lost relatives that leave you huge estates or suitcases full of dollars in some far-away country are not as common as these scammers would have us believe. You can recognize when email spam is trying to phish for money by its promises to deliver great gain in return for a small investment. For historical reasons, we call this type of spam “Nigerian prince” or “419” spam.

Part of a long and entertaining mail about how the FBI is investigating a Facebook promo where you won US$10,000,000.

So is it really malicious?

Please note that you need to weigh all the elements above if you want to rule them out as spam or malicious. Each of them is a red flag by itself—even if the other elements look legitimate. And, even if all of the above red flags have been cross-checked and determined as sound, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of the email still being malicious.

Sender addresses can be spoofed, signatures can be stolen or mimicked, domains can be typosquatted, accounts can be hacked, and the spelling and translation services among spammers are improving rapidly, as spammers have noticed that it improves their success rate. It’s also not always immediately clear from the content if the email is spam, scam, or bona fide truth. Some malspam authors have shown great creativity in coming up with believable stories to tell.

So when all else checks out but your gut tells you something is off, there are other edicts to keep in mind when determining whether an email could be misleading.

Companies just don’t do this.

Reputable banks do not send you unsolicited mails asking for credentials, they do not use link shortening services, and they will certainly not ask you to send your credit or debit card to them by (snail) mail. The IRS and Microsoft will not email you to tell you that you owe them money or that your computer has a virus. There are certain things that organizations just will not do—but threat actors like to fool users by seeming to come from a legitimate, scary company.

There are attachments.

First and foremost: do not, under any circumstances, open any attachments that you were not expecting. It’s as easy as that. If you receive an attachment without forewarning from a company or individual that you do not know, do not double-click on it. If it’s from a friend, acquaintance, or company that you do business with, it is necessary to check with the sender to see if it is safe to open the attachment.

There’s a call-to-action button.

Some dangerous spam emails do not come with malicious attachments but instead try to trick you into downloading a malicious file, courtesy of the call-to-action button. This button is simply a fancy embedded link that is meant to draw eyes and clicks. You can examine the call-to-action button in the same way you do links—by hovering over it. If you’re not sure, check with the sender and/or simply delete the email.

They are phishing for information.

Another type of dangerous spam is the type that phishes for information. This information does not necessarily have to concern you directly; it can be about the company you work for or someone you know well. Password credentials and credit card numbers aren’t the only data threat actors look to steal via malicious email. Always be cautious, always stay suspicious, until you can verify that the person requesting this information is who they say they are.

What to do with a suspected malicious email

The answer to this is quite simple: delete the email. You can ignore it and let it fester in your inbox or you can get rid of it and send it to trash, where it will be permanently dumped from your email client in a set amount of time. You may also want to report the email as spam before you delete—most email platforms have this functionality built in, and some are better than others are tracking and blocking these types of emails. Reporting the malicious email as spam will not hurt—if anything, it’s giving your email client important intel in the fight against malspam and can keep future similar emails coming to bother you again.

Finally, many banks and other financial companies have a special email address where you can send emails that you suspect to be phishing attempts. They will thank you if you are right about your suspicion. If you’re wrong and it is from them, they might consider changing their email practices to be less spammy.

Safe practices when receiving mail

If you want to be proactive against malicious emails, there are some tips and tools we recommend that will give you the opportunity to safely perform all the checks we have recommended earlier on. This includes changing some default settings in your email client (though yours may already have them in place by default.) Our recommendations are as follows:

“Disable HTML” or “Read in plain text”: This lessens the chance of malicious scripts being executed as soon as you open the email. If you don’t want to disable HTML, then we would recommend closing the preview window. That will allow you to delete suspect emails from your inbox before giving them a chance to do any harm.

Make sure you can see the full URL when you hover over a link in an email message. This is built into in most email clients by default. But if it’s not, we highly recommend enabling it.

Make sure you can see the full email address of the sender when you first look at it. This is one of the main indicators that something might be “phishy.”

If you have the option to use a spam filter, please use it. It will stop big waves of known spam. It does not make you completely safe, but it saves you a lot of work.

We have said this before, but it’s really important: Please do not open any attachments that you weren’t expecting. The old misconception that only executable attachments can harm you is not true. Documents, PDFs, and other attachments are just as potentially dangerous.

If you are still unsure whether an email is malicious or just regular spam after checking all the points we stipulated, simply delete the email and go about your day.

If the email contains information you think could be important if legitimate, however, contact the sender in any other way besides using the “reply” option. For example, if it’s your bank, give them a call and ask if they really sent you something and whether it’s safe to open. Chances are, they didn’t—and they’ll be glad you reported the scoundrels for using their name.

Credits

Thanks to My Online Security for providing me with examples and screenshots. You can find his blog with many, many examples of phishing mails at myonlinesecurity.co.uk.

[tech-tonics]

Tackling your child’s screen time

From the Huffington Post, Taylor Pittman

We live in an increasingly digital world ― one in which new smartphones, tablets and other tech goods are practically endlessly available. So how do you, as a parent, navigate what’s appropriate and what’s not for your kids?

Since October 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that children younger than 18 months should only participate in video chatting, children between 18 and 24 months should watch only high-quality programming in a parent’s presence, and children ages 2 to 5 should be limited to one hour of such programming per day. For kids older than that, the organization suggests “consistent limits on the time spent using media” and encourages parents to experience the technology (shows, games, etc.) along with their kids in order to open a discussion about what they see.

But maybe we need to go beyond setting time limits. Many parents want a deeper dive into the issue. In January, two Apple shareholders wrote an open letter requesting that the company look into and address the impact of technology on kids. Last Sunday, former Google and Facebook employees shared their campaign, in conjunction with Common Sense Media, to teach kids how technology and social media can affect them. Parents and child health experts are also calling on Facebook to remove its controversial Messenger Kids app.

Because we still know so little about how screen time affects kids, it’s hard to determine what appropriate technology usage should be within families. HuffPost spoke with tech professionals to learn what screen time looks like in their home.

Keeping A Balance

Amy Bruckman, a professor and associate chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, has two sons, ages 12 and 14. As many parents do, Bruckman initially tried to keep track of her kids’ screen time, especially their video game use. Then she decided to switch up her focus.

Bruckman’s new plan let her sons choose their own amounts of screen time on the weekends as long as they also read a book for an hour every day, exercised and, ultimately, led more balanced lives. Her plan worked “well beyond” her expectations, she said. Why? They “embraced the values behind the new system” ― that is, the boys came to appreciate the importance of reading, exercise and simply other things beyond technology.

“I also tell them, ‘Look, if you were doing nothing but practicing your musical instrument with every second you had, I would say that was a problem, too,’” Bruckman said.

During the week, the family’s tech use is somewhat different. Bruckman allows her kids to play video games or use their phones after they get home from school and do their homework since that screen time typically doesn’t add up to much anyway. Phones at the breakfast table are fine, but devices don’t come to the dinner table.

Brad Stone, a tech and business journalist for Bloomberg and author of The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World, also strives to keep a balance at home with his 10-year-old twins.

“They don’t have phones, and yet it’s a challenge all day every day,” he said. “They are drawn to screens.”

Stone joked that he also has to fight that “magnetic attraction.” As he attempts to set limits for his twins, he often finds himself getting sucked in by his tech devices.

“Then the kids call me on it and then it becomes even harder to enforce the limits you want to place on them,” he said. “I feel the conflict in my own house and I feel that a lot of parents do, too.”

Stone has no “hard and fast rules” when it comes to his kids’ screen time, but they don’t have computers (they use his for homework and similar purposes). His family also prefers no phones during dinner or at restaurants.

“We want to keep technology out of it,” he said.

Maintaining Awareness

For Dr. Neema Moraveji, co-founder and chief scientist at Spire, a company that creates wearable devices to help people track their health, analyzing the way he uses technology is key.

“Personally, I try as much to be aware about whether I’m using technology as a tool or whether it’s using me,” he said. 

Moraveji has a 4-year-old daughter, a 1-year-old son and another child on the way. He applies the same approach of thinking of technology as a tool when it comes to them. He and his wife are trying to teach their daughter to be mindful of when she’s using devices.

“My wife and I have really taken an approach of using the moments to teach her, and not even to teach her as if we’re experts, but sharing what we know so she can always be better,” he said. “We’ve done some little things like say, ‘OK, you’ve had some screen time. Let’s not have any for the rest of the day.’ Or we’ve told her, ‘Not at the dinner table.’ We’ve experimented with those things, and we really found that ultimately the core skill is awareness ― teaching the child, showing the child how to build their own awareness in those teachable moments.”                                                                                                         

To encourage this skill, Moraveji has one rule when it comes to his daughter’s tech use. When he or his wife determines that it’s time to put the screen away, they don’t take it away from her.

“I let her know, ‘Hey, there’s one more minute, there are two more minutes,’” he said. “What we really want to do is have her decide and turn it off. I never pause it for her or turn it down. I say, ‘Can you please pause it?’ or ‘Can you please turn it off?’ At the end of the day, you’re teaching them to be adults on their own time.”

Pramod Sharma, founder and CEO of educational games system Osmo has similar guidelines for his 8-year-old and his 3-year-old. While his family makes sure to spend  time without devices, they also look at how the time is spent with them. Sharma suggests that devices should usually be enjoyed with other people. “We should probably make a ‘Healthy Tech Time Pyramid’ like we have for food groups,” he said. “Passive tech time and solo tech time should be done in small amounts.”

As an expert on educational technology, Sharma stresses that parents should consider not only the quantity but the quality of their kids’ screen time. “I don’t think that creating beneficial physical-to-digital products and supporting limits on screen time are mutually exclusive,” he said. “It’s the quality of the screen time that’s the point ― whether kids are passively sitting in zombie mode or engaged and interacting with each other and the world around them.” 

We should probably make a ‘Healthy Tech Time Pyramid’ like we have for food groups. Passive tech time and solo tech time should be done in small amounts. Pramod Sharma, father and founder of educational games system Osmo Participating With Them Monitoring tech use doesn’t mean completely doing away with technology, our experts emphasized. 

When he was a kid, Stone said, his parents were concerned about how much TV he watched, and now, watching TV seems like a common balancing strategy for families looking to spend time together.Similarly, Moraveji participates in his daughter’s screen time experience by asking her questions about the programming when it’s over.“After she watches something, we ask her about it ― what happened in the video, what did the animal do, why did you laugh, and that sort of thing,” he said. If parents set time limits on tech, it’s vital they follow such rules, too. 

To encourage her kids to read for an hour and exercise every day, Bruckman does just that.“Your kids see how you yourself act,” she said. “Your best teaching tool is modeling with your own behavior.”Anya Kamenetz, author of The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life, echoed Bruckman’s thoughts and stressed that screen time with the family can be a fun element as long as it’s balanced with other non-tech activities. She also has an easy tip for parents when they reach for their phone in front of the children.“One basic tip is to narrate what you are doing when you pick up your phone around your kids ― ‘I’m going to ask Mom to pick up milk,’” Kamenetz said. “This creates transparency and accountability.” 

Remembering The Good And of course, parents should keep in mind all the positive effects of technology. As much as Stone appreciates his family’s limits on tech, he also wants his kids to be comfortable with digital devices.“As a parent, it’s sort of not clear where you draw the line,” he said. “You want to expose them to the technology tools because it’s going to be important for their future. You want them to familiarize themselves with it and be comfortable around computers.”

Moraveji thinks that many digital games can be helpful resources for teaching kids, as long as they’re monitored. Bruckman recognizes that her son keeps in touch with friends from his previous school through the collaborative play and communication system in video games.Still, the idea of screen time is “a tough topic,” she said.

“People in the 1950s were panicked about comic books and thought that comic books were going to destroy the minds of the next generation,” said Bruckman. “Every generation is puzzled by their children’s choices of media. I am puzzled by why my children like to watch videos of other people playing video games. I will never understand that. My parents were puzzled by my choices ― that’s just the way the world works.”

[tech-tonics]

Cursive sees revival in schools

NEW YORK (AP) — Cursive writing is looping back into style in schools across the country after a generation of students who know only keyboarding, texting and printing out their words longhand.

Alabama and Louisiana passed laws in 2016 mandating cursive proficiency in public schools, the latest of 14 states that require cursive. And last fall, the 1.1 million-student New York City schools, the nation's largest public school system, encouraged the teaching of cursive to students, generally in the third grade.

"It's definitely not necessary but I think it's, like, cool to have it," said Emily Ma, a 17-year-old senior at New York City's academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School who was never taught cursive in school and had to learn it on her own.

Penmanship proponents say writing words in an unbroken line of swooshing l's and three-humped m's is just a faster, easier way of taking notes. Others say students should be able to understand documents written in cursive, such as, say, a letter from Grandma. And still more say it's just a good life skill to have, especially when it comes to signing your name.

That was where New York state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis drew the line on the cursive generation gap, when she encountered an 18-year-old at a voter registration event who printed out his name in block letters.

"I said to him, 'No, you have to sign here,'" Malliotakis said. "And he said, 'That is my signature. I never learned script.'"

Malliotakis, a Republican from the New York City borough of Staten Island, took her concerns to city education officials and found a receptive audience.

Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina distributed a handbook on teaching cursive writing in September and is encouraging principals to use it. It cites research suggesting that fluent cursive helps students master writing tasks such as spelling and sentence construction because they don't have to think as much about forming letters.

Malliotakis also noted that students who can't read cursive will never be able to read historical documents. "If an American student cannot read the Declaration of Independence, that is sad."

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when cursive writing began to fall out of favor. But cursive instruction was in decline long before 2010, when most states adopted the Common Core curriculum standards, which say nothing about handwriting.

Some script skeptics question the advantage of cursive writing over printing and wonder whether teaching it takes away from other valuable instruction.

Anne Trubek, author of "The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting," said schools should not require cursive mastery any more than they should require all children to play a musical instrument.

"I think students would all benefit from learning the piano," she said, "but I don't think schools should require all students take piano lessons."

At P.S. 166 in Queens, Principal Jessica Geller said there was never a formal decision over the years to banish the teaching of cursive. "We just got busy with the addition of technology, and we started focusing on computers," she said.

Third-graders at the school beamed as they prepared for a cursive lesson this past week. The 8-year-olds got their markers out, straightened their posture and flexed their wrists. Then it was "swoosh, curl, swoosh, curl," as teacher Christine Weltner guided the students in writing linked-together c's and a's.

Norzim Lama said he prefers cursive writing to printing "'cause it looks fancy." Camille Santos said cursive is "actually like doodling a little bit."

Added Araceli Lazaro: "It's a really fascinating way to write, and I really think that everybody should learn about writing in script."

[tech-tonics]

Little Donnie’s M.O.

A facinating article: https://goo.gl/iZnh3c

[tech-tonics]

Calling and texting scams

Reprinted from INC.

By Joseph Steinberg CEO, SecureMySocial

A scam that seems to reappear periodically is back and helping criminals steal people's money. Protecting yourself is simple--if you know how the scam works.

So, here is what you need to know to protect yourself from the three variants of the scam:

What is the scam?

1. In the first version of the scam, criminals target their victims simply by calling them (usually from a robocall autodialer which supplies caller ID information that the victim will not recognize)--and hanging up before anyone answers, thereby arousing the call recipient's natural curiosity. Criminals sometimes do this several times in succession--so victims see a call coming in repetitively from some number they don't recognize, further increasing the chances that their curiosity will cause them to call back.

2. In another variant of the scam, the criminals don't hang up quickly, but rather wait for the intended victim to answer the call, at which point the robocaller plays a recording of someone crying for help or the sounds of someone in need of medical attention or under attack--and then hangs up. Obviously, many good-hearted people are likely to call back in such a situation. Some criminals may do the same, pretending to be a collection agency, a law enforcement official, or a doctor treating a close relative.

3. In the third version of the scam, a criminal sends a text message similar to the voice recording in variant 2--explaining that he or she is in danger and needs help--often making it appear as if the message was sent by accident to the wrong recipient. The criminal may ask for you to call or to text back.

In all of these cases, the criminal wants you to call or text back.

These calls are likely part of what is commonly known as the "473 Scam," "Ring and Run Scam," or "One Ring Scam," and the numbers displayed on your caller ID or sent in a text message are likely premium numbers. You will be charged--sometimes quite a bundle--for any calls that you make, or text messages that you send, to them.

What should you do?

It's quite simple to protect yourself: Do not call or text back.

How do I know if it is a scam call or text?

The name "473 scam" comes from the fact that criminals have been known to use caller IDs with the area code 473--which appears to be domestic, but is actually the area code for the island of Grenada and several other islands outside the United States that, like the U.S., use country code +1. Calls placed to 473 numbers are international calls, not typically included in calling plans, and can run up quite a bill. Also, the criminals perpetrating 473 scams often establish premium numbers--the equivalent of the 900 numbers that were popular in the United States in the pre-internet era. Calls to such numbers can sometimes cost more than $20 for the first minute! (In fact, a couple decades ago, similar scams used to be run from within the United States--criminals would send messages to people's pagers (remember those?) paging them from premium numbers with the hope that the recipients would call back and be charged for the calls.)

Of course, the 473 scam is run from area codes other than 473--at the bottom of this story is a list of area codes that appear domestic (because they use country code +1), but are, in fact, international.

Are there other numbers I need to worry about?

In addition to the list of international numbers that "look American," keep in mind that Canada and various U.S. territories are also part of country code +1--and while scammers do not typically run 473 scams from Canada or U.S. territories, some domestic telephone plans do not consider calls to these areas to be a domestic or free calls. For that reason, I have included lists of U.S. territory and Canadian area codes below as well.

Are there lessons to learn from this scam?

The history of the 473 scam reveals an important point you need to know in order to stay safe.

After most Americans became aware that 900 numbers were premium numbers, criminals started to use other areas codes--often 809 (the Caribbean islands)--which led to this scam even being known as an 809 scam. After sufficient media coverage educated enough folks not to return calls to area code 809, criminals shifted to other areas codes--assisted by the implementation of many new area codes over the last two decades--making it far more difficult for people to recognize which numbers are domestic and which are not. Of course, the fact that today's phones allow people to respond quickly to text messages and missed calls means that people are less likely than during the era of pagers to reconsider whether it's a good idea to respond before they call or text back. Also, psychologically speaking, humans are more likely to become alarmed when hearing the voice of another human crying for help than when seeing a text message--giving today's scammers another edge up over their counterparts two decades ago. Scammers adapt their techniques as technologies and awareness levels change.

As far as lessons, here is the bottom line:

If you miss a call, whomever called can send you a text message (or leave a voicemail). If they did neither, and you don't know who called, don't worry about it. Also, remember that it's unlikely that someone you do not know who is in distress at a location with which you are not familiar would dial a random number in another country and ask you to help them--they would call the police.

Here are the current international area codes within the +1 country code:

242 -- Bahamas

441 -- Bermuda

784 -- St. Vincent and Grenadines

246 -- Barbados

473 -- Grenada, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique

809, 829, and 849 -- Dominican Republic

264 -- Anguilla

649 -- Turks and Caicos

868 -- Trinidad and Tobago

268 -- Antigua

664 -- Montserrat

876 -- Jamaica

284 -- British Virgin Islands

721 -- Sint Maarten

758 -- St. Lucia

869 -- St. Kitts and Nevis

345 -- Cayman Islands

767 -- Dominica

Here are the U.S. Territories' area codes (listed by territory):

American Samoa -- 684

Guam -- 671

Northern Mariana Islands -- 670

Puerto Rico -- 787 and 939

U.S. Virgin Islands -- 340

Here are the Canadian area codes (listed by province):

Alberta -- 403, 587, and 780

British Columbia -- 236, 250, 604, and 778

Manitoba -- 204 and 431

New Brunswick -- 506

Newfoundland -- 709 (879 is being added in 2018)

Northwest Territories -- 867

Nova Scotia -- 902

Nunavut -- 867

Ontario -- 226, 249, 289, 343, 365, 416, 437, 519, 613, 647, 705, 807, and 905

Quebec -- 418, 438, 450, 514, 579, 581, 819, and 873

Saskatchewan -- 306 and 639

Yukon -- 867

Nationwide -- 600 (and possibly 622, 633, 644, 655, 677, and 688)

U.S.-Canada Numbers to Beware:

Area code -- 900

Also -- Canadian numbers that begin 976 after the area code (These can be like 900 numbers. The U.S. used to have such numbers as well. Numbers beginning 540 in New York used to also be premium numbers, but these should no longer be in service.)

[tech-tonics]

Anti-Malware, Ransomware Tips

o Many virus/malware issues begin with administrator-level privileges and execution. Perhaps Windows users of devices should, at most, be given the 'power user' privilege and NOT that of a local machine administrator.

o Keep third-party software (Flash, Java, etc) updated.

o Do not follow unsolicited web links in email messages or submit any information to webpages in links. 

o Use caution when opening email attachments. 

o Maintain up-to-date anti-virus software.

o Perform regular backups of all systems to limit the impact of data and/or system loss.

o Secure open-share drives by only allowing connections from authorized users. Turn off or unplug external drives.

o Keep your operating system and 3rd party software/applications up-to-date with the latest patches.

o Immediately disconnect the infected system from the wireless or wired network. This may prevent the malware from further encrypting any more files on the network.

o Users who are infected should change all passwords AFTER removing the malware from their system.

o Users who are infected with the malware should retrieve encrypted files by the following methods:

* Restore from backup

* Restore from a shadow copy or

* Perform a system restore

* Here are a few items in the "try at your own risk" category:

o Windows 7 and above has an "App Locker" feature that can be used to allow or prevent executables from being run in certain situations. It can be a challenge to set up, but it's pretty powerful. A station can practically be rendered to be a kiosk with the proper settings.

o Microsoft has an Enhanced Migitation Experience Toolkit (EMET). There can be some complexity here, but the tool with the default settings may help. At least one article mentions EMET as a good tool to fight against CryptoLocker 

o CryptoPrevent and BitDefender's Anti-CryptoWall could help to prevent malware and ransomware infections.

o It has been suggested by some to  force JavaScript files (.js) to open in Notepad. This way, if a disguised JavaScript were clicked, it would open in Notepad and would not execute

[tech-tonics]

Why technology cannot fix education

By Kentaro Toyama, The Chronicle of Higher Education

In 2004, I moved to India to help found a new research lab for Microsoft. Based in Bangalore, it quickly became a hub for cutting-edge computer science. My own focus shifted with the move, and I began to explore applications of digital technologies for the socioeconomic growth of poor communities. India struggles to educate its billion-plus population, so during the five years that I was there, my team considered how computers, mobile phones, and other devices could aid learning.

Sadly, what we found was that even when technology tested well in experiments, the attempt to scale up its impact was limited by the availability of strong leadership, good teachers, and involved parents — all elements that are unfortunately in short supply in India’s vast but woefully underfunded government school system. In other words, the technology’s value was in direct proportion to the instructor’s capability.

Over time, I came to think of this as technology’s Law of Amplification: While technology helps education where it’s already doing well, technology does little for mediocre educational systems; and in dysfunctional schools, it can cause outright harm.

When I returned to the United States and took an academic post, I saw that the idea applies as much to higher education in America as it does to general education in India. This past semester, I taught an undergraduate course called "IT and Global Society." The students read about high-profile projects like One Laptop Per Child and the TED-Prize-winning Hole-in-the-Wall program. Proponents argue that students can overcome educational hurdles with low-cost digital devices, but rigorous research fails to show much educational impact of technology in and of itself, even when offered free.

My students — all undergrads and digital natives — were at first surprised that technology did so little for education. They had a deep sense that they benefited from digital tools. And they were right to have that feeling. As relatively well-off students enrolled at a good university, they were all but guaranteed a solid education; being able to download articles online and exchange emails with their professors amplified the fundamentals.

But their personal intuition didn’t always transfer to other contexts. In fact, even in their own lives, it was easy to show that technology by itself didn’t necessarily cause more learning. To drive this point home, I asked them a series of questions about their own experience:

"How many of you have ever tried to take a free course on the Internet?" Over half the class raised their hands.

"And how many completed it?" All the hands went down.

"Why didn’t you continue?" Most students said they didn’t get past two or three online lectures. Someone mentioned lack of peer pressure to continue. Another suggested it wasn’t worth it without the credits. One student said simply, "I’m lazy. Even in a regular class, I probably wouldn’t do my homework unless I felt the disapproval of the professor."

In effect, the students demonstrated an informal grasp of exactly what studies about educational technologies often find. So, if my tech-immersed undergraduates could intuit the limits of educational technology, why do educators, policy makers, and entrepreneurs keep falling for its false promise?

One problem is a widespread impression that Silicon Valley innovations are necessarily good for society. We confuse business success with social value, though the two often differ. Just for example, how is it that during the last four decades we have seen an explosion of incredible technologies, but America’s poverty rate hasn’t decreased and inequality has skyrocketed? Any idea that more technology in and of itself cures social ills is obviously flawed. Yet without a good framework for thinking about technology and society, it’s easy to get caught up in hype about new gadgets.

The Law of Amplification provides one such framework: At heart, it affirms that technology is a tool, which means that any positive effects depend on well-intentioned, capable people. But this also means that good outcomes are never guaranteed. What amplification predicts is that technological effects follow underlying social currents.

MOOCs offer a convenient example. Proponents cite the potential for MOOCs to lower the costs of education, based on the assumption that low-cost content is what is needed. Of course, the Internet offers dirt-cheap replicability, and it undeniably amplifies content producers’ ability to reach a mass audience. But if free content were all that was needed for an education, everyone with broadband connectivity would be an Ivy League Ph.D.

The real obstacle in education remains student motivation. Especially in an age of informational abundance, getting access to knowledge isn’t the bottleneck, mustering the will to master it is. And there, for good or ill, the main carrot of a college education is the certified degree and transcript, and the main stick is social pressure. Most students are seeking credentials that graduate schools and employers will take seriously and an environment in which they’re prodded to do the work. But neither of these things is cheaply available online.

Arizona State University’s recent partnership with edX to offer MOOCs is an attempt to do this, but if its student assessments fall short (or aren’t tied to verified identities), other universities and employers won’t accept them. And if the program doesn’t establish genuine rapport with students, then it won’t have the standing to issue credible nudges. (Automated text-message reminders to study will quickly become so much spam.) For technological amplification to lower the costs of higher education, it has to build on student motivation, and that motivation is tied not to content availability but to credentialing and social encouragement.

The Law of Amplification’s least appreciated consequence, however, is that technology on its own amplifies underlying socioeconomic inequalities. To begin with, the rich will always be able to afford more technology, and low-cost technology in no way solves that. There is no digital keeping up with the Joneses.

But even an equitable distribution of technology aggravates inequality. Students with poor high-school preparation will always find it hard to learn things their prep-school peers can ace. Low-income families will struggle to pay registration fees that wealthy households barely notice. Blue-collar workers doing hard manual labor may not have the energy to take evening courses that white-collar professionals think of as a hobby. And these things are even more true online than offline. Sure, educational technologies can lower costs for everyone, but it’s those with existing advantages who are best positioned to capitalize on them.

In fact, studies confirm exactly this: Well-educated men with office jobs disproportionately complete MOOC courses, while lower-income young adults barely enroll. The primary effect of free online courses is to further educate an already well-educated group who will pull away from less-educated others. The educational rich just get richer.

So what is to be done? Unfortunately, there is no technological fix, and that is perhaps the hardest lesson of amplification. More technology only magnifies socioeconomic disparities, and the only way to avoid that is nontechnological: Either resolve the underlying inequities first, or create policies that favor the less advantaged.

Kentaro Toyama is an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, and the author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology, published this month by PublicAffairs.

[tech-tonics]

Too young for this type of fun? Babies and smartphones

By Judith L. Page, USA Today

Think, for a moment, about the day-to-day life of a 2-year-old.

They’ve conquered walking, and potty training is on the horizon. Words are springing forth and the assertiveness that comes with life experience is already testing the little one’s parents. Nothing in the house is safe anymore.

More than two-thirds of 2-year-olds are also using tablets, more than half dawdle on smart phones, and 1 in 4 are deploying some form of technology at the dinner table.Even babies, not even a year old, are being pulled in, according to a new study.

If this last paragraph stopped you, it should, because when the consumption of technology eclipses or begins to diminish social interactions with very young children, we have a problem — and a big one. The image of a group of toddlers sitting apart, all engaged in their devices rather than playing together, isn’t some far-off notion.

We know intuitively, after all, that overuse of technology can translate to an under use of speech and other forms of human-to-human communication. Anyone who has traveled by subway, walked through an airport or, really, seen people in any public setting knows that adults live in their devices: ear buds in, heads down. The difference, though, is that we grew up without these devices — and that’s an important distinction.

Today’s children are in uncharted waters. We don’t fully understand yet how this technological immersion is helping or harming the development of their ability to communicate. However, we do know that nothing substitutes for human interaction when it comes to speech and language development — not even technology. Hearing-wise, technology can do outright damage if it is allowed to repeatedly emit unsafe sound levels close to the ear.

The early years are also when children are most malleable, as the most rapid period of brain development takes place before age 3. During this time, the primary way young children develop their speech and language abilities is through human communication, something technology simply cannot duplicate. The less time they’re conversing, the less opportunity these children will have to develop strong speech and language skills.

Meanwhile, younger and younger children are gaining access to technology that could end up harming their hearing if it is used unsafely. Thanks in part to misuse of wildly popular technology, the problem of unsafe listening has risen to a global level. Recently, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to reduce it.

How young are tech users? This spring, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association just released a poll of 1,000 parents of children ages 0-8. Some of the results are eye-opening:

•68% of these parents’ 2-year-olds use tablets; 59% use smartphones and 44% use video game consoles. •55% of parents voice concern that misuse of technology might be harming their children’s hearing; with respect to speech and language skills, the figure is 52%. •52% say they are concerned that technology negatively impacts the quality of their conversations with their children, with about the same percentage saying they have fewer conversations than they would like because of technology. •Hearing loss among children is a concern; 72% of parents polled agree that loud noise from technology might lead to hearing loss in their children. Couple that with research showing that one in five Americans 12 and older has hearing loss that makes communication difficult, and you can begin to see the enormity of the problem.

The poll, though startling, was not all bad news. A vast majority of the surveyed parents reported putting limits on their children’s use of technology. The efficacy of those efforts, however, seemed to weaken over time. The meaningful enforcement of rules, though adjusted as children grow and their interests change, is essential if developmental needs are going to be effectively addressed.

As a speech language pathologist, I advise parents that there is no substitute —technological or otherwise — to developing vocabulary and communication skills through organic conversations and real exchanges. Listening, talking, reading and interacting with their parents and others is the best and only way children can build a sound foundation for a lifetime of communication.

So as families begin to gear up for those summer trips — whether long car rides or cross-country flights — I encourage parents to take a moment to think about how their children are using technology. Are the ear buds blasting, potentially jeopardizing their hearing? Is conversation now relegated to yes-no exchanges rather than meaningful dialogue that cultivates vocabulary and builds social skills? Is a child even aware of his or her surroundings and the human interplay?

Technology has thrust humanity forward in ways we could not have imagined just a generation ago. But should devices come to rule our world — and starve our children of human interaction — society, and especially children, could well pay a terrible price in communication ability.

Judith L. Page, an associate professor and speech language pathologist, is president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

[tech-tonics]

Read this first before posting anything on the internet

By Jon Ronson, The New York Times Magazine

As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger on the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport:

“ ‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”

Then, during her layover at Heathrow:

“Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”

And on Dec. 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

She chuckled to herself as she pressed send on this last one, then wandered around Heathrow’s international terminal for half an hour, sporadically checking her phone. No one replied, which didn’t surprise her. She had only 170 Twitter followers. Sacco boarded the plane. It was an 11-hour flight, so she slept. When the plane landed in Cape Town and was taxiing on the runway, she turned on her phone. Right away, she got a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.” Sacco looked at it, baffled.

Then another text: “You need to call me immediately.” It was from her best friend, Hannah. Then her phone exploded with more texts and alerts. And then it rang. It was Hannah. “You’re the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now,” she said.

Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

The furor over Sacco’s tweet had become not just an ideological crusade against her perceived bigotry but also a form of idle entertainment. Her complete ignorance of her predicament for those 11 hours lent the episode both dramatic irony and a pleasing narrative arc. As Sacco’s flight traversed the length of Africa, a hashtag began to trend worldwide: #HasJustineLandedYet. “Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can’t look away. Can’t leave” and “Right, is there no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, Twitter! I’d like pictures #HasJustineLandedYet.”

A Twitter user did indeed go to the airport to tweet her arrival. He took her photograph and posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town International. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”

By the time Sacco had touched down, tens of thousands of angry tweets had been sent in response to her joke. Hannah, meanwhile, frantically deleted her friend’s tweet and her account — Sacco didn’t want to look — but it was far too late. “Sorry @JustineSacco,” wrote one Twitter user, “your tweet lives on forever.”

In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere. Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.

One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for “Silence and Respect,” pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signs — smoking in front of No Smoking signs, for example — and documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didn’t realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.

Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamie’s birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (“After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client,” read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. “Woman needs help.”) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. “I didn’t want people looking at me.”

Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon. In particular she felt for “that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim. I felt so terrible for her.” She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died,” people unearthed Lynch’s personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.

I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.

The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. Two days later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.” The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.

Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. That same day she was publicly let go.

“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email. “SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”

Late one afternoon last year, I met Justine Sacco in New York, at a restaurant in Chelsea called Cookshop. Dressed in rather chic business attire, Sacco ordered a glass of white wine. Just three weeks had passed since her trip to Africa, and she was still a person of interest to the media. Websites had already ransacked her Twitter feed for more horrors. (For example, “I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night,” from 2012, was unearthed by BuzzFeed in the article “16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets.”) A New York Post photographer had been following her to the gym.

“Only an insane person would think that white people don’t get AIDS,” she told me. It was about the first thing she said to me when we sat down.

Sacco had been three hours or so into her flight when retweets of her joke began to overwhelm my Twitter feed. I could understand why some people found it offensive. Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”)

I would be the only person she spoke to on the record about what happened to her, she said. It was just too harrowing — and “as a publicist,” inadvisable — but she felt it was necessary, to show how “crazy” her situation was, how her punishment simply didn’t fit the crime.

“I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.” She released an apology statement and cut short her vacation. Workers were threatening to strike at the hotels she had booked if she showed up. She was told no one could guarantee her safety.

Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters — the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”

As she told me this, Sacco started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to improve the mood. I told her that “sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”

“Wow,” she said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”

She glanced at her watch. It was nearly 6 p.m. The reason she wanted to meet me at this restaurant, and that she was wearing her work clothes, was that it was only a few blocks away from her office. At 6, she was due in there to clean out her desk.

“All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “If I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself.”

The restaurant’s manager approached our table. She sat down next to Sacco, fixed her with a look and said something in such a low volume I couldn’t hear it, only Sacco’s reply: “Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?”

We agreed to meet again, but not for several months. She was determined to prove that she could turn her life around. “I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. “I’m going to come back.”

After she left, Sacco later told me, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she broke down crying.

A few days after meeting Sacco, I took a trip up to the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. I wanted to learn about the last era of American history when public shaming was a common form of punishment, so I was seeking out court transcripts from the 18th and early 19th centuries. I had assumed that the demise of public punishments was caused by the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual, I thought, because a person in the stocks could just lose himself or herself in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Modernity had diminished shame’s power to shame — or so I assumed.

I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to scroll slowly through the archives. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. I scrolled faster, finally reaching an account of an early Colonial-era shaming.

At the archives, I found no evidence that punitive shaming fell out of fashion as a result of newfound anonymity. But I did find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning the outsize cruelty of the practice, warning that well-meaning people, in a crowd, often take punishment too far.

It’s possible that Sacco’s fate would have been different had an anonymous tip not led a writer named Sam Biddle to the offending tweet. Biddle was then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers and eventually posted it on Valleywag, accompanied by the headline, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s P.R. Boss.”

In January 2014, I received an email from Biddle, explaining his reasoning. “The fact that she was a P.R. chief made it delicious,” he wrote. “It’s satisfying to be able to say, ‘O.K., let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’ And it did. I’d do it again.” Biddle said he was surprised to see how quickly her life was upended, however. “I never wake up and hope I [get someone fired] that day — and certainly never hope to ruin anyone’s life.” Still, he ended his email by saying that he had a feeling she’d be “fine eventually, if not already.”

He added: “Everyone’s attention span is so short. They’ll be mad about something new today.”

Four months after we first met, Justine Sacco made good on her promise. We met for lunch at a French bistro downtown. I told her what Biddle had said — about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib, but like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.

“Well, I’m not fine yet,” Sacco said to me. “I had a great career, and I loved my job, and it was taken away from me, and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that.”

Sacco pushed her food around on her plate, and let me in on one of the hidden costs of her experience. “I’m single; so it’s not like I can date, because we Google everyone we might date,” she said. “That’s been taken away from me too.” She was down, but I did notice one positive change in her. When I first met her, she talked about the shame she had brought on her family. But she no longer felt that way. Instead, she said, she just felt personally humiliated.

Biddle was almost right about one thing: Sacco did get a job offer right away. But it was an odd one, from the owner of a Florida yachting company. “He said: ‘I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side,’ ” she told me. Sacco knew nothing about yachts, and she questioned his motives. (“Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?”) Eventually she turned him down.

After that, she left New York, going as far away as she could, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She flew there alone and got a volunteer job doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality rates. “It was fantastic,” she said. She was on her own, and she was working. If she was going to be made to suffer for a joke, she figured she should get something out of it. “I never would have lived in Addis Ababa for a month otherwise,” she told me. She was struck by how different life was there. Rural areas had only intermittent power and no running water or Internet. Even the capital, she said, had few street names or house addresses.

Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she knew going in that she would not be there long. She was a New York City person. Sacco is nervy and sassy and sort of debonair. And so she returned to work at Hot or Not, which had been a popular site for rating strangers’ looks on the pre-social Internet and was reinventing itself as a dating app.

But despite her near invisibility on social media, she was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet. Biddle wrote a Valleywag post after she returned to the work force: “Sacco, who apparently spent the last month hiding in Ethiopia after infuriating our species with an idiotic AIDS joke, is now a ‘marketing and promotion’ director at Hot or Not.”

“How perfect!” he wrote. “Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together.”

Sacco felt this couldn’t go on, so six weeks after our lunch, she invited Biddle out for a dinner and drinks. Afterward, she sent me an email. “I think he has some real guilt about the issue,” she wrote. “Not that he’s retracted anything.” (Months later, Biddle would find himself at the wrong end of the Internet shame machine for tweeting a joke of his own: “Bring Back Bullying.” On the one-year anniversary of the Sacco episode, he published a public apology to her on Gawker.)

Recently, I wrote to Sacco to tell her I was putting her story in The Times, and I asked her to meet me one final time to update me on her life. Her response was speedy. “No way.” She explained that she had a new job in communications, though she wouldn’t say where. She said, “Anything that puts the spotlight on me is a negative.”

It was a profound reversal for Sacco. When I first met her, she was desperate to tell the tens of thousands of people who tore her apart how they had wronged her and to repair what remained of her public persona. But perhaps she had now come to understand that her shaming wasn’t really about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.

[tech-tonics]

Social media in the classroom

By Vicki Davis, computer science and IT integrator from Camilla, Ga. for Edutopia

Before we talk social media, let's talk about the relevance of social media by taking a quiz. Which of the following is most likely to be true?

☐ Should we teach letter-writing in the classroom? Kids need to write letters and mail them. But what if they become pen pals with strangers and share private information with them? What if their letter gets lost in the mail and the wrong person opens it? Are we opening up a whole dangerous world to our students once they mail letters to others? Surely students will send thousands of letters through the mail in their lifetime. ☐ Should we teach email in the classroom? Kids need to email other people and should know how to title a subject. But what if they email someone bad? What if they accidentally send it to the wrong person? What will we do? And are we opening up a whole dangerous world to our students once they email others? Surely students will send thousands of emails in their lifetime. ☐ Should we teach (dare we say it) social media in the classroom? I mean, they don't have to learn microblogging on Twitter -- you can do that in Edmodo, right? You can have a private blog or put them on Kidblogs or Edublogs instead of letting them post long status updates on Facebook, right? Are we opening up a whole dangerous world to our students once they are writing online and posting comments to each other? Surely students will post thousands of status updates, pictures, and blogs in their lifetime. The Social Media Answer ☑ There's one form of writing that can arguably get someone fired, hired or forced to retire faster than any other form of writing.  (If you don't believe me, read "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life" in the New York Times.) ☑ There's one form that will most likely be read by college admissions offices and teams of student "stalkers" hired to vet students before they receive scholarships. ☑ There's one form that will prevent some people from running for political office and get others elected. One form of writing is that powerful.

If you guessed social media, you're right.

The Social Media Myth The myth about social media in the classroom is that if you use it, kids will be Tweeting, Facebooking and Snapchatting while you're trying to teach. We still have to focus on the task at hand. Don't mistake social media for socializing. They're different -- just as kids talking as they work in groups or talking while hanging out are different.

You don't even have to bring the most popular social media sites into your classroom. You can use Fakebook or FakeTweet as students work on this form of conversation. Edublogs, Kidblog, Edmodo, and more will let you use social media competencies and writing techniques. Some teachers are even doing "tweets" on post-it notes as exit tickets. You can use mainstream social media, too.

12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now Tweet or post status updates as a class. Teacher Karen Lirenman lets students propose nuggets of learning that are posted for parents to read. Write blog posts about what students are learning. Teacher Kevin Jarrett blogs reflections about his Elementary STEM lab for parents to read each week. Let your students write for the world. Linda Yollis' students reflect about learning and classroom happenings. Connect to other classrooms through social media. Joli Barker is fearlessly connecting her classroom through a variety of media. Use Facebook to get feedback for your students' online science fair projects. Teacher Jamie Ewing is doing this now, as he shared recently. Use YouTube for your students to host a show or a podcast. Don Wettrick's students hosted the Focus Show online and now share their work on a podcast. Create Twitter accounts for a special interest projects. My student Morgan spent two years testing and researching the best apps for kids with autism (with the help of three "recruits"), and her work just won her an NCWIT Award for the State of Georgia. Ask questions to engage your students in authentic learning. Tom Barrett did this when his class studied probability by asking about the weather in various locations. Communicate with other classrooms. The Global Read Aloud, Global Classroom Project and Physics of the Future are three examples of how teachers use social media to connect their students as they collaborate and communicate. Create projects with other teachers. (Full disclosure: I co-created Physics of the Future with Aaron Maurer, a fellow educator I first met on Twitter.) Share your learning with the world. My students are creating an Encyclopedia of Learning Games with Dr. Lee Graham's grad students at the University of Alaska Southeast. The educators are testing the games, and the students are testing them, too. Further a cause that you care about. Mrs. Stadler's classes are working to save the rhinos in South Africa, and Angela Maiers has thousands of kids choosing to matter. It's in the Standards If you're going to ignore social media in the classroom, then throw out the ISTE Standards for Students and stop pretending that you're 21st century. Stop pretending that you're helping low-income children overcome the digital divide if you aren't going to teach them how to communicate online.

Social media is here. It's just another resource and doesn't have to be a distraction from learning objectives. Social media is another tool that you can use to make your classroom more engaging, relevant and culturally diverse.

[tech-tonics]

Too much technology and not enough learning?

By Ben Johnson, administrator, author and educator for Edutopia

I was reading the book The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley and couldn't help wondering what our schools would be like today if we were forced to teach without the technology (including copy machines). She describes three school settings in South Korea, Finland and Poland as being devoid of the technology U.S. teachers take for granted, and how, especially in math and science, their best students outperform our best students by a wide margin. I agree with the premise of her book: good teaching and high expectations make the difference, and technology is icing on the cake. My concern is that we are at a point where our students spend more time using technology and less time actually learning.

Maybe There Isn't an App for That Yes, I know, there are other factors that contribute to their better score on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) -- longer school days, advanced science and math starting earlier in elementary school rather than high school, extra tutoring in Korean hagwons, less to learn with a more focused curriculum, no non-essential learning activities such as sports, home ec or computer applications courses. Even controlling for those things, their best and brightest outperform ours. Yes, I know, some might ask, "At what cost?" But that is another point we can discuss later. What I am getting at is that our student learning is so diluted by bountiful resources and access to all types of knowledge and learning activities that our students are underwhelmed with learning. The only students challenged in the U.S. are the AP and International Baccalaureate, and even then we have a hard time getting to the most important things.

For example, we have all experienced the "app" mania and are sick of hearing, "Is there an app for that?" Here is a new distraction: why don't we encourage students to use valuable time for "learning" through social media? After all, they already spend hours of their time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and myriads of other social media sites.

To answer that question, I feel similar to Harrison Ford who played Colonel Graff in Ender's Game when Ender asked why the email was not being sent. Graff stated that the cadets had freedom as far as their personal thoughts were concerned, but he would not allow "unfiltered communications" which the family (and others) might not understand and would distract the cadets from their original mission.

Just Plain Learning I have to tell you that I have a hard enough time filtering the communication that comes out of students' mouths in the classroom, let alone what they text or write to their buddies out of the classroom. While Facebook has a really cool knack for helping people stay in touch with each other and their lives, it takes a considerable amount of time, not only to participate, but to review what all the other people are doing. Filtering out what is useful from all the pointless blather takes more time. Now, if the communication is attached to a project, as in collaboration via Evernote, Assemblee or FieldNotes, then I can see a purpose and a reason to share thoughts with each other, but that could be done just as easily face-to-face -- which is more powerful still. Of course, if geographically disparate groups of students need to collaborate, technology certainly can help, but even still it can never fully replace face-to-face interaction.

If we want our students to do better, I think we can take a lesson from the countries that are cleaning our clocks on the fairly easy PISA, which is designed to test thinking. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days of chalk boards and overhead transparencies, not just to simplify teaching and learning but to minimize distractions and focus on what is really important -- just plain learning.

[tech-tonics]

Forget Science. Farmers' Almanac appears more accurate

By James Joiner, The Daily Beast, 27 February 2015

Last summer the 200-year-old publication forecast this hellish winter. Nobody believed them, but their secret weatherman was right.

Like the rest of us poor lost Yankee souls in southern New England, I’m surrounded on all sides by what amounts to a glacier’s worth of white desolation. Record-setting snow dumped in back-to-back-to-back winter storms with such density that public transportation in Boston simply gave up and went south, and the weighty oppression of the stuff was such that not even drunken townies in Southie could be heard more than a few feet away.

We are a region caught unawares, surprised with our pants so far down that there’s frostbite nipping at our you-knows, and no one—from spray-tanned cable TV weather wizards to the feds at the National Weather Service to the plethora of online forecasters, all of them with bleeding edge technology and fancy algorithms at their beck and call—had much in the way of forewarning.

There was, however, one place that got it right.

Nailed it, in fact. Quietly, casually, and without aplomb, just like they’ve been doing for almost exactly 200 years solid:

The Farmers’ Almanac.

That digest-sized annual tome available at hardware stores and mom-and-pop convenience shops, the very same one that caused a good number of the elderly Yankees up here to smile a smug, “I told you stupid kids with your faces stuck in your phones that this was gonna happen, but you were too busy swiping right to care. And now you’re gonna freeze and wish you’d bought a shovel and candles two weeks ago” smile when the rest of us schmucks turned up at their shops to cop winter survival gear.

Not only did they get it right, just as they claim to around 85 percent of the time—they actually made this winter’s predictions almost two years ago, using much the same technique they did back in the 1800s.

“It’s like an ancient Chinese secret,” says the Almanac’s managing editor, Sandi Duncan gravely, before laughing. “No, I’m kidding. It is an old, old formula that dates back to when the Almanac was first founded back in 1818, it’s a mathematical and astronomical formula. It takes things like sun spot activity, position of the moon, the phase of the moon, and a variety of other factors into consideration.”

Even Duncan doesn’t know the details, which are passed on only to the venerable publication’s resident weatherman, Caleb Weatherbee, a shady, pseudonymous fellow who has had a byline in the book for two centuries.

“He’s a real person, but he has a false name to keep him secret,” Duncan explained. “We’ve only had seven weather prognosticators actually, in almost 200 years. So when you take on the job you have to love the weather, and  you have to love what you do. It’s pretty much a secure position.”

When pressed for more details on the man behind the mystery, Duncan clammed up quickly. “I can’t answer these questions.”

When pressed for more details on the man behind the mystery, Duncan clammed up quick. She’ll admit that he’s in the United States, but as to whether he’s a weather professional, or anything else, you can almost hear her upper lip stiffen.

“I can’t answer these questions.”

When the current edition of the Farmers’ Almanac dropped last August, popular website livescience.com took them to task for their dire winter predictions, even getting meteorologist Anthony Artusa, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, to weigh in.

“We don’t see anything offhand that would suggest it would be a really brutal winter,” he scoffed.

Who’s laughing now?

“We like to keep them on their toes,” admitted Duncan, laughing again. “In a day and age of high-tech radar systems and computer tracking technology, it’s nice to be reminded, and the Farmers’ Almanac reminds all of us, that there’s one thing, weather, it’s not 100 percent predictable. We’re not in control of it; it’s Mother Nature.”

And while the formula they use has changed very little over the centuries—centuries!—the Almanac itself has managed to change with the times.

“It’s changed so much,” Duncan told me, even since she herself took the job in 1994. “Now we have online, we have social media, we have a couple calendars. It’s become more of a brand rather than just the Almanac.”

Duncan informs me that farmer’s almanacs were once the most printed publications save for Bibles, and that they came on the scene in the 1600s. Currently, there are two main ones here in the United States, her Farmers’ Almanac and the Old Farmers’ Almanac, which is printed just a state away and predates hers by a couple decades.

Two hundred years is a long time, and it probably feels even longer in today’s media economy.

Duncan has been delving into back issues for the 2017 200th anniversary issue, and in doing so is having some cultural differences put into perspective.

“Recipes will call for different things, like lard, and they would never give exact measurements,” Duncan noted. “It would just say ‘add the butter’ and you wouldn’t know how much butter. One of my favorite ones is from the old tips section, ‘If you think somebody’s dead, put a mirror in front of their face.’ It’s so funny to see how life has changed, and how the content has changed, ’cause there’s other ways to tell if someone is dead, thank you.”

While the print edition remains “steady” in this digital era, the circulation is certainly down from the 6 million or so it once enjoyed—a number it attained via selling copies to places like banks as promotional items, with their logos or advertisements printed on the covers. The Almanac, though, stays true to its vision without being hokey.

“Over the years we’ve evolved as people moved away from the farm, but we do have gardening tips and information for any type of farmers, whether they’re growing something out on their balcony or in their backyard,” she claimed. “I like to say that we were always green, even before green was en vogue."

Being green before it was en vogue is good, but being right about this winter before it happened is a miracle.

[tech-tonics]

9 tips if you plan to keep using Windows XP

So, it's past the April 8 last patch deadline for Windows XP and you're still using the operating system. And why not? XP has proven it's worth as a very stable operating system. But if you plan to keep using XP a while longer, here are nine tips that should keep you going a while longer:

I hope you have every patch that Microsoft has ever offered you. 08 April 2014 was your last Microsoft patch, so you probably won't be revisiting Windows Update anymore.

Keep updating other software that you may be using, such as Flash, Java, your anti-virus, and more. Sophos Anti-Virus, for example will be supported on XP SP3 until at least 30 September 2015. (See tip [8].)

Consider tightening up the restrictions imposed by your anti-virus and your endpoint firewall (if you use one). If you must keep XP computers going, try to shrink their operational universe, so that they get used only when necessary, rather than whenever it's convenient.

Remove all software and drivers you are not using. In fact, make an active effort to minimise the set of applications you permit on your XP computers. Even software that is still being patched depends on operating system components that aren't, and it simply may not be possible for your vendor to work round lower-level holes in Microsoft's code.

If your anti-virus has an Application Control feature, use it to enforce any software restrictions you decide upon in tip [4]. Application control lets you set rules like, "Skype and other instant messaging clients aren't allowed at all, so we don't need to worry about any data they might leak."

Put your XP computers on their own network, and limit access into and out of that network as strictly as you can. If you are a Sophos UTM user, you can add UTM gateways to set extra, stricter network filtering for your XP computers, such as blocking email and instant messaging traffic, and preventing the use of social networks.

Urgently get rid of administrator-level user accounts if you have any left. You should have done this years ago, throwing out any desktop software which required administrator privilege to work. It's now more important than ever to do this, in order to reduce the scope of an attack if hackers do manage to get in.

Get on with your personal or organisational efforts to get rid of XP. Tips [2] to [7] don't really buy you more time - they just reduce the risk while you catch up. Don't be in this position again when 01 April 2015 comes around.

Ditch IE and switch to Google's Chrome browser or Mozilla's Firefox browser. Both of Chrome and Firefox browsers will continue to receive updates and patches and should run on Windows XP a while longer.

Some examples

Here are some examples of the limitations you might enforce for your XP computers:

• On a computer used to control specialised hardware, e.g. a lathe.

No browsers, no Microsoft Office, no Flash, no Java and no PDF reader installed. Application Control blocking on all unnecessary software. Internet access limited to known-and-needed sites for security updates.

• On a computer used for general office purposes, including browsing and email.

Upgrade it. It'll end in tears if you don't. You have six whole weeks!

• On a computer used online with legacy business apps.

Stick to a non-IE browser that is still getting security updates. All unneeded plugins removed. Application Control blocking on all unnecessary software. Internet access limited to known-and-needed sites for security updates and the legacy apps.

Where to?

You may not like the fact that Microsoft is forcing you to upgrade.

But you've had years of warning, so don't fall back on the excuse that the deadline took you by surprise: if you're going to miss it, be practical about it.

Set yourself a new deadline, as close in time as you possibly can, and stick to it.

We promised no guilt trips, so take this as an objective and unjudgemental statement: "The rest of us are counting on you."

[tech-tonics]

How the power of interest drives learning

The following article was written by Annie Murphy Paul, published in the blog Mind/Shift, kqed.org

In recent years researchers have begun to build a science of interest, investigating what interest is, how interest develops, what makes things interesting, and how we can cultivate interest in ourselves and others. They are finding that interest can help us think more clearly, understand more deeply, and remember more accurately. Interest has the power to transform struggling performers, and to lift high achievers to a new plane.

So what is interest? Interest is a psychological state of engagement, experienced in the moment, and also a predisposition to engage repeatedly with particular ideas, events, or objects over time. Why do we have it? Paul Silvia of the University of North Carolina speculates that interest acts as an “approach urge” that pushes back against the “avoid urges” that would keep us in the realm of the safe and familiar. Interest pulls us toward the new, the edgy, the exotic. As Silvia puts it, interest “diversifies experience.” But interest also focuses experience. In a world too full of information, interests usefully narrow our choices: they lead us to pay attention to this and not to that.

What Interest Can Do For Us

Interest is at once a cognitive state and an affective state, what Silvia calls a “knowledge emotion.” The feelings that characterize interest are overwhelmingly positive: a sense of being energized and invigorated, captivated and enthralled. As for its effects on cognition: interest effectively turbocharges our thinking. When we’re interested in what we’re learning, we pay closer attention; we process the information more efficiently; we employ more effective learning strategies, such as engaging in critical thinking, making connections between old and new knowledge, and attending to deep structure instead of surface features. When we’re interested in a task, we work harder and persist longer, bringing more of our self-regulatory skills into play.

Interests powerfully influence our academic and professional choices. A seven-year-long study by Judith Harackiewicz of the University of Wisconsin and her colleagues found that college students’ interest in an introductory psychology course taken their freshman year predicted how likely they were to enroll in additional psychology classes and to major in the subject. Interest predicted such outcomes even more accurately than students’ grades in that initial course. In general, writes Harackiewicz, “research has found that interest is a more powerful predictor of future choices than prior achievement or demographic variables.”

In fact, scientists have shown that passionate interests can even allow people to overcome academic difficulties or perceptual disabilities. One study found that students who scored poorly on achievement tests but had well-developed interests in reading or mathematics were more likely to engage with the meaning of textual passages or math problems than were peers with high scores but no such interests. Another study, of prominent academics and Nobel Laureates who struggled with dyslexia, found that they were able to persist in their efforts to read because they were motivated to explore an early and ardent interest.

How To Promote Interest

So what can parents, teachers and leaders do to promote interest? The great educator John Dewey wrote that interest operates by a process of “catch” and “hold”—first the individual’s interest must be captured, and then it must be maintained. The approach required to catch a person’s interest is different from the one that’s necessary to hold a person’s interest: catching is all about seizing the attention and stimulating the imagination. Parents and educators can do this by exposing students to a wide variety of topics. It is true that different people find different things interesting—one reason to provide learners with a range of subject matter, in the hope that something will resonate.

“Research has found that interest is a more powerful predictor of future choices than prior achievement or demographic variables.”

But it is also the case that interesting things generally share a number of characteristics. The research of Paul Silvia suggests that to be interesting, material must be novel, complex, and comprehensible. That means introducing ourselves or others to things we haven’t encountered before (or novel aspects of familiar things), and calibrating their complexity so that these things are neither too hard nor too easy to understand. Understandability is crucial: as Silvia writes, new and complex things are interesting “provided that people feel able to comprehend them and master the challenges that they pose.”

Research shows, for example, that an inscrutable poem is judged as more interesting when readers are given a hint that allows them to make sense of what it’s about. Abstract art, too, is considered to be more interesting when the paintings are given titles that help viewers understand what the artists may have had in mind as they painted. Viewers become even more interested in such paintings when they are given biographical information about the artist and background about the historical context in which it was created.

Starting A Virtuous Cycle

What counts as novel, complex, and comprehensible, of course, depends on the age and ability of the individual. One way that parents and educators can ensure that things are both complex and comprehensible is to make sure that students have sufficient background knowledge to stimulate interest and avoid confusion. The more we know about a domain, the more interesting it gets. Silvia suggests that one reason that growing knowledge leads to growing interest is that new information increases the likelihood of conflict—of coming across a fact or idea that doesn’t fit with what we know already. We feel motivated to resolve this conflict, and we do so by learning more. A virtuous cycle is thus initiated: more learning leads to more questions, which in turn leads to more learning. Parents and educators can encourage the development of students’ interests by actively eliciting these queries, what researchers call “curiosity questions.”

If curiosity doesn’t seem to be emerging on its own, there are ways to coax it out, as George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in a classic paper, “The Psychology of Curiosity.” Curiosity arises, Loewenstein wrote, “when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.”

[RELATED: For Students, Why the Question Is More Important Than the Answer]

The simplest way to open an information gap is to start with the question. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham notes that teachers and parents are often “so eager to get to the answer that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question.” Yet it’s the question that stimulates curiosity; being told an answer quells curiosity before it can even get going. Instead of starting with the answer, begin by posing a genuinely interesting question—one that opens an information gap.

Parents and educators can also promote the development of kids’ interests by demonstrating their own passion for particular subjects. A study of 257 professional musicians, for example, found that most important characteristics of the musicians’ first teachers (and, of course, parents are often kids’ first teachers) was the ability to communicate well—to be friendly, chatty, and encouraging—and the ability to pass on their own love of music, through modeling and playing well. Try sharing your own personal interests with young people through casual conversations, hands-on demonstrations, and special trips.

Keeping Interest Alive

If catching people’s interest is about seizing attention and providing stimulation, holding it is about finding deeper meaning and purpose in the exercise of interest. Caution is required here, however. Research has found that infusing a subject with meaning by stressing its future utility can produce the opposite of its intended effect. In one study, for example, Judith Harackiewicz and her coauthor informed students that math would be important in their adult lives. The intervention actually undermined interest in math among students who did not consider themselves skilled in the subject, making such students feel threatened and leading them to withdraw.

Harackiewicz and other researchers have found more success when they encourage students to generate their own connections and discover for themselves the relevance of academic subject matter to their lives. In a 2010 study, for example, Harackiewicz and her colleagues had college students engage in a writing exercise in which they were asked to think about the how math (and in an accompanying experiment, psychology) might play a role in their lives. In the math-related intervention, for example, participants were first taught a mathematical procedure and then asked to write a short enin, one to three paragraphs in length, briefly describing the potential relevance of the technique to their own lives, or to the lives of college students in general.

Completing this exercise led subjects to become more interested in the subjects they wrote about, an effect that was strongest among those participants who initially reported that they did not do well and did not feel competent in math or psychology. Harackiewicz calls this a “value intervention,” because it helps students see the value of what they’re learning. As employed by parents, this doesn’t have to be a formal exercise; it can be something you do in casual conversations. When you ask, on the car ride home or around the dinner table, “What did you learn about in school today?”, you can follow up with a question like “How do you think people might use that knowledge in their jobs?” or “What could that skill help you do?”

Parents, educators and managers can also promote the development of individuals’ interests by supporting their feelings of competence and self-efficacy, helping them to sustain their attention and motivation when they encounter challenging or confusing material. Weaker learners may need more of this assistance to find and maintain their interests, while stronger learners can be pushed in the direction of increasing autonomy and self-direction. The goal in each case is to cultivate interests that provide us with lasting intellectual stimulation and fulfillment, interests that we pursue over a lifetime with vigor and zest.