DadTalk

Virtual Worlds for Kids to Flood the Market

Shhhh. I need your help keeping a secret from my children. Don’t tell them about Webkinz or Club Penguin. Ever.

I’m especially talking to you, gift-givers. I will be checking all, cuddly, stuffed animals for  “Webkinz” tags. If I find one, be prepared to cough up a gift receipt pronto.

To be honest, I didn’t even know what Webkinz was until about two weeks ago. But at a recent holiday party, a boy about Seth’s age was dragging one around by the ear. The 4-year-old freaked whenever he lost sight of the toy.

The boy’s dad explained the concept to me: You get the doll, go online and activate an account. From there, you can feed and take care of your Beagle, Alley Cat or Brown Arabian. Personally, I’d go for the Bull Frog, since cats and dogs dominate the market. Besides, it would be a lot cooler to feed it insects than stinky dog food.

So you are probably wondering, what’s wrong with these virtual worlds? Harmless fun, right?

Comments Are Broken Working

It seems there is a problem with entering comments on DadTalk. I am waiting to hear back from Typepad on the problem.

It seems Typepad automatically labels some comments as spam, especially if you try to comment too quickly. Highly annoying. I have published some of the ones recently blocked.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Thanks.

Brett

At What Ages Is Technology Too Early Versus Too Late?

As a youngster, I loved technology. Even as an adult, I still get excited about new tech products.

I cringe, though, at the idea of giving my young kids tech toys. I apparently distrust the educational value of ClickStart My First Computer and Webkinz over more mundane items such as crayons and a stuffed animal.

That isn’t to say, we haven’t exposed our kids to technology. Seth and Lael get plenty of time with various artistic time sinks that my wife, Anne, finds for them.

Still, toys are beginning to look more like my BlackBerry than true toys. “If you give kids an old toy camera, they look at you like you’re crazy,” Reyne Rice, a toy trends specialist for the Toy Industry Association, tells The New York Times.

Alas, both of my kids would rather play with old cell phones than a toy version. Seth is keenly aware that the hand-me-down digital camera is nowhere near as cool as dad’s Canon EOS-20D. (Sadly, it’s already dated, but don’t tell Seth.)

But there is no escaping the trend in toys: Forget lead paint, hello silicon chips.

Are digital toys really good for children? Well, they certainly are not recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for children under the age of 2, reports the Times. But what about Seth, who is 5?

On the other hand, I worry about my kids falling behind the technology curve. One day a computer will be the single most important tool in their lives.

Should I should start teaching Seth and Lael how to code in  .net when they turn 6? Or should I wait until they turn 13?

I’m not really sure.

Spoofing Problem Worsens

My domain name continues to be hacked and spoofed by spammers at an increasing rate. My apologies to anyone receiving FAKE e-mail from this domain. If you have any information as to the source of these attacks, I would greatly appreciate it.

So Sorry, I Am Being Spoofed

After an inquiry to my web hosting company, I have been informed the dadtalk.net is being used in a spoofing campaign. Basically, that's when spammers hide their e-mails  using someone elses e-mail domain name. In this case, that would be my domain name.

If you received an e-mail from this domain and think it was spam, I apologize. If those e-mails are trying to sell you a product, please let me know what that product is so I can sue their sorry asses.

Okay, so I'm probably not going to sue them. But at least I can sick Go Daddy on them.

Again, I apologize to anyone who has received a fake e-mail from the dadtalk.net domain.

Our Connection With Food, Outdoors Is Disintegrating

Walk into an American grocery store, and there appears to be a plethora of choices. Aisles chock-full of creative products fill up spaces often ranging from 30,000 to 100,000 square feet.

Even the produce section seems to have an ever-increasing range of choices: multi-colored peppers and potatoes, several varieties of citrus, melons, salad fixings and nuts. All – including organic these days – are clean, shiny, perfect. Most of it even tastes half-decent, though still not as good as can be had at farmer’s markets. Certainly, the produce section is the best it has been since I was a little boy in the 1960s and 1970s.

There are even more choices in the meat, fish, beans, grains and cheese sections. When I first moved to Arizona in 1986, it took several years before I could find any lamb. Now you can find lamb from New Zealand, real goat cheese from Italy, red rice from China or Quinoa from Central America at your local Whole Foods.

But if you look a bit closer, especially in the manufactured-food sections, the majority of what we consume is still made from the same basic ingredients: corn, wheat, soy, sugar, corn syrup, vegetable oil and rice. It’s more noticeable in traditional stores than say Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, but a look at most ingredient lists reveals the same basic crap over and over.

Now consider the Chinese grocery store and even more importantly the herb store. I was in one of each last night prior to a business dinner in Chicago’s Chinatown. In these far smaller stores you can find a plethora of products made from odd plants and animals we, in the Western world, don’t normally consider ingestible.

The herb store we went to has thousands of products ranging from fungi to abalone to teas to deer penis. Okay, the last one is a bit too gross even for me, but I think you get my point that Asian culture makes full use of the planet’s biodiversity.

How much of good health depends on this enormous range of food and teas consumed in the Asian world? It’s difficult to tell because Western science tends to automatically downplay the value of these items.

Rather, Western culture seems bent on wiping out all such products from the face of the earth. How many times have you been told not to eat any mushroom not wrapped in Cellophane?

Certainly I’ve been culturally conditioned to fear anything that hasn’t been certified by American scientists as “safe.” While I often overcome such doubts, walking into the Chinese herb shop made me realize I had no recognition of 75 percent of the store’s contents. Bins and bins of dried mushrooms, herbs and berries were a complete mystery to me. (I did recognize some, of course.)

Worse, the West seems intent in burying it’s own historical and tribal knowledge of local biodiversity. Sure, you can find books describing dozens of forgotten herbs, barks and seeds, but do you really know what to do with them? How much Indian knowledge of local plant and animal varieties have been lost for good? What has been lost by the burning of the Amazon and displacing of their native communities? The same is happening in Africa and other Asia nations as well.

For generations, we have been destroying both the diversity and the knowledge that go with it. Even the diversity of our mainstay crops such as wheat, rice and corn is at risk as seed conglomerates push monoculture around the world. A new international effort is being made to save this biodiversity, as reported here in The New York Times, but it may be too little, too late.

Meanwhile, we grow further and further away from our roots, so to speak. Americans even fail to see the flowers through the forest, reports The New York Times on something called “plant blindness.” That’s because kids today have so little contact with nature, as I wrote about here on my love for the outdoors.

Kids today rarely eat berries straight from the bush or pull carrots out of the ground. Instead, we do our children a huge disservice by separating some of the basic foundations of life: food – water – nature – into sterilized packaging such as paper, tin, plastic and cardboard.

I find this sad, scary, dangerous and upsetting.

Book Reviews Toxic Invasion Damages Everyone’s Health

Have you ever held your breath for 35 minutes? In a manner of speaking, I am right now (Feb. 7) as I ride a Chicago bus so noxious with fumes, I vacillate between not inhaling at all and being forced to take a shallow breath to avoid passing out. I’m convinced the tailpipe is connected directly to the heating system.

I wish I could say this was an occasional occurrence, but alas at least once a month my fellow commuters join me to win the jackpot: most polluted bus in the Chicago Transit Authority fleet.

I find it quite ironic, therefore, that on today’s bus ride I finished reading How Everyday Products Make People Sick by Dr. Paul D. Blanc. While the book is largely a way-back trip through the horrors of the industrial workplace, it also is revelatory as to how toxic poisons became part of our daily lives.

Blanc reveals how perfectly safe products such as animal- and plant-derived glue became a toxic substance made from coal-tar and petroleum by-products. Bleach, used in the homes pf most Americans, originally killed workers by the score. Both of these products can be as health-damaging to the consumer as the workers who first discovered the side effects of these chemicals. Bleach when mixed with other common cleaning products can cause a form of asthma.

By sifting through the historical record, Blanc exposes how politicians and industrialists repeatedly fail to learn from the side effects – brain and nerve damage, impotence, chloracne, mill fever and of course death – that befell those who made household products such as plastic, glue, rubber, cotton, fuel additives and bleach.

One would think these problems are a thing of the past, but apparently not. Blanc makes clear that there is a cycle of forgetting safety lessons and letting businesses return to their bad ways. Or industry simple exports the side effects to poorer nations.

Are we heading back into one of those periods of forgetfulness? Consider that thousands of new untested products are hitting the market everyday.

Another book that reveals how unnatural chemicals and products are infiltrating our lives is The Hundred-Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald, which I mentioned here.

The toxic bus is the least of our problems, according to Fitzgerald, who reveals that we’re poisoning our water, food and air with pharmaceuticals, home products and cosmetics. But scientists have little understanding of how these chemicals interact once they’re in our body. Just about every aspect of our lives polluted with chlorine, pharmaceuticals, synthetic chemicals, flame retardants and other chemicals, Fitzgerald says.

No need to persuade me that the dangers are real: I’ve thrown many products away – think bathroom cleaners, shampoos and dashboard conditioners for the car – after discovering they affect my breathing or irritate my skin. We’ve had to change diaper brands numerous times for both of our kids because of horrible skin reactions. (We think it might be the bleach used to make diapers white.) The list is endless.

I’ll warn you in advance: Reading these two books will be unnerving for some and a lesson in anger management for others. While there may be a touch of alarmism in The Hundred-Year Lie, Blanc takes a very sober approach in How Everyday Products Make People Sick. Both books, though, shed light on my contention that Something Odd Is Happening to US.

It’s morning now, 12 hours after the bus ride. All night long, I could taste the industrial fumes. The off-taste is slowly fading, but my lungs are clogged and my voice has dropped an octave, which happens when I talk too much or breath bad air. After reading these books, I can only imagine what those fumes are doing to mine and everyone else’s health.

Many Children Accidentally See Porn on Web, Study Finds Here’s What You Can Do

About 42 percent of Internet users from ages 10 to 17 say they’ve viewed porn in the last year, reports The Associated Press via The Hartford Courant. Of those kids, 66 percent said they had not sought out the images. And about 16 percent of kids 10- to 11-years-old were exposed to porn against their will, according to the survey. Keep in mind that the porn threshold used by the study is fairly low: a naked body.

But there is no question that children are exposed to unacceptable images and videos. The problem is blamed on a variety of factors: kids, many technically more capable than their parents, employ tools such as file sharing, chat and online games. And of course there are sites such as MySpace and Flickr, where monitoring against porn can be difficult.

But a number of respondents say that an ordinary web search can result in porn popping onto their screens. If that is happening, it is highly likely that these computers are teeming with spyware. (I wrote this article (doc) for the Los Angeles Times a few years ago to explain spyware.)

Rather than pontificate about how parents should do this or that, I’m just going to offer suggestions on the jump on how to keep your children safe from pornography if it is important to you:

Picking Traits of Our Children Poses Some Thorny Questions

Would you willingly choose to have a dwarf or deaf child instead of a “normal” one? Apparently, some parents are doing just that, writes Dr. Darshak Sanghavi in a New York Times essay.

Notice I put quotes around the word “normal.” Why? To some dwarfs and deaf people, their traits are just that, normal. After all, these two traits can be traced deep into recorded human history.

But while the Times’ essay focuses on the moral right or wrong of favoring or choosing these traits, I have a different question. As our societies increasingly use materials that permanently damage human DNA and create new traits, should we allow them to propagate into the human genome? Should we stop them? Should we pick and choose?

Some of these traits will take care of themselves: the very traits may damage reproductive ability or kill at a young age. Some of these traits even may be deemed beneficial.

But many may fall somewhere in the middle. Take this hypothetical: Let’s say industrial hormones that contaminate our drinking water permanently alters human DNA in some people to create androgynous children.

These children are healthy in every way, but in this scenario each has male and female genitalia. Now this trait occurs occasionally in nature, but in this case we’re looking at a permanent, artificial cause. Mutation before they have children? Or because the trait is benign – at least biologically – should they be free to let the genetic mutation swim out into the gene pool?

I think most people will reflexively pick their respective sides. But I don’t see clear-cut answers here. How does society determine what is a good trait and what is a bad one? Mutations have been occurring throughout the evolutionary process.

The dwarfs mentioned in the Times essay, prefer short stature. They don’t care how they came by it. It may be that our hypothetical androgynes don’t care how they became that way either.

Should we?

I’ve Re-launched Work Website*

I’d like to announce that working with my partners, we’ve redesigned our website at FuturePathTrading. Other than this blog, it’s essentially the first large-scale website I’ve ever built or managed.

FuturePathTrading is a futures and options brokerage owned by several partners, including my brother. While I’ll be revealing more about my “other” job soon, this one is paying the bills.

By the way, this site is built on the Joomla Content Management System. It’s essentially an open-source database application that gives me the ability to quickly update the site.

As you will notice, I incorporated several blogs on this site to keep visitors returning. Seems that my answer to all problems are: start a blog!

I urge you to take a look at the new site and give me some feedback because I have a lot to learn. Thanks in advance for looking.

– Brett

*Some people may still be seeing the old site as servers update. The new version should have a flash movie showing traders at left and servers on the right.