Should kids be allowed to surf the web without being monitored?

The Internet is a sneaky place filled with pornography, corrupted .mp3 files and pictures of people planking.  Kids are always active, and it’s impossible to keep an eye on them at all times.  So when you combine the two, you’re asking for trouble.  But according to one researcher, you shouldn’t worry about it, because the best solution is to let your kids surf the web with no supervision whatsoever.

There was a great public concern that teenagers would come upon some guy jerking off and be traumatized, or somehow be mysteriously cajoled or beckoned into a life of promiscuity, but boyd said the teenagers’ actual reactions when they did encounter a flabby, bald middle-aged man staring into the camera and performing sexual acts was “Ew,” and they clicked past him. “It was the best abstinence-only education you can think of,” she jokes. Her point is that our deepest fears of kids’ confrontation with pornographic material, and what happens in that moment where they see something pornographic, may be overblown and irrational. And in fact, she argues that, on close examination, many of our cultural anxieties about what happens to kids online are based more on parents’ imaginations than the realities of teenage experience. (Take what she argues are the exaggerated fears of cyber-bullying for instance, or fears of sexual predators online, when the vast preponderance of sexual predators are people kids know in their daily lives.)

Is she serious?  Cause it sounds to me like a clever way of getting out of parenting.  Stopping the problem is too hard, so let’s not even try.  Oddly enough, that’s also Mitt Romney’s plan for helping poor people.

Drinking coffee will make you live longer

For as long as I’ve been alive, there has been a debate over the health benefits of alcohol.  Does a glass of red wine make you healthier, or is it slowly poisoning your body?  Now apparently we’ve begun this same debate over coffee.  Previous studies of coffee and its health benefits turned up inconclusive or contrasting information.  However, a recent study – the largest to date – shows that drinking coffee is more than just OK.  It’s actually healthy.

Drinking a daily cup of coffee -- or even several cups -- isn't likely to harm your health, and it may even lower your risk of dying from chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests.

Overall, coffee drinkers were less likely than their peers to die during the study, and the more coffee they drank, the lower their mortality risk tended to be. Compared with people who drank no coffee at all, men and women who drank six or more cups per day were 10% and 15% less likely, respectively, to die during the study.

First off, if people are dying during your study, you’re probably not doing it right.  Secondly, studies can be funny.  Some people see a relation between coffee drinking and life expectancy and think, “drinking coffee extends your life!”  Me, I think that most people drink coffee at work.  Which means they have a job.  Which means they have health insurance.  And enough money to spend $20 a week on coffee.  I haven’t run a study, but I’ll bet that people who have health insurance and disposable income to spend at Starbucks live longer than poor people without health insurance.  My grandma is 91 years old.  I doubt that giving her 6 cups of coffee a day will improve her health.  Although it would be fun to watch.  You’ve never played Go Fish until you’ve played it with a 91-year old who’s jacked up on caffeine.  She’ll snap a table in half the way she throws that pair of 7’s.

Search is over; the future of the web is "discovery"

Right now, Google is great at answering our questions.  We type in a query, and it spits out thousands of answers.  But this is only the tip of the iceberg for the Internet giant.  According to many experts, the future of the web is "discovery," where instead of providing an answer to your search, Internet companies will tell you what you want before you ask for it.  Google will know you better than you know yourself.  From the Huffington Post:

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2010. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

The convenience of information delivered to us, without active agency of our own besides our membership to a social network or shopping service, raises the question of how intimately this convenience is tied with consumerism, and whether this technology will fuel our curiosity, or just our consumption.

When the computer apocalypse finally happens, we're all totally screwed.  Businesses have been dependent on machines for a long time, but now our human brains are becoming dependent on them as well.  Thanks to the Internet there's no need to learn anything any more.  I used to be able to name all the state capitals from memory.  Now I just look them up online.  We used to discuss life's great questions with our friends.  Now we ask Siri.  Some people can't multiply two one-digit numbers without consulting their smart phone's calculator.  Soon we won't even know how to work an on/off switch.  And when that happens, computers can finally make their move.  If we forget how to shut the computers down, we'll never be able to stop their eventually overthrow of humanity.  Our demise is inevitable!  Smash your iPad and save yourself now!

Scientific proof that people love talking about themselves

If you've ever thought that people are self-absorbed, now there's scientific evidence to back you up.  A new study shows that talking about yourself gives you the same kind of rush as sex or money.  From the Wall Street Journal online:

"Self-disclosure is extra rewarding," said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves," Ms. Tamir said.

Generally, acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex.

This study not only verifies centuries of suspicions; it finally answers the question of why Facebook and Twitter exist.  Now we just need a study showing why people love to talk about Kim Kardashian.  It makes no sense.  She's a hot chick who has nothing to say.  You could find three hundred of those at the Mohegan Sun nightclubs right now.

Georgia woman makes miraculous recovery from flesh-eating virus

I'd like to start this week by sharing the incredible story of Aimee Copeland.  The 24-year old Georgian suffered the wrath of a horrible flesh-eating virus while hanging out with friends at the Tallapoosa River.  She lost her leg and suffered severe damage to her abdomen and kidneys.  Doctors told her parents that she wouldn't live through the night.  And yet, against all odds, she managed to survive, and now it appears that she is on her way to an amazing recovery.  The story can be found at CNN.com.

"We're going to celebrate that day forever for the rest of your life," Andy Copeland told his daughter as she lay heavily medicated in an Augusta, Georgia, hospital bed. "It's the day that my daughter was delivered from this horrible, horrible disease."

Alright, let's get one thing out of the way.  This girl only made it onto the home page of CNN because she’s hot.  That said, it's a tragic and heartwarming story.  I hope that she's able to recover as thoroughly and quickly as possible.  There's very little positive that can be found in a story like this.  However, let me offer one silver lining.  For the rest of Aimee’s life, no one will be able to complain in front of her ever again.  Some day, one of Aimee's friends will be whining about her relationship troubles, and Aimee will be able to say, "Yeah, that reminds me of this one time, when I got a flesh-eating bacteria that took my leg and left me unable to breathe for weeks.  But please, tell me again about that confusing text message you got."  And from that point on, everyone in Aimee's life will have to keep all of their petty grievances to themselves.  We should all be so lucky.