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The availability of very early indicators of performance puts a whole new spin on the Matthew effect: teachers can use these indicators to address trouble spots before the student or employee ever has a chance to fall seriously behind.

the evaluation specialist West pointed out that his formula only spots “signs of students who drop out—it doesn’t mean they are dropouts.” But the research is clear that we also shouldn’t wait to help them avoid that fate.

Kids don’t want to ask a monkey character in a game what the weather will be on Tuesday. They want to sing him a song or ask him about life in the zoo.

But as he points out, the way today’s children use technology will likely dictate the tech landscape for decades to come. If you can get kids hooked on speech technology young, they’ll stay with it forever.

“The way kids talk and communicate is very different from how adults do, both in terms of how they use language and the fundamental frequencies that come out of their throats,

While ToyTalk uses existing third party technology for its raw speech recognition, it works with those partners to develop better recognition models using ToyTalk’s own data. Now, ToyTalk has a trove of some 20 million children’s utterances, which Jacob believes is the largest database of kids conversation in the world

“Virtual assistants are awesome when they can answer every question. In our case, it’s the opposite,” Jacob says. “I have to know a lot of things that I’m not able to answer, and redirect the conversation to something that is within character.”

And Jacob says some toy companies are already testing PullString to power apps based on existing characters.

this technology could give kids a whole new way to play that falls somewhere in between the playground and the imaginary friend. “I think at some deep level if we succeed, we’ll inspire the imagination of kids to talk about things they might not otherwise talk about,”

even in the absence of information about the character’s past.

The age of 8 has been identified as a watershed at which children become measurably more likely to act out aggressions after watching violent behavior on television

. The children recognize that in the real world it’s impossible to fly without a plane or to be born with skin that deflects bullets. 

By age 10 or 11, children will make fairly complex judgments about characters’ motivations and they regularly distinguish between justified and unjustified violence

One study also found that if you ask children between the ages of eight and ten who they most want to be like, they are far more likely to cite superhero type characters than everyday folks like their parents.

but conflict play continues to provide a unique transitional space for children to explore and express their own tensions

We also aim to develop conflict play scenarios where children can experience the benefits of cooperation. With the fate of the world (or even the entire universe) hanging in the balance, children must learn how to build teams, trust in others and work together towards common goals. In those pretend situations, developing social skills may be the only way to overcome the lords of evil!

Other common signs include neglecting spending time with family and friends, changes in sleep patterns (artificial light from phones damage sleep hormone signals), foregoing healthy activities such as walking and socializing, difficulties relating to other kids and people, stress on fingers and the body and behavioral issues such as delinquency.

digital detox specialist

All else being equal, supervisors gave employees with late start times lower performance ratings, as well as lower "conscientiousness" ratings, than workers who arrived early

The results of the other experiments came to the controversial conclusion that those with wealthier backgrounds were more likely to cut off other drivers, lie in negotiating, or cheat.

How do we get the right message to the right user to maximize the value to the consumer? In doing so, we can minimize waste and theoretically deliver a much more accurate and compelling experience

The Internet of Things phenomenon is in the early days of posing the question: Can we, or should we, bring the intelligence and efficiency of the Internet to everyday objects?

It is addictive

children grow up not caring about the natural world.

The list of physical and social maladies associated with sedentary behavior—an almost inevitable corollary of time spent on electronic devices

American Academy of Pediatrics used to recommend that parents limit screen time to less than two hours a day for children over the age of two

digital reality as the new normal

Make shutting down the devices a family thing.

We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.

So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain

married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married

As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.

Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all

The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.

The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.

Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*

And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.

This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,

Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.

What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.