WebWatch Releases Landmark Study on Childrens' Web SitesPublishers of many major children’s Web sites should do a better job disclosing sales and advertising information to parents, especially as more kids at younger ages go online to play and meet friends, says a study released today by Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Mediatech Foundation. For the study, parents in 10 families used video cameras to keep journals, providing insights into the way children use sites such as Club Penguin, Webkinz, Nick Jr., Barbie.com and others. Footage from those journals, which can be viewed here, illustrates how young children respond to advertising and marketing tactics online. The study, "Like Taking Candy from a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments," used ethnographic methods and focused on young children, ages 2½ to 8. Download a PDF of the study.
anonymous on 08 Nov 09When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. Zaret's main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic "Unchained >Melody" for the 1955 movie "Unchained", later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in "Ghost". Three of the albums (the best three in my opinion) were performed by Tom Glazer, semi-famous 1940s folk musician and somewhat of a lyricist himself (he wrote "On Top of Spaghetti"). The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly. In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents' basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web. They are available at either 32 Kbps (about half a megabyte each) or 160 Kbps (about two megabytes each). The higher-quality MP3 versions were encoded by Ron Hipschman.
