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Google’s Next Phase in Driverless Cars: No
Steering Wheel or Brake Pedals
By JOHN MARKOFF MAY 27, 2014
VOCABULARY:
Other than a panic button, a new car takes the driver out of driving. Credit Google

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Humans might be the one problem Google can’t solve.
For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But Google’s brightest minds now say they can’t make that handoff work anytime soon.
Their answer? Take the driver completely out of the driving.
The company has begun building a fleet of 100 experimental electric-powered vehicles that will dispose of all the standard controls found in modern automobiles. The two-seat vehicle looks a bit like the ultracompact Fiat 500 or the Mercedes-Benz Smart car if you take out the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake and gear shift. The only things the driver controls is a red “e-stop” button for panic stops and a separate start button.
The car would be summoned with a smartphone application. It would pick up a passenger and automatically drive to a destination selected on a smartphone app without any human intervention.
The company has begun building a fleet of experimental electric-powered vehicles that can’t be driven by people and are summoned with a smartphone app.
Google won’t say if it intends to get into the car manufacturing business or simply supply technology to carmakers, but it says there are plenty of possibilities if it can persuade regulators to allow cars with no drivers. One potential use: driverless taxi cabs.
In an interview at Google’s headquarters here, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder who is actively involved in the research program, said the company decided to change the car project more than a year ago after an experiment in which Google employees used autonomous vehicles for their normal commutes to work.
There were no crashes. But Google engineers realized that asking a human passenger — who could be reading or daydreaming or even sleeping — to take over in an emergency won’t work.
“We saw stuff that made us a little nervous,” said Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie
Mellon University roboticist who directs the car project at Google.
The vehicles will have electronic sensors that can see about 600 feet in all directions. Despite that, they will have rearview mirrors because they are required by California’s vehicle code, Dr.
Urmson said. The front of the car will be made from a foamlike material in case the computer fails and it hits a pedestrian. It looks like a little bubble car from the future, streamlined to run by itself — a big change from the boxy Lexus SUV Google has been retrofitting the last few years with self-driving technology.
The new Google strategy for autonomous cars is a break from many competing vehicle projects.
Mercedes, BMW and Volvo have introduced cars that have the ability to travel without driver intervention in limited circumstances — though none completely eliminate the driver.

That feature, which is generally known as Traffic Jam Assist , allows the car to steer and follow another vehicle in stop-and-go highway driving at low speeds. In the Mercedes version, the system disengages itself if the driver takes his hands off the steering wheel for more than 10 seconds.
Volvo said that by 2017 it planned to have the cars in the hands of ordinary consumers for testing in the streets of Gothenburg, Sweden, where the company has its headquarters.
In the interview, Mr. Brin acknowledged those advances, but said they were incremental. “That stuff seems not entirely in keeping with our mission of being transformative,” he said.
Google’s prototype for its new cars will limit them to a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The cars are intended for driving in urban and suburban settings, not on highways. The low speed will probably keep the cars out of more restrictive regulatory categories for vehicles, giving them more design flexibility.
Google is having 100 cars built by a manufacturer in the Detroit area, which it declined to name.
Nor would it say how much the prototype vehicles cost. They will have a range of about 100 miles, powered by an electric motor that is roughly equivalent to the one used by Fiat’s 500e, Dr.
Urmson said. They should be road-ready by early next year, Google said.
A self-driving car Google has worked on for four years out for a spin in Mountain View, Calif.
Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times
The current plan is to conduct pilot tests in California, starting with ferrying Google employees between buildings around its sprawling corporate campus here.
Laws permit autonomous vehicles in California, Nevada and Florida. But those laws have generally been written with the expectation that a human driver would be able to take control in emergencies.
Google executives said the initial prototypes would comply with current California automateddriving regulations, issued on May 20 . They will have manual controls for testing on California public roads.

In the future, Google hopes to persuade regulators that the cars can operate safely without driver, steering wheel, brake or accelerator pedal. Those cars would rely entirely on Google sensors and software to control them.
So where might the driverless cars be used besides at Google’s offices?
Last year, Lawrence D. Burns, former vice president for research and development at General
Motors and now a Google consultant, led a study at the Earth Institute at Columbia University on transforming personal mobility .
The researchers found that Manhattan’s 13,000 taxis made 470,000 trips a day. Their average speed was 10 to 11 m.p.h., carrying an average of 1.4 passengers per trip with an average wait time of five minutes.
In comparison, the report said, it is possible for a futuristic robot fleet of 9,000 shared automated vehicles hailed by smartphone to match that capacity with a wait time of less than one minute.
Assuming a 15 percent profit, the current cost of taxi service would be about $4 per trip mile, while in contrast, it was estimated, a Manhattan-based driverless vehicle fleet would cost about
50 cents per mile.
The report showed similar savings in two other case studies — in Ann Arbor, Mich., and
Babcock Ranch, a planned community in Florida.
Google is one of the few companies that could take on a challenge like that, said John J.
Leonard, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist. But he added: “I do not expect there to be driverless taxis in Manhattan in my lifetime.”
Mr. Brin said the change in Google’s car strategy did not mean that the company was giving up on its ultimate goal of transforming modern transportation.
“Obviously it will take time, a long time, but I think it has a lot of potential,” he said. “Selfdriving cars have the potential to drive in trains much closer together and, in theory, in the future at much higher speeds.
“There is nothing to say that once you demonstrate the safety, why can’t you go 100 miles per hour?”
A version of this article appears in print on May 28, 2014, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Google’s Next Phase in Driverless Cars: No Brakes or Steering Wheel.

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By T.C. Sottek on May 30, 2014 08:59 am
VOCABULARY:
On January 2nd, 2013, David Eckart lived through a nightmare. After being stopped in a
Walmart parking lot, New Mexico police asked Eckart to step out of his car, and patted him down. They searched his car without his consent. He was handcuffed, arrested, and eventually a search warrant was issued that allowed police to search his body for drugs, even though nothing had been found in his vehicle. He was taken by police to two emergency rooms where, despite his protests, he was humiliated and coerced into intrusive medical procedures. Hospital staff X-rayed him, searched his cavities for drugs several times, gave him three enemas in the presence of police, and finally an invasive colonoscopy. No drugs were ever found.
What happened to Eckart is a terrifying violation of dignity and privacy. And it all happened because police say he allegedly failed to yield at a stop sign.
It may never have happened if a computer were driving the car.

It’s ironic, but the future of privacy on America’s roadways could come from Google, a company that basically makes money from tracking everything you do on the web. This week Google showed off a bold vision for the future of cars ; a custom-made driverless vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals. You simply hop in the car, tell it where to go, and you’re off to your destination. It’s a crazy, amazing, optimistic bid for the future.
It’s also controversial.
Some observers have called self-driving cars "a privacy nightmare." Since driverless cars will likely talk to each other on the road and periodically report back to the mothership, that means they’ll collect a lot of data, and nobody really knows yet how that scheme will work. Will Google target ads to drivers based on where they roam? Will companies share your driving data with dubious marketers or sketchy data brokers?
And what about the police? Will driverless cars be safe from the NSA?
All of these concerns are valid, except that they don’t present a future that’s appreciably different from our present situation. We’re already living in a digital world where you’re tracked at every turn. If you log in anywhe re on the mainstream web, you’re probably being tracked with cookies, and if you’ve got a device with GPS in your pocket, the police can already track your historical whereabouts by obtaining a warrant. But what if mass adoption of driverless cars actually increased the privacy of drivers more than any other roadway invention in history?
Privacy is about more than just data collection. It’s also about feeling secure against someone searching through your belongings. While the Bill of Rights protects citizens against unreasonable searches, it’s no guarantee that your rights won’t be violated — just ask David Eckart. Eckart’s example is extreme, but the kind of traffic stops that led to his ordeal are very common. Forty-two percent of involuntary encounters with police in the United States happen in cars, and many of these encounters lead to searches.
But even traffic stops that don’t result in searches can bring citizens unwanted attention or questioning. Whether they’re questions from police about where you’ve been and who you’ve been with, why you’re in a certain place, what you’re photographing, what’s in your bag, or anything else you might not want to tell an agent of the government, they pose a potential danger for people who don’t want officers prying into their lives. That’s not a paranoid view of police, it’s just a fact about risk: even if most police have your best interests in mind, the best way to avoid invasive searches is simply to never come in contact with officers unless you want to. These concerns are especially significant for minority groups that are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement for searches.

According to data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 26.4 million people were subject to traffic stops in America in 2011. Of those stops, BJS data shows that a vast majority were violations based on the behavior and decisions of drivers. That includes speeding (46.5 percent of all stops), not wearing a seatbelt or talking on a phone (6.6 percent), illegal turns and lane changes (7.0 percent), stop sign or stop light violations (6.7 percent), and roadside sobriety checks (1.3 percent). Those are all legitimate reasons for police to stop people, but they can also lead to unwanted intrusions that have nothing to do with traffic violations.
Of all the traffic stops in 2011, BJS says about 792,000 people (3 percent) were searched. The majority of those people d idn’t believe the police had a legitimate reason to search them.
Human beings get pulled over because they're human.

In total, violations based on driver behavior accounted for 68.1 percent of traffic stops by police.
In other words, human beings were pull ed over in most cases because they’re human: they break the rules of the road and sometimes make mistakes. In some cases, like obeying speed limits, there’s even a cultural expectation that most people will routinely break the law. As the
ACLU's senior policy analyst Jay Stanley tells The Verge , this means that roads are quasiauthoritarian spaces that give police huge discretion in choosing who to punish. But in a world with self-driving cars, things would look much different. "The latitude of the police to pull people over would be much reduced," Stanley says. "People wouldn’t be subject to so much arbitrary enforcement."
When humans become passengers instead of operators, moving violations would disappear as quickly as the steering wheel. Automated red-light and speeding cameras that ding drivers with robotic precision will become mostly obsolete. Selfdriving cars won’t speed, they won’t make illegal turns, they won’t blow through stop signs, and they’ll safely ferry you home without incident if you’ve had too much to drink or if you’ve got a really important text message that can’t wait. That means police will either need a very good reason to pull you over, or a clearly bogus one; but either way, it’ll drastically lower the number of encounters people have with police.
That’s not to say the road to a driverless future will be perfect. The first self-driving cars will probably be expensive and rare; hybrids and all-electric cars are still the exception to the cheap, reliable internal combustion engine. Wealthy people and those in cities with access to taxis will enjoy the benefits of self-driving cars first, even though the least privileged are searched most frequently. And taking the steering wheel away from privileged groups first may make those still driving traditional cars bigger targets for police in the interim before mass adoption. In the 2011 data from BJS, black drivers were relatively more likely to be pulled over in a traffic stop, and blacks and hispanics were more likely to be ticketed than white drivers. White drivers were both ticketed and searched at lower rates than black and hispanic drivers.
Getting to scale won’t necessarily be pretty. But the wide adoption of self-driving cars could provide substantial benefits to everyone. A recent report from the Eno Center for Transportation notes that driverless cars could eliminate at least 40 percent of fatal crashes in the US, saving tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars every year. Our commutes to and from work could be smoother and s afer. Lots of people who can’t drive, like the young, elderly, and disabled, would be given new freedom.
And we probably won’t get pulled over by the cops.

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World | James Risen and Laura Poitras, The New York Times | Updated: June 01, 2014 18:33 IST
VOCABULARY:
(US Marshals Service via The New York Times)
In an undated handout, Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May of 2010
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency's reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last

four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the NSA documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the NSA finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency's ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The agency intercepts "millions of images per day" - including about 55,000 "facial recognition quality images" - which translate into "tremendous untapped potential," according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the NSA now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
"It's not just the traditional communications we're after: It's taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information" that can help "implement precision targeting," noted a
2010 document.
One NSA PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man - sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven - in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the
Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to U.S. intelligence agencies.
It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation's surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the NSA's foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.
Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the NSA would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an NSA spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.
Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. "Facial recognition can be very invasive," said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at
Carnegie Mellon University. "There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving."
State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver's licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The FBI is developing

what it calls its "next generation identification" project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.
The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.
The NSA, though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.
"We would not be doing our job if we didn't seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities - aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies," said
Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.
She added that the NSA did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver's licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the
State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the NSA collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.
"The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition" research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions."
Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum. Laura Donohue, director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. "There are very few limits on this," she said.
Congress has largely ignored the issue. "Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data," Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., said in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.
Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people's faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.
Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of
Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that "when pictures come in different angles, different

resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software."
That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when
Tundra Freeze, the NSA's main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.
Similarly, another 2011 NSA document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to bin Laden.
But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.
It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The NSA does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans' domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Vines.
The NSA has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on
Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010,
Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.
The agency's use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the NSA and its British counterpart, General
Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.
The NSA achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases - one in a huge NSA database code-named Pinwale, and

another in the government's main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide - according to
NSA documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of "identity intelligence" analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.
The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the NSA was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the NSA collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.
In addition, the agency was working with the CIA and the State Department on a program called
Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.
One of the NSA's broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the NSA relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by
Google, the documents show.
The NSA can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.
© 2014, The New York Times News Service

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Last Child in the Woods,
Richard Louv’s book, is stimulating a national debate on the role of nature in children’s lives. As Louv suggested in his presentation at the Minnesota
Landscape Arboretum, today’s children suffer from nature-deficit disorder. They are often raised to be ‘afraid’ or cautious of the outdoors. Parents suggest that it is dirty, dangerous, or, Louv states, “that nature is in the past; the future is in electronics.” True enough, these same children spend a huge amount of time on the internet, with cell phones, playing video games, watching TV, or mesmerized by other electronic gadgetry.
“We need to give our children Vitamin N where N stands for nature,” Louv implores us. His implications are clear. Our nation feeds our children high calorie, low nutrient fast food and then asks them to sit on the couch or at a desk with their eyes glued to a screen. Considering these facts, it is no wonder that childhood obesity is on the rise.
The human body is designed to move; movement is becoming obsolete along with being in nature.
As an investigative journalist, Richard Louv compiled a lot of research data to make his case for nature-deficit disorder. Many of the research results are startling. For example, would you guess that early experiences in nature are positively linked with the development of imagination? (Louv, 2001, Fjortoft 2000. Other research indicated that exposure to nature improves children’s cognitive abilities as it enhances their observations skills, awareness, and reasoning.(Pyle, 2002)

Behavioral changes have also been recorded.
Children who play outside in nature with others are much less likely to engage in bullying, demonstrate respect for each other, and develop collaborative skills. (Malone & Tranter, 2003; Moore, 1996; Fjortoft,
2000)
Improvements shows up indoors, too.
Children who spend time in nature score higher on tests of concentration and self-discipline. (Taylor, 2002) They also report a greater sense of awe and wonder which according to Harvard’s E.O. Wilson are motivating factors in life long learning. (Wilson, 1997)
Nature is therapeutic.
Doing simple things like walking, playing, or exploring nature can reduce or sometimes even eliminate the need for drugs in children who suffer from
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.) University of Illinois/Urbana researchers Andrea Faber Taylor and Frances Kuo have conducted a series of studies on the role of nature in relief of ADHD. In one study, they compared the concentration ability of three groups of children diagnosed with ADHD. Each group took three 20 minute walks, one in a green park and the other two walks in a downtown or residential area with less green. All the groups were tested for concentration immediately after their walks by researchers blind to which walk the children had taken.
Results showed, according to Taylor, improved concentration and longer attention span after the green walk. (2008, Taylor) These results are mirrored by a larger study done with adults by MIND (see the Eco-Healing section above) and studies done with 450 children.
What Are Some Symptoms of
Nature-Deficit Disorder?
To explore if your child or anyone in your family is suffering from the disorder ask yourself the following questions:
1. Is your child over-weight and/or out of shape?
2. How many hours a week does your child spend in nature or outdoors?
3. Is your child lethargic and/or depressed?
4. Is your child stressed or anxious frequently?
Your child does and all children do not have to suffer from ADHD to benefit from exposure to nature. Often parents, grandparents, and other family members imagine that children only benefit if they are taken on camping trips or hiking.
Research shows that, while these things are wonderful, they are not necessary. Taking children to a local green park, for a walk in nature, or encouraging them to garden with

you, or explore backyard insects can all provide them with physical, psychological, and spiritual nourishment. One can imagine how even placing a nature photo, a plant, or a small living thing like a turtle or fish in their rooms enhances their imagination and sense of aliveness. The importance of nature images and/or views has been established and had an influence on modern hospital design for 30 years. (Ulrich, 1984)
As research mounted throughout the 1990s on the important role nature plays in children’s physical, mental, and spiritual development, educators and schoolyard architects began to explore greening school playgrounds. In 2001 the book, Greening
School Grounds: Creating Habitat for Learning , was published in the United States inspiring the country to follow the leadership of Britain, Canada, Australia, and Sweden who were already investing in green school grounds. These schoolyards include features such as vegetable and flower gardens, butterfly gardens, small water features, unstructured shrubs, trees, and grassy areas. Planners realize that, eventually, these green areas will be populated by birds, insects, and small ground creatures whose presence will provide children with multiple levels of nature experiences every day.
If you wish to help green the coming generation and support their caring for the environment, you can do three simple things:
1. Talk to other adults
—parents, teachers, community members, and policy makers —about the importance of nature in childrens’ lives.
2. Support efforts to green children’s worlds whether those efforts come through family outings, visits to public parks, or advocating green schoolyard programs.
3. Take the children that you know on a walk, visit a park, garden with them, or take them camping.
A demonstrated by-product of these efforts is that children, and all people, who experience an intimate relationship with nature become good stewards of nature.
Children are key to the Earth’s future health for good or for ill.

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November 11, 2013 Naomi Simson
I was at a holiday resort a while ago; what a great place to people watch – to be an observer of all things human. I noted a couple coming to the breakfast restaurant with their two tiny tots on their respective backs – I observed silently ‘how cute’.
The couple sat nearby with their 2 & 4 year olds. I was surprised to see the parents setting up two iPad’s for each of their little girls to watch (during breakfast!!)…. and as the meal progressed I noticed that both parents cheered every time either of their daughters put something in her mouth.
Agh….. fast forward ten years and wonder why many teenagers don’t speak to their parents and have an odd relationship with food.

Please, please parents – you can never start too early to teach your child the art of conversation… and that food is for nourishment not reward…. It is a ‘slippery slide’ once the ‘little electronic baby sitter’ makes it’s way to the dinner table.
I know you want them to sit still and be quiet, but most people in the restaurant do understand that kids are kids – and often express themselves enthusiastically. That is a good time for table games – like ‘eye spy’ (I remember playing that one with my son before he knew the alphabet – everything was a ‘pig’ or a ‘star’ – it was such a laugh.)
Take a moment to dream with your young one’s – to share a story – and to listen to them… and the rest of us in the restaurant will look on in awe.
Besides these are future employees and leaders in our community and we need them to be articulate and healthy, not just to sit still and be mesmerized by electronic pictures.
Respond to the question – What is the purpose of having both of these articles together in one lesson?
Use Collins FCA paper. Assignment #1, 10 lines. FCA – Correct Punctuation (2), Complete
Sentences (2), Viable Answer (4).

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By Lisa Guernsey
VOCABULARY:
A shot from the game Minecraft. Courtesy Minecraft.net.
Have you heard about Minecraft, the computer game that uses virtual building blocks and teems with opportunities for creative problem-solving? Have you yet been swept into the myriad Minecraft conversations by today’s tweens and teens about rocks and minerals, sand and glassmaking, jungles and deserts, urban planning and railroad lines, nighttime zombies and daily survival?
Have you been warned that you may rue the day you let this time-sucker into your household?

Minecraft is an open-ended video game that lets players build virtual houses and communities with a few simple keystrokes. Since it officially launched last November,
Minecraft’s website
has recorded more than 36 million registered users, with 6.8 million purchasing a copy to run on their own computers. Look for Minecraft tutorial videos on YouTube and millions of entries pop up.
The game, which can be played on a computer, on Xbox 360 , or on a smartphone app, doesn’t rely on high-resolution graphics or keep track of earned points. It’s nothing like those road-race games that favor fine motor skills and quick reaction times. Think of it as a SimCity with treasure hunts and lost-in-the-jungle adventures of infinite possibilities. First-time players of Minecraft enter a blank
“natural” landscape of trees. Discovering that the sun will soon set and darkness is nigh, they must gather wood and build a shelter or risk being extinguished by the monsters of the night. As the name of the game suggests, players mine the environment for materials then craft things like pickaxes, fishing rods, even chocolate-chip cookies. (When
Conan O’Brien reviewed Minecraft
recently as part of his series “Clueless Gamer,” he said: “Taking things out of the ground and then building things. …
So it’s like we’re in Wales in the 19 th century and we’re desperately poor. What a fun game for kids.”) Once that task is mastered, other opportunities beckon: Mine for diamonds, tame cats, stock chests with found objects, create glass windows by building kilns and gathering sand, make bows and arrows out of spiderwebs (but be careful—vanquish those spiders first!), lay out railroad-like roller coasters, design wonderlands for friends to visit. There is no end to the options.
I repeat: no end. It’s no surprise, then, that parents are cursing its birth. As a researcher examining the potential of technology in education and as the mother of two Minecraft-obsessed girls in elementary school, I have an acute love-hate relationship with this game. One minute I’m mesmerized with its potential for encouraging children to get creative, explore, and think critically about what it takes to build new communities. The next I’m shrieking at my kids and issuing ridiculous threats. (Me, stomping over to our kitchen computer: “I have already said this three times.
Shut it down. It’s dinnertime. Do I have to unplug this from the wall? Want spiders, huh? How 'bout
I leave you outside tonight to find the real ones on the back porch!”)
Minecraft has many markers of what makes for a good learning environment: child-initiated projects, deep engagement, challenging tasks that push kids to persist and reach higher goals, excitement over what has been learned or discovered, tools for writing, and multiple modes of play that enable kids
(and adults) to mold the game to their liking. Want to play by yourself and have loads of gold bricks available for your yellow-brick road? Use “creative” mode. Want to invite friends to build a town?
Turn on the multiplayer server. Want to add more monsters and turn the game into a swashbuckling adventure? Add a “ mod ” created by fans and game developers to trigger more zombies or creepers to appear.
And it has classroom potential, too. For example, Joel Levin, a second-grade teacher at Columbia
Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City who will be at the Future Tense event on technology in elementary education on Thursday, has adapted Minecraft so that his students can enter a multiplayer world customized for their classroom, working together to create and maintain buildings and landscapes. (Watch this case-study video of Levin produced by the Joan Ganz Cooney
Center.) At an Atlantic Live event this spring
, Levin said he “brought it into my classroom because my 5-year-old daughter was having such an amazing experience with it.”
Levin sees enough educational value in the game to take it beyond the walls of his school. He is coowner of TeacherGaming, a startup company with a product called MinecraftEdu . Through a partnership with Mojang, the Swedish company behind Minecraft, TeacherGaming sells Minecraft

downloads to educational institutions at up to a 50 percent discount and is testing customized versions for teachers to use in classrooms. (The original Minecraft costs $26.95 for a one-time download.)
According to Levin, about 300 schools have bought the discounted Minecraft so far, and 50 schools are testing MinecraftEdu. One teacher, he says, is using it to teach English as a second language through Minecraft’s online chat system. Another has her students write nightly journal entries about their Minecraft adventures.
My girls, who beg me each day to look at all the new buildings they’ve created, broached the idea of an educational Minecraft before I could even mention it: “I like Minecraft better than my homework,” my 8-year-old told me this spring when I struggled to redirect her to that night’s math.
“Maybe my homework could be on Minecraft? Like when we were learning shapes, I could go on
Minecraft and make pyramids! And I could put up signs like, ‘A pyramid has a square on the bottom.’ ”
The thing is Minecraft wasn’t designed to mesh with school life, at least not under the blocked-time, subject-specific schedules that define most classrooms today. In fact, as I learned from Scott Traylor, founder of 360KID
, a consulting company that tracks virtual worlds, Minecraft wasn’t built as a learning tool for kids at all. And with the exception of the nascent MinecraftEdu partnership that was prompted by fans outside the company, there haven’t been any attempts to promote it for kids or for school use. Last year, when Minecraft won an award for the best virtual world for children at the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson didn’t even appear to pick up his prize.
Now families with Minecraft-obsessed children have to come up with new ways to accommodate it in their daily lives. Some have banned Minecraft on school days. (If Minecraft becomes part of lessons, they’ll have to adapt, I suppose.) Others have put time limits on its use each day. (A much trickier strategy than time-limiting TV watching, where programs conclude after 30 minutes.) One father wrote into the question-answering site Quora to find out how to cope with his 12-year-old son’s Minecraft addiction
. (The advice: Engage with him
. “Don't just unplug your kid, teach him how to unplug himself, and encourage him when he does,” said one .
) In our house, we have rules about kids doing their book-reading first and making sure to have daily outdoor time. We also encourage them to tell us about what they are making on Minecraft and show them how to conduct research online to figure out how to concoct new things. My husband, nearly as Minecraft manic as they are, has created quests for them and their friends to find treasures he’s hidden.
But I’m alarmed at how the minutes can turn into hours if I’m not there to tell my kids to take a break. I love that they are creating things, talking about their creations, and planning ahead for new projects. But I hate that the real thing—their Legos, the cardboard boxes saved for building forts— can’t hold a candle to Minecraft in capturing their interest. (There’s even a Lego version of
Minecraft .) Finding balance between the real and the virtual worlds now requires some real vigilance on my part.
I’m fascinated to watch whether Minecraft and other immersive games will eventually change the culture of our staid and struggling elementary schools. But I have to admit: I’m worried about what might happen when they do.

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Local child development professionals weigh pros and cons of ubiquitous electronics
By Evan Tuchinsky
This article was published on 01.09.14
.
VOCABULARY:
As people’s lives become more
and more integrated with the
Internet, it’s not surprising that children get exposed to technology at a young age. Tablets were especially hot gifts this Christmas—including devices designed for, and marketed to, kids—and even youngsters who didn’t unwrap a smartpad may get the chance to use one in preschool or grade-school classrooms.
Is that a good thing? Should we grin or grimace when we see a child engaged with electronics?
Perhaps a bit of both, according to North State professionals involved with childhood health and development. Tablets have benefits, provided their use is judicious.
“It comes back to the same conversation that we had about TV
20 years ago,” said Heather Senske, administrator of Child
Development Programs & Services for the Butte County
Office of Education. “It’s about the quality of the program, the
Online resource:
The National Association for the
Education of Young People has released a series of recommendations for technological devices.

appropriateness, the learning that’s offered—and then the adult who’s there to interact in order to facilitate that learning and to make it relevant to the child.”
While research on how tablets, computers and smartphones affect child development remains in the early stages, television may prove an apt parallel, particularly since so many children use them to watch videos. The American Academy of Pediatrics lumps viewing and computing into one category—“screen time”—with a recommendation of no more than two hours per day, and only for children at least 2 years old.
Even then, the tablet, like the TV, shouldn’t replace parental interaction. All too often, though, an electronic device becomes what Dr. Craig Corp calls “a fancy pacifier,” and an engrossing one at that. In his pediatrics practice in Chico, Corp frequently sees children so mesmerized by tablets or phones that he has a hard time getting their attention.
Not all parents want their children hard-wired to technology. Ronda Gambone, owner of Little
Discoveries Preschool , which has two campuses in Chico, said she used to have Leapster tablets and computers for pre-K and kindergarten students, but no longer.
“So often the families get so much of it at home that our experience is [parents] don’t want [their kids] in front of TV or technology here at the school,” Gambone said. “A lot of the preschool environment is socialization; they need to learn how to socialize and problem-solve.
[Computing] was just one of those things that wasn’t working; a lot of the younger ones didn’t quite understand the concept of what they were doing.”
Exposure is a matter of degrees. While some parents don’t permit their young children to spend time in front of a screen, Corp said, many do. As such, content counts.
“If a child is actually going to learn something, and it’s not [presented] at a super-fast pace, that’s probably OK,” he said. “Like everything else in life, if you’re doing something active that engages the mind—doing something creative, actually putting things together—that’s better than doing things that are just passive.”
Heidi Cantrell, perinatal outreach coordinator at Enloe Medical Center, has a simple saying:
“Active child, passive toy.” Parents should give children objects that offer the child “control over cause and effect”: blocks, tea sets, jack-in-the-boxes and toys with buttons that elicit actions.
The latter description may fit a tablet. Well, that’s true when used by older children; a toddler mimicking Mom’s motion of swiping a finger across the screen is probably not deriving the same interactivity, though.
That’s why Corp and Cantrell endorse the AAP’s recommended limits on screen time. Children,
Cantrell said, require “quality-of-life experience—human-relationship-based experiences that last a lifetime. … All humans need to be accepted and loved and have a purpose. I don’t think technology gives that as well as another human can give that to us or we can give to another human.”

With tablets for children a relatively new phenomenon, researchers have not been able to complete long-term studies on if or how the technology affects development. A previous study linking TV to ADD could prove prescient, though.
That research, published in the medical journal Pediatrics , found a correlation between attentiondeficit disorders and the amount of television children watched as infants and toddlers. The more hours watched under age 3, the greater the likelihood of developing ADD or ADHD.
“The brain goes through a tremendous amount of development those first few years of life,”
Corp explained, “and that’s at least some of the concern with the overuse of TV with younger kids. There’s at least some limited evidence that it can actually affect brain structure, brain development and nerve connections.
“Is that good or bad? As we move into the future with technology more integrated into our lives,
I don’t know that we know the answer for that, but I think we need to be cautious with it. Not all things are good for the developing brain.”
Cantrell equates a baby’s brain development with gardening, in which billions of neurons “are like seeds, and when they’re nourished by positive experiences, it encourages synaptic growth, or an electrical storm of wiring that goes on in the brain and imprints forever. …If neglected, [the garden] will never grow the root system; and if it’s over-watered and doesn’t struggle on its own, it won’t be as strong, [either].”
That’s why child-development experts put such a premium on parental involvement and truly educational experiences—some of which are indeed possible with a tablet. The program in use on the tablet—be it a book, game, puzzle or video—should spark inquisitiveness and conversation. It should be “appropriate to the child’s level of development,” Senske said, and supplement other methods of learning.
Noted Corp: “Technology is not all good or all evil—it’s a million shades of gray. It depends on how it’s used.”

01 | 6 | 14
Dear Boys,
Do you remember the day we went to the drugstore and the lady said, “Wow, you are the first kids I’ve seen all day with nothing in your hands.” Remember how she marveled at how you didn’t need an electronic device to carry through the store? I know how her words made you feel. I know how it reminded you that you are different because your mom limits your electronic usage. I know it was yet another reminder.
The same reminder you receive when we are out to eat and you notice all the kids playing their phones and iPads instead of talking to their parents. I know it was a reminder of all the sporting events where you feel you are the only kids whose parents are making them cheer on their siblings rather than burying themselves in a phone. I know it was another reminder to you that you feel different in this electronic age we live in.
Well, boys, it’s not you. It’s me. Me being selfish maybe. You see I can’t bear to miss a moment with you . Let me explain.
I want to talk to you when we are out to eat. I want to listen to your questions. I want to have training opportunities. I want to allow space for conversation that can take us deeper. And if you are always distracted with electronics, well… I might miss those moments.

I could give you all the statistics about how damaging it is to your development, your attention span, your ability to learn. While all of those are valid reasons to keep electronics away, that is not my primary reason why I say no to you so much. It’s more than that. Much more. I need you to understand this.
When we are together, I want all of you.
The fullness of you. I want to experience you. Truly experience you. And I can’t do that with you when there is an electronic device between us. You see it acts as a barrier. I want to see what brings life to those eyes. I want to watch the wonder and magic dance across your face as you discover the wonders of this world. I want to watch you as you figure things out. I want to watch you process life, develop your thoughts. I want to know you. I want to know your passions. I want to watch you as you discover your God-given talents and gifts. And when you hide behind a screen, I miss out on all of that. And my time with you….well it will be over in the blink of an eye.
I want to guide you into an understanding of life and who you are. Boys, kids today are starved for attention, true connection and relationship. I don’t want you to feel starved. That is why I say no. I know that feeding the desire to play in your device is like giving you candy. It satisfies for a moment but provides no long term nutrition. It does more harm than good.
I don’t want to look back when I’m out of the trenches of child training and regret a second
I had with you. I don’t want to merely survive. I want to thrive in this life with you. We are in it together. We are a family.
Yes, when we are waiting at a doctor’s office for an hour, it would be eaiser to quiet you with my phone. But if I did that, I fear I would send you a message that says I’d rather hush you than hear those precious words falling from your lips.
I can’t bear the thought of allowing you to miss out on the wonders and mysteries of this world.
When you are transfixed on a screen, the beauty of this world will be lost to you.
In every moment beauty is waiting to be discovered. I don’t want you to miss it.
I want you to be comfortable with yourself. I want you not to feel a constant need to be entertained and distracted. If you stay behind a screen, you never have to experience just being you, alone with your thoughts . I want you to learn to think, to ponder life, to make discoveries, to create. You have been gifted by God in unique ways. I want those to bloom.
They can’t bloom in the glow of a screen. They need life, real life, to bring them to light.
I want you to be confident in who you are. I want you to be able to look people in the eyes and speak life into them. If I allow you to live behind a screen, you get little practice relating eye to eye. To truly know someone you have to look into their eyes. It’s a window into their heart . You see what can’t be seen in cyberspace.
When I tell you no to devices, I’m giving you a gift. And I’m giving me a gift. It’s a gift of relationship. True human connection. It’s precious and a treasure. And you mean so much to me that I don’t want to miss a second of it.

I love how God created your mind. I love to hear the way you think and process life. I love to see what makes you laugh. I love to watch those eyes widen when a new discovery is made.
And when your head is behind a screen, I miss all of that. And so do you.
In this life we have few cheerleaders. In this family we will cheer each other on. I know it is boring to sit at swim lessons and watch your brother learn to swim. I know it is boring to sit through a 2 hour baseball practice. And in all honesty, it would be easy for me to give you the iPad and keep you quiet and occupied. But we all lose out when we do that. You will miss out on watching your brother’s new accomplishments. You will deprive him of the joy of his moment to shine for you. You will miss out on what it means to encourage each other.
I want you to grow up knowing the world doesn’t revolve around you. (One day your wife will thank me) I want you to learn to give selflessly of yourself….to give away your time, your talents, your treasures. If I distract you with electronics when you should be cheering for your brother, well, I’m simply telling you that your happiness is more important than giving your time to someone other than yourself.
This world needs more selflessness. This world needs more connection. This world needs more love. We can’t learn these behind a screen.
I want to raise sons that know how to look deeply into the eyes of the ones they love. I want my future daughters in law to know what it’s like to have a husband that looks deeply into her eyes because he knows the value of human relationships and the treasure of love. And that is best communicated eye to eye.
I want to watch your face illuminated by the majesty of life – not the glow of a screen.
I want all of you. Because I only have you for a short while. When you pack up and leave for college, I want to look back with no regrets over the time I spent with you. I want to look back and remember how your eyes sparkled when we talked. I want to look back and remember how
I actually knew those little quirky details of your life because we had time enough to be bored together.
It’s ok to be bored. We can be bored together. And we can discover new things together.
I love you. I love you too much to quiet you with an iPhone or an iPad or a DS. And
I can’t even apologize, because I’m really not sorry. I’m doing this so that I won’t be sorry one day.
With all my love,
Mom

VOCABULARY
1.
ACCOMMODATE to supply suitability; oblige or do a favor for
2.
ADVOCATES acting or speaking in support or defense of a person or idea
3.
ALLEGEDLY
4.
AUTONOMOUS
said to have happened but not yet proven
existing or acting separately from other things or people
5.
BECKON
6.
COERCED
to signal, summon, lure, or entire, sometimes with a nod or hand gesture
to make someone do something by using force or threats
7.
COMMUTES to travel regularly to and from a place
8.
COMPREHENSIVE of a large scope; covering or involving much; inclusive or thorough
9.
CONSENT
10.
DEFICIT
11.
DERIVING
12.
DISCLOSED
13.
DISENGAGES
14.
DUBIOUS
15.
ENGROSSING
16.
EXPLOIT
to give permission for something to happen or be done
a lack or shortage; deficiency
to receive or obtain from a source or origin
to make known, reveal, or uncover
to separate from someone or something
doubtful, questionable
fully occupying the mind or attention
to use selfishly for one's own ends; to utilize, especially for profit
17.
FACILITATE
18.
IMMERSIVE
19.
INCREMENTAL
20.
INTEGRATE
to assist in the progress of an action or process
noting or pertaining to digital technology or images that deeply involve one's senses
related to a small amount, degree, or portion of something
to bring together or incorporate (parts) into a whole
21.
INTERCEPTS to stop or interrupt the course, progress, or transmission
22.
INTERVENTION to occur, fall, or come between points of time or events
23.
INTRUSIVE
24.
INVOLUNTARY
intruding where you are not wanted or welcome
not voluntary; not by one's own choice
25.
JUDICIOUS
26.
MYRIAD
27.
NASCENT
28.
ORDEAL
having, exercising, or characterized by good or discriminating judgment
a very great or indefinitely great number of persons or things
beginning to exist or develop
a difficult or painful experience, a trial
29.
PHENOMENON something that is impressive, marvelous, or extraordinary
30.
POTENTIAL existing in possibility : capable of development into actuality
31.
PROTOTYPE an original or first model of something from which other forms are copied or developed
32.
REVOLUTIONIZE to bring about a radical change in
33.
SYNAPTIC
34.
TEEMS
35.
VIGILANCE
relating to the region where nerve impulses are transmitted and received
to abound or swarm; be prolific or fertile
state of being very watchful