Mediaboss Marketing

February 26, 2014

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Despite the availability of DVDs and other media products claiming to help babies learn to read, these goods dont actually instill reading skills in infants, according to new research appearing in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

While we cannot say with full assurance that infants at this age cannot learn printed words, our results make clear they did not learn printed words from the baby media product that was tested, senior author Susan Neuman, a professor researchers at New York Universitys Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, said Tuesday in a statement.

In order to test whether or not these media products could actually help infants develop reading skills, Neuman and colleagues from Lakehead University, the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan examined 117 babies between the ages of nine and 18 months who were randomly placed in treatment or control groups.

Those babies in the treatment group were given a baby media product such as a DVD, a set of word and picture flashcards or a flip book while the children in the control group did not. The treatment group infants used the products daily over a seven-month span as researchers conducted one home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development for both the treatment and control groups.

Neumans team tested the reading skills in the laboratory by having them recognize the names and sounds of letters, as well as their vocabulary, their ability to identify words on sight, and their reading comprehension levels. A mixture of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each developmental stage.

Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases, the university explained.

The results of the research, which included criterion and standardized measures of emergent and early reading skills, found no noticeable difference between those babies who had been exposed to the media-based learning tools and the control group on all but one of the 14 assessments conducted.

The lone exception was the parents belief that the children were learning new words, despite evidence to the contrary. On exit interviews with the parents, Neuman said that moms and dads had great confidence that their children were learning to read and had benefited from the use of such programs. Her teams findings indicate that their faith in those educational DVDs and other vocabulary development tools is misplaced.

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New Study Confirms Instructional Media Can't Teach Babies To Read

A gun control group founded in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is ramping up pressure on social media websites to ban gun sales on their platforms, part of a corporate policy advocacy push that has emerged as the issue of firearms regulation fades in legislatures.

Popular sites like Facebook and Instagram currently permit users to buy and sell weapons through an online marketplace, and the group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, says those policies "make it easy for minors and dangerous people to get guns online, with no questions asked."

Moms Demand Action announced this week they are in formal talks with Facebook, which also owns Instagram, to convince the company to halt gun sales. The talks are the result of a campaign, launched last month, that calls on Facebook to stop facilitating potentially illegal activity and to block easy, unregulated access to dangerous firearms. Other online social platforms, like Craigslist and Google+, prohibit gun sales.

Moms Demand Action's founder, Shannon Watts, said the group recently began conversations with Facebook about how the company can end "easy access" to guns through its website.

"Until they do, they are taking the risk that they are facilitating the illegal sale of guns on their social network. American moms are the number one demographic on Facebook and we don't want guns sold into the dangerous hands on the same site where we post our family photos," said Watts.

A petition to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom asking them to change the policy has drawn nearly 100,000 signatures.

"We've got a tremendous amount of interest in getting Facebook to change their policy," said Deborah Lewis, spokeswoman for the Central Connecticut branch of Mom's Demand Action.

Last year, the bulk of the group's lobbying efforts were legislative-focused, amid fierce gun control debates in statehouses throughout the country and in Congress. Some laws were changed, other efforts faltered, and lawmakers, for the most part, since have moved to other issues. Moms Demand Action, though committed in its push for stricter gun regulations, has turned its focus to achieving gun safety through reformed corporate policies. Last fall, after pressure from gun control advocates, Starbucks CEO and president Howard Schultz reined in a policy allowing people to bring guns into stores, and wrote an open letter asking customers to drop the weapons when they grab a cup of coffee.

Though Schultz described the policy change as a "request and not an outright ban," gun control advocates still claim the victory.

"Starbucks was a big win for us," said Lewis. "We look at gun safety from a few different angles we look at it legislatively, but it's many-pronged."

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Gun Control Group Wants Sales On Social Media Stopped

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By: EcoCollision

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Army Builds Fake City to Practice Taking on U.S. Citizens - Video

(ThinkStock) After much criticism from conservative quarters, the Federal Communications Commission has... A key advocate of the project to assess whether news organizations are meeting government-defined... Many liberals seemingly attempt to prevent criticism by restricting speech. (Thinkstock) View 5 More Photos

Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission say they have absolutely no plans to censor the press.

"The commission has no intention of regulating political or other speech of journalists or broadcasters," FCC chairman Tom Wheeler wrote to a group of House Republicans on Feb. 14, after controversy erupted over an FCC project to question journalists to determine whether their articles, commentaries, and newscasts meet government-determined "critical information needs."

Likewise, FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a key backer of the project, said during her Senate confirmation hearing back in 2009 that the FCC "is not in the business of censoring speech or content on the basis of political views and opinions."

They no doubt believe what they say. So what explains the FCC's -- or at least the Democratic side of the FCC's -- willingness to embark on an effort that many journalists felt infringed on some of the nation's most cherished First Amendment protections?

The answer lies in the firm belief among many on the Left, and that includes some in the FCC, that the media is in dire need of "reform."

Angry and troubled by the continued success of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other conservative programs and personalities, media reformers say the press is under such tight corporate control that "independent" voices have been drowned out and many Americans receive a dangerously one-sided diet of information.

The answer, those reformers believe, is strong government action to create more "diversity" in the media. If more women and minorities, in particular, own and control media outlets, the idea goes, the less influence Limbaugh, Fox, et al will have.

In 2011, Commissioner Clyburn appeared at an event called the National Conference for Media Reform, staged annually by a left-leaning media activist organization called Free Press. From the audience came a question: "I understand the Fairness Doctrine is not coming back, but why has the FCC sat by and allowed angry, hateful, often racist talk show hosts, 95 percent of whom are conservative, to poison the supposedly public airwaves?"

The crowd erupted in applause. Clyburn began her answer by suggesting her heart was with the questioner. "This is when the personal side of Mignon and the professional side of Mignon are at constant war," she said. On the one hand, America has free speech for all, "and when we talk about those freedoms of expression, that sometimes mean expressions which we don't agree with."

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Media 'reform' schemes business as usual for some on FCC

PCs can make great home entertainment systems, at least in theory. But in practice, having to control everything from a mouse (or keyboard) is a major disadvantage.

QRemoteControl can help out by controlling your desktop (PC, Mac or Linux) from a mobile device -- Android, BlackBerry, MeeGo, Symbian or Sailfish -- via Wi-Fi. You can operate a media centre, launch programs, control the mouse, keyboard and more, even if youre in a different room.

Setup is generally very straightforward. We launched the server component on our Windows 8.1 PC (its portable, so no installation required), then installed and ran the Android client. Clicking "Search servers" on our phone ran a quick network scan, listing the PCs IP address, and after clicking this we were connected.

The standard control layout is uninspired, but experiment for a moment and youll soon figure out how everything works. There are cursor keys, an "Enter", backspace and a "Close" button. You can zoom in and out, simulate Alt+Tab, and control media playback in various ways (Play/ Pause, Back, Next, Volume up/ down, Mute, more).

If this isnt enough, your remote control can also act as a touchpad, and a keyboard.

A "User Commands" section provides custom buttons which can be tweaked to launch whatever program or shortcuts you need.

Best of all, there are a host of configuration options. These start at a simple user level, with the ability to set a custom icon for each User Command button, or apply some basic skin tweaks. Youre also able to replace the standard buttons with your preferred keyboard shortcuts. And low-level settings covering network communications, cursor acceleration, scroll speeds and more are very helpful in making sure the program works just as youd like.

We had a few issues with the program. The touchpad would occasionally stop responding; if we took our finger off the screen for a moment, we could put it back and carry on. For some reason, the Alt+Tab button didnt work at all.

QRemoteControlis also easy to set up, simple to use and very configurable, though: if you need a PC remote control then its definitely worth a try.

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Control your desktop from an Android device with QRemoteControl