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Nearly 80% of children between the ages of 0 and 5 who use the Internet in the United States, do so on at least a weekly basis, according to a report released Monday from education non-profit organizations Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop. The report, which was assembled using data from seven recent studies, indicates that young children are increasingly consuming all types of digital media, in many cases consuming more than one type at once. Television use dwarfs internet use in both the number of children who surf the web and the amount of time they spend on it. The analysis found that during the week, most children spend at least three hours a day watching television, and that television use among preschoolers is the highest it has been in the past eight years. Of the time that children spend on all types of media, television accounts for a whopping 47%. Heavy television viewing may even be partially responsible for the rising number of children who use the Internet. Parents in one study indicated that more than 60% of children under age three watch video online. That percentage decreases as children get older (the report suggests this is because school-age children have less time at home), but even 8- to 18-year-old children reported in another study that they consume about 20% of their video content online, on cellphones, or on other portable devices like iPods. Internet and television use among children has become entwined in other ways as well. A 2010 Nielsen study suggests that 36% of children between the ages of 2 and 11 use both mediums simultaneously. Altogether, children between the ages of 8 and 10 spend about 5.5 hours each day using media - eight hours if you count the additional media consumed while multitasking. The report doesn't attempt to solve the more-than-decade-old debate of whether all of this screen time is good for children. Instead, it preaches balance: "My mother used to say that too much of anything isn't good fo

The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis. Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media. Explore 3,000 hours of international TV News from 20 channels over 7 days, and select analysis by scholars.

"A new study by MIT scientists pinpoints areas of the brain used exclusively for language (PDF), providing a partial answer to a longstanding debate in cognitive science. According to the study, there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language. After having their subjects perform the initial language task, which they call a 'functional localizer,' they had each one do a subset of seven other experiments: one on exact arithmetic, two on working memory, three on cognitive control, and one on music; since these are the functions 'most commonly argued to share neural machinery with language.' The authors say the results don't imply that every cognitive function has its own dedicated piece of cortex; after all, we're able to learn new skills, so there must be some parts of the brain that are both high-level and functionally flexible."

A review of two recent studies (Gallup and Aberdeen Group) summarizes some of the key findings of the value of internal social networks.   18% boost in employee engagement streamlined operations better, faster innovation failing to engage employees costs $300B in wasted productivity

This article summarizes some of the issues around the recent study that possibly finds a link between cell phone use and cancer.  The neat thing about the article is that it provides a tool to look up cell phone models to see how they perform on this rating. 

Doctors can now make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone/Android app with close to the same accuracy as a diagnosis at a medical computer workstation, researchers from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine have shown in a new study. The Resolution MD Mobile app lets physicians view and manipulate remote medical images in high-resolution 3-D on the iPhone or Android phone, allowing for a quick diagnosis for the treatment of stroke, cardiac arrest, or other emergencies. 

Spammers don't fit the life patterns of regular users.  "[Microsoft researchers]  are using studies of legitimate and malicious social networks to spot bogus email accounts that are used to push spam, malware, and otherwise malicious links."

Studies show that younger generations really aren't that different from their older counterparts. Go figure.

Research out of Brigham Young University shows that political entries on Wikipedia are quite accurate and reliable locations to get information. 

Google's fourth and most ambitious attempt at social networking has set Silicon Valley abuzz, with membership soaring past 10 million people in just three weeks. Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, the two executives in charge of Google+, said in an extended interview that they closely studied Google's previous failures with Orkut, Wave and Buzz to find a better approach. They also found a close-knit team of engineers and designers willing to take a risk.

Latest Pew research shows users of social networking sites are, in general, more connected in real life than are non-users.

Combined, the three major blogging platforms -- Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr -- account for 80.5 million unique pairs of eyeballs in October 2011 (Facebook had 139.1 million unique that month.) By the end of 2011, the Nielsen/McKinsey company had tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million in 2006.

Today we are publishing a report of the statistical results from the Panopticlick experiment on web browser fingerprintability. The results show that the overwhelming majority of Internet users could be uniquely fingerprinted and tracked using only the configuration and version information that their browsers make available to websites. These types of system information should be regarded as identifying, in much the same way that cookies, IP addresses, and supercookies are.