Spanking Your Kid Could Hatch A Bully

NEW YORK — Punishing your toddler with a few swats on the rear may come back to bite you, a new report suggests.

According to the study, kids who were spanked often were twice as likely as those who weren’t spanked to develop aggressive behaviors such as getting into fights, destroying things or being mean to others.

Earlier research had produced similar results, but most had not taken into account how aggressive kids were to begin with, and other factors could have biased the results.

Although the new study doesn’t prove that corporal punishment causes aggression by itself, it shows that the link remains even after excluding a broad range of possible explanations…

Drug Label Accuracy Getting Lost In Translation

NEW YORK — Computer programs pharmacists rely on to translate prescription labels for non-English speaking customers often produce potentially harmful errors, new research indicates.

Examples include translating “once a day” into “eleven times a day”; replacing “by mouth” with “by the little”; and translating “two times” into “two kiss.” While nearly all of the pharmacies surveyed in the study said pharmacists checked label printouts for accuracy, most of these pharmacists weren’t fluent in Spanish.

The consequences of such errors are “immediately apparent and frightening to any physician,” Dr. Iman Sharif and Julia Tse, who conducted the research, note in the journal Pediatrics. There has been at least one documented case of such consequences, they add; a man who was supposed to take his two blood pressure medications once a day took 11 pills of each instead. (The word “once” in English means “eleven” in Spanish.)…

Your Bionic Brain: The Merging Of Brian And Machine

Flickr/illuminaut – Adapted from the book The Scientific American Brave New Brain.

The six-million dollar man was pure fantasy in the 70s — but largely realistic technology today. And the future of this tech is even wilder: Implantable brain electrodes may be just around the corner.

Futurists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about merging human and machine, especially human brains and computers

. These dreams are slowly becoming reality: The deaf are hearing with bionic “ears,” the blind see with the aid of electrodes, an amputee is moving a prosthetic arm by thought, a man paralyzed with locked-in syndrome is “speaking” through a brain electrode connected to a computerized synthesizer.

One such bionic advance — thought-driven neural implants — could change the lives of millions of people, including the many thousands conscious but now entombed within their own bodies in what’s called locked-in syndrome, and the thousands of wounded warriors returning from battle with missing limbs and devastating brain injuries. And it could open tremendous opportunities for people in the future who would like to take their minds where no man’s body has gone before — into deepest space or the deepest of ocean depths, for example, through the “senses” of a thought-driven robot…

Homeland Security Wants Poison-Sniffing Cell Phones

Your cell phone

might soon become its own canary. The Department of Homeland Security wants to create cell phones that can detect toxic chemicals in the air just as easily as they can receive a call or send a text message.

Regardless of carrier or platform, let’s be real for a second: Your cell phone can do a lot of things. From surfing the Internet, to serving as its own GPS device, to taking pictures and videos, to rocking out, a typical cell phone can really be thought of as the focal point of a number of handheld devices (and their awesome services).

Well, your cell phone might soon become its own canary as well. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security — specifically, its Science and Technology Directorate division — wants to help create 40 prototypes, by the end of this year, of cell phones that can detect toxic chemicals in the air just as easily as they can receive a call or send a text message…

Google Frakenstein: Machines To Choose Your News

(Drudge Report)

GOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive!

News sites should use technology to PREDICT what a user wants to read by what they have already read, Schmidt told the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NEWS EDITORS, where a few humans still remained in the audience.

“We’re all in this together.”

MORE

Schmidt said he doesn’t want ‘to be treated as a stranger’ when reading online, POLITICO reports.

He envisions a future where technology for news editing could help tailor advertisements for individual readers.

And he wants to be challenged through technology that ‘directs readers’ to a story with an ‘opposing’ view.

[An odd suggestion from the CEO of a company long accused of offering little to no conservative-leaning links on its news page, while aggressively promoting left-leaning hubs.]

Schmidt said GOOGLE is working on new ways to push adverts and content for consumers, based on what stories they’ve read.

What stories his machines have selected.

Developing…

Facebook To Blame For Divorce Boom

The dangers of social networking sites for the young are well documented, but increasing numbers of middle-aged users are also having their private lives thrown into turmoil by online activity.

Marriage counselors claim sites like Facebook are contributing to separations and divorce as bored 40 and 50-somethings try to reconnect with childhood sweethearts. British divorce firm Divorce-Online said Facebook was cited in one-fifth of the divorce petitions it processed last year, The Sunday Mail reports….

Facebook Under Privacy Microscope

Regulators globally are grappling with a conundrum: how to contend with the rise of an internet phenomenon that five years ago did not exist?

Facebook, founded in a Harvard dorm room just five years ago, now boasts 400m users and is the world’s largest social networking site.

But its meteoric rise has also brought with it an increase in scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates, who are questioning the direction in which such sites are heading.

Social networking sites by definition have courted controversy over their privacy policies, including Google’s YouTube and Buzz, but it seems that Facebook has been the one to stick its neck out.

In December, it implemented changes that made most of its users’ personal information public by default. Last month, Facebook unveiled plans to share user information automatically with some third-party websites. “Facebook is just stuck under the privacy microscope,” says Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. “There’s almost nothing the company does at this point that doesn’t raise some privacy concerns. That has not escaped the attention of regulators in both Europe and the US.”…