Kids, Mobile Devices and Parent Guilt?

I had a good friend who worked for Edinburgh city council in what I considered at the time a bit a whimsical social workerism. His department was 'play development' which was education and opportunities for developing kids playing. The weight actually on teaching adults how to create a simple environment, encourage kids, vary the content and bring in learning for cognitive and motor functions. This was through structured and unstructured play.

It isnt really laughable at all once you are a parent of this generation, 40 something with 1.9 kids, and sit feeling guilty about the amount of time you allow your kids to use iPads, android nettpads, mobiles and nettflix while you do whatever house work or bbc.com,  facebook and jobbs.net.

Should we feel so guilty about allowing our kids on average maybe two hours on mobile devices per day? Why don't we spend time playing with our kids?

Partly this is a generation inheritance thing, and that is what play-development in Edinb'ra' was trying to break and rebuild. Our parents were kids in the 40s and 50s , mine actually earlier again! They had a very traditional set of life patterns and had not been played with so very much by their hard working fathers and even their home oriented housewife mothers. Kids were left to their own devices and play happened a lot at school or in the summer holidays when kids then had actually free range to wander with fewer cars and no worries about pædofiles on every street corner.

More affluent families had nannies, sometimes playful sometimes tyrants in the post war years. Working class mothers in the 1950s had hard house work to do in the uk, while fathers often worked long hours and my father talked even of working christmas morning and just popping in to see me after mum gave birth.

Back then kids had books for wet winter evenings, listen with mother, scouts and the playpark. Kids have all that now. The point is that kids back then were by in large left to their own devices and given encouragement to read and be active rather than the parents engaging in play very often.

My generation in turn, were then treated the same but by that time first the expansion in childrens tv and then the arrival of the home computer meant that we were the first generation super glued to the flat screen.

However as a child I had a lot of other activity with the cub scouts and with my pals or just the local gathering of kids in the woods or the playparks. I did lack a real sense of structured play, which in fact I beleive to be detrimental to me as a person in terms of being used to going with the flow more than being a team player at work or in sport now.

What i do remember was on the one side being embarressed to have my parents even see most of my playing behaviour. You are in a magical little play act for yourself or with pals, and the fun of fooling and adopting personna and making strange noise, and conducting fantasies along a loose course.

On the other hand i then put a bigger value on times when my parents did play with me or took me out on the boat or for a picnic.

So If my parents had played with me all the time i may have been just as negatively affected by their intrusion, becoming one of those irritating precocious only-child offspring who have little irritating questions or pompous comments on play and dont quite get the point of the free feeling of letting go and being a bit wild and naughty.

For me it is a conscious effort to engage in play and also to get my kids involved in sports. However as a house husband for now, it is getting easier and more natural to throw in half an hour board games or help out at junior gymn' or whatever. Also the wee man gets a very long bedtime story session while his big sister reads with joy on her own accord, after many years of having being read for herself.

So i dont see net-pads as all that negative. In fact there are many positive things , and they are growing up with the technology. In one word to use on this topic, mobile devices with touch screens are interactive.

The amount of time used on them is the issue. Can a parent (their mum) with a candy crush addiction cured only to be replaced by family-farm really comment on mindless game play? Can I complain about social networks for kids, beyond the whole pædo and hacking thing, when i can easily be on facebook oer bloggging for an hour at prime time for joint family activities?

In actual fact i think the real danger area for time misspent on nett-pads is actually not about the parent-child interaction, but a sickness for common play when kids visit each other at home. I cannot remember the last time when i went to collect the 'wee man' and he was not involved with an iPad game , with only one pad between the two. Perhaps worse, an iPad mad family where the two kids then sit and play unconnected games for maybe an hour of a two hour visit.

Teenagers now are into the instant mini high of social gratification on FB and the newer platforms. SMS is dieing ! But with laptops in the class room and mobiles int the playground time is just sucked away into largely unconstructive interaction , "twittering" being an apt name.

There are some arguements for the positive sides of social media for teenagers. Friendships can be sustained when classes are split, people go to college or move away. People learn some social ettiquette and get perhaps more feedback on positive and negative attitudes and opinions. People also know who they have more in common with, and can be more socially included in activities and parties rather than talk of social exclusion, which is a fact of life in what ever social contact for teenagers who have the typical challenges of being a bit different. Indeed gay teenagers, goths, those with acne, those who are a bit childish still etc can reach out to each other and find people in the same situation further a field, helping them know they share problems or just ways-of-being which local school society shuns.

The journalist based trad' media itself is reponsible for the bad press the nett pad and social media youth generation get. Ironic because in order to compete for share of voice they have to publish bluntly negative headlines to catch attention and utilise studies which are loaded to find negativity from outset.

By in large though parents have to set limits on time spent on netpads, and schools have to have rules and also counselling about social media. We have to encourage awareness of a balanced lifestyle and how to use these new platforms responsibly and to positive ends as well as permitting just plane old, time wasting recreation.

Puttin' in the Putin into Crimea...Crime in Crimea or Crying for Crimeans ?

Putin may be an unsavoury character to us in the west> he is after all a KGB shadowmaster, but what is the wests real problem with him effectively annexing Crimea?

The crimea was only given over to Ukraine as some strange post stalin concession in 1954. It remained ethnically Russian with the major black sea naval base there under the USSR. Now there comes a long a Kiev government which immediately tries to ban Russian as an official language , and any other non standard Ukrainian language.

What would the US or Britain, those two well known poorly sanctioned invaders of other countries have done? Fidels son invades Guantanamo? War. Argies Invade Falkands again, War. Porto Rico goes socialist anti america by a democratic vote, now let us call that an insurgency. Belieze and Gibralter?

The precedent is not quite the same as Putins Sileasian style holidays from diplomacy to save ethnic Russians and raise popularity in the great bear vote. However where was any real credence or precedent in the invasion of Iraq? It was an oil-well-grab whereas Crimea is probably going to be a land grab and the destruction of a potentially troubelsome rival black sea fleet.

My point is the allies have all done worse within the last 140 years and within the last decade the insurgencies to Iraq and Afganistan and the continued tacit support for the racist political right in the Holy Land and all their west bank land grabbing have done little for world peace.

Putin is preempting a possible civil disruption crimea vs Kiev, not a civil war, and in many ways he is justified in going in there given the uncertainty of who and howrule from kiev will pan out. If this had been the USA going into a terratory with high allegance to them and many of their citizens,  there would be a big presedential conference with a rough translation of what Putin and his cronies will say over the next few days. Only then it would be right.

WHy No Key Boarded Android Devices ..?

I am not a fan of soft keyboards. Apple have the best out on their products but android leave me reeling in portrait mode.

Hence first I was very pleased with my X 10 min pro from the then Sony/Ericcsson but it is really a kid on android phone in reality. Fantastic for texting and so on , but the keyboard becomes unreliable at high cpu load or memory use or the like.  More useable for long e mails or blogs than my first HTC Desire as a company phone.

A guy at worked turned up with what prove to be the last hard keyboard Android product on the market here period> The rather tasty HTC Desire Z

Any bigger and  it would be a mini lap top or PDA in effect but it is only a bit bigger and heavier than the Desire. The keyboard always works, but the back light has no fix for always on and HTC have chosen not to support such useful upgrades in what they see as a niche, loss making phone no doubt.

Downsides in being discontinued are that the processor and OS are a bit laggy wespecially when exiting apps to go to home screen/ It does the usual dinosaur sub v 2 android call micro black out on incoming calls too.

I have 2.2 and I think that is as far as this phone will go. Maybe there will be an ybuntu for android in future harr harr.

The phone is on the heavy side, kind of nice in my very muscular hands girls, while the screen could be bigger if not for that completely functionless multifunction button. It flashes on incoming calls. It maybe allows you to answer them, otherwise it is a spastic. The keyboard not lighting up in daylight while having quite dark letters designed to shine through those LEDs is another spastic thing.

THe biggest down side is the battery life and we should have guessed that from the availability of a big breeze-block after market battery. The standard 1200 mA is insiuffcient and I hear that allowing the new non memory batteries to fully dishcarge actually erodes the quality of the battery at the matrix to [positive terminal end so I wore mine down to a two hour life time of intense wifi with bluetooth, and even shorter with any calls or low bars to cell sender. I fixed this I thought with a 1500mA Anker battery, Peoples ROC unfortunetly/ This has given better life but with any wifi and bluetooth use on top of calls, it is still pathetic and the worst charged life of any phone i have ever owned.

So what HTC need to do is a version of this phone for their new Desire, their Sensation and their little thingy too. Also a mini pad with a slide and tilt set up like a nano netbook. Sony no longer ericcsson , should get in on this act and stop selling thier volume, low margin, low price efforts they are now punting.

screen keyboards use up space and get all thumbed up , especially in portrait mode where it seems to be a weakness of android to have finger point centering to the right or left of actual.

These are the two companies struggeling most, partly because Samsung does big screen phones better, and partly because they became entrenched in the evenutally low margin business sector. Volume never seemed to come their way with profits to match, while executives cried in their prams for a me-too iPhone. So they need to offer some different products, and hard keyboards integrated to the device are a great way forward.

My Desire is so lovely to type with and use for the screen size that I am loathed to get rid of it. I will uninstall some gubbins soon to see if it goes a tad faster and a tad less thirsty.

Face Book Fatigue Part II

Facebook tired with itself as a serious communications venture, dropped @facebook.com e-mail addresses this week.

I think it is just a sign of fatigue with facebook. It is great, it works, it does what it says on the box, it is full of crap.

We all have folk on ignore. We are all annoyed by people's childrens parties and small accidental comedy episodes which get likes in the 50s or more. We most of all hate glib quotation shares.

The trouble is that we have some difficulty in screening out those trite jpeg messages which talk about what love actually is, or what real men are, or what a sister is, or what the day is in very over simple philosophical terms. Especially when people start sharing them to their other halves' FB homepages then we begin to put them on ignore. Because they are jpegs the text content cannot be blocked out by any algorythm (yet ?)

So we ignore the trite idiots who expose us to this crap. My sister in law is the worst offender, maybe 12 in an average day at one point. When it came to one of her kids birthdays, only six liked out of 300 "friends" . Everyone had her on ignore.

I know too, if I had a bit of a blurbing day then maybe a couple more people fell off my timeline and followed me no more. I think that is a shame. I should have had more shares to relevant groups or screened out or listed in peeps but it wither is fiddly or not possible on FB

FB addressed this with the "importance" algorithm which takes likes and probably rate-of-liking, tags, places, number of comments and some content words from the OP to push the post out to your friends list as being of critical value. Also It seems some very seldom posters get air time. THis helps cut down the spam but kind of messes up my general need for a stream of some attention rather than blushing 10 likes and 10 comments.

It annoys us does it not that some people get instantly dozens of likes and happy comments. Sod that though. They were popular in the first place off-line mostly. It is their real friends lack of picking up the phone or dropping in for a coffee which gives credence, a critical mass to which a little flock of followers like to. Facebook colludes as mentioned. These become big important threads, little jimmy spilling chocolate ice cream in the hotel pool.... a hard day work, wishing it was friday....a wonderful life lifting cabin tour to a luxury mountain resort...

I have so many people on ignore now that I get mostly STV news from the old homeland. If someone likes a post of mine, I usually have to go onto their time line and find something to compliment them on.



The time is ripe for one of the other emerging platforms to offer something new and more controllable. Perhaps Twitter may buy out a smaller player which offers one of the new image-share-reply type set ups. Google plus is spreading but who wants google knowing all about you are serving you spam across its omnipresence?

FB dare not change its little blue magic 2002 look and 2008 live scripting. It cant afford the band width either. However it may as before experiment with something rather more radical than the "time line" replacement to the "wall" of old.

Until that point I judge by this 2014 1st quarter's "likes " on my posts and those of the folk I dont have on ignore or venture on their walls, sorry time line, that in fact facebook fatigue is hitting.

I believe the current 2002 look FB with the current barriers to having sensible, relevant, fun content being served up means that it has reached the end of its product life cycle in western countries and either needs a clever revamp or it will loose out to a superior competitor just as freinds-reunited was killed by FB.

England'snext Nuclear Deterrant, sorry Sabre to Rattle in the Home Counties...

England expects.....to need to replace the Trident ICMB and submarine delivery system in the next 5 to 10 years.

The arguements for a UK contribution to the USAs deterrant as it would be anyway, are laughable and pander to a self image of the Empire circa 1952. However the proposal to invest in Son of Trident is plain ridiculous.

When the UK troops leave Afganistan for good we will be at a cross roads and likely to be moving away from being 'Airstrip one' for a US dominated NATO towards a UN and EU centre of gravity. Finally we may be able to leave the US to make its own mess in the middle east and spend money on poor muslim communities in the UK rather than chasing bogey men in the dusts of the 'stans, or standing with our bayonets pointed at Putin.

Sabres are still in high demand amongst some of the admiralty establishment and in the non twittering class in the Home Counties who see Britain as a major player in the world. A bit like Norwegians, if you are bloody minded enough to think you can punch more than your weight then actually you will by sheer bluff and determination. Trident II, would be an expensive white elephant which would appease strategists who are experts on the cold war and are paranoid about a Russian attack on the UK.
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Why is Trident II a waste of money ?

Firstly it has no real detente element to play. Russia and China are stable enough now for the forseeable lifetime of a new weapon system that it really would be an embarressing sabre to rattle given how much the investment would drain from a strangled defence budget. We are likely to recieve other tasking for our armed forces> even David Cameron is sceptical to the US far right who want to invade Iran vis a vis secure more oil.  We will be in an EU and NATO which will be most interested in defending borders, responding to attacks from rogue states and of cours e doing UN peace keeping duties.

Why is Trident a toothless tiger? because it will never be used and it performs no real detente function against major powers who may believe the UK would be allowed to use it in the abscence of a US lead WWIII. The Argentines knew this as much as Maggie Thatcher in 1982. A "leak" in the late 80s suggested that Polaris was remissioned to Buenos AIres but that leak was probably just Tory propaganda against a Labour movement still hijacked by duffle coat CNDers and Leninist Militants. The legacy of the Cold War, Polaris folloed by Trident,  didn't stop the argies taking the Falklands and it didnt stop the lockerbie Bombing nor any other attack on the UKs interests since the fall of communism.

The alternative delivery system is the far cheaper cruise missile system. In fact the navy had a nuclear delivery capability possible in the torpedo tube launched cruise missiles it introduced in the 1990s. It is a proven technology and there are diifferent ranges it can cope with depending on which system y ou buy, plus the missiles can be repurposed for air drop launch for retasking to a different sphere of influence.

The other "benefit" if you can call that such, is that the smaller U boats can also carry out hunter killer and surveillance operations and that the missile itself can be used
with alternativce payloads such as propoganda leaflets  (seriously, dropping  one of those in the middle of Tehran wouldmake them think)

The trouble with them is that an enemy will not be able to discriminate between a non nuclear tactical explosive and a full on nuclear attack and may choose to take a default stance of counter attacking with nuclear force. Here we are talking for the moment Russia and China. Who own our football clubs and most of our industries.

I counter argue going back to the fact that despite Putin being a bit prickly and China not being a democracy, neither are in the ball game with us for detente any more, not with the UK. Our future forseeable missioning will be against rogue states such as perhaps Iran and any other middle eastern country which turns radical and acts as a centre of terrorism or military aggression against UK interests and allies. These type of targets will be softened up by stealth incursion disabling their ability in radar to detect cruise weapons. We saw this in desert storm where the weapons were used such. Iran is arguably more sophisticated in detection but they as yet cannot launch a nuclear reprisal and if attacked would probably not care too much about what type the 12 incoming missiles from the gulf or the black sea actually are.

As I argue, the theatre of conflict will maybe change to SE Asia again or to outer mongolia for that matter, however, a cruise missile capacity is a good investment in both protecting our assets by nuclear deterrance and in effecting fairly accurate incursions to far flung targets with no casualties on our side.

Another thing too is that such weaponry and submarines can be entirely well catered for in England and Wales, such that a move for Scottish Independence in 2017 would not render the land based facilities at the deep water approaches at Loch Long a liability.

The opt out is to as with polaris, extend the life and utility of the current trident fleet to 2025  and hence three general elections away at least. This leaves us with a rather rusty white elephant who would get in effect a blank check book to patch up and even re/mission to some extent. The uk has a rather awful list of expensive patching ups, probably incluing the Chevroline update for Polaris and definetly the Nimrod surveillance aircraft and the blue streak missile. Like fixing a victorian villa, refurbishment nearly always uncovers greater ills or unforseen building work and then of course there may be a move to further standardise the fleet, which are in effect each different submarines by the time they are finished for various reasons.

30 years ago Cruise missiles were the hot thing, the new way to provoke the Russians.  around the cold war meeting table. They were stealthy, being under radar and low infra red footprint, while  they were long enough range to hit the major USSR targets from , yes you remember it, Greenham Common in the southern UK.

At least with a cruise system you get some utility in minor conflict time and a decent enough capacity to wreck any arab states military machine if committing to this as a major part of the fleet. Also woh betide me if the UK actuall sees sense and dumps an over priced and useless arsenel of US controlled H bombs, you then are not left with a scrapped white elephant.
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What Place the People's World?

The world of people is just a big pile of hypocrisy.

Take the UK: privatisation so good for everyone and so counter inflationary that you now have power companies charging pretty much what they think they can get away with and actively working against comparability in the market price tariffs.

USA: home of democracy, where the wealth built by disowning the native inhabitants and enslaving both Africans and many migrant workers has now turned the nation into an Oligarchy where everything is done to hinder  policy which was brought in democratically. A state which can invent a war to capture oil supply in Iraq but yet is not interesting in organising decent health care for a quarter of it's population. A president cannot be seen to be acting successfully unless it is in the interests of the Oligarch's own egos.

Most of all, Global Capitalism which is now completely reliant on growth in consumer markets and manufacturing capacity on a former communist enemy who still runs much of the country as a command economy and who probably interfere with raw material prices to favour production and their own interests.

House Market Stumbling into a new Era?

Shock horror to a few people we know well, that their houses are not worth squillions over what they paid for them, and worse, for those with interest only payments, the house is now in negative equity!

Is this the start of a new era of falling house prices and property becoming a poor investment?

On the first point, not an era . yet. For now this is a correction as banks just won't lend 100% for first time buyers who present the biggest risk to them in defaulting.

This has a very immediate knock on effect to the market and it works like a steep pyramid at this point thus:

First time buyers tend to be on a metropolitan and suburban basis, youngish people buying a flat. Second homers of the geo-socio-demographic tend to be those who have just become parents.  Here you have the first multiplier- two flats to sell which makes for a large amount of capital paid down or gained over the years - and we are having those kids and those three bedroomed properties later.

In order to move up, they have to sell at a profit and of course actually sell on time to avoid bridging loans and uncertainty. It is this key multiplier which has put the brakes on the housing market and caused many sectors of the market to fall in value for the first time in two decades.

The older key mulitplier of days of yore in the 1970s, 80s and 90s was that when wages go up x% points, mortgage borrowing goes up x% x 3 because we can borrow on three times income. That was trashed about in with on the one side big capital gains and disequity across geographical areas, and then dodgey mortgages on 5 times individual or couple's joint income.

This correction in the market comes as a surprise to many, but we have seen similar  before in the 80s , 90s and around 2000-2003 depending where you live. Those falls were caused in part by over-valuations and overloaning too, but the gap being one step up in the market that suddenly property values were so vastly over geared to annual average incomes that a proportion of the population in the areas affected were either stuck with where they lived, unable to move up, or like me stuck with having to rent and share apartments to be able to save up for a mortgage.

The belief system is still there that housing is a good SHORT term investment amongst the public- you get a capital gain and alter your gearing, and your wages or other income rises allowing you to go on with the rat race until you have an appropriately sized cage to bore everyone to death in.

However it may be the banks and legislators who now actually put water on this belief system, and turn home ownership once again into a longer term investment. Governments in many countries or regions of countries with economic up swings over the last decade, have been involved in freeing up land and allowing for more provision in the market, while unfortunetly the developers understand a lot about gross margin but zero about demographics and have built endless yuppie rabbit hutches across the western world, and to some extent probably in the east. The hang over from this will be that there can be more building once the correction runs its course- this will mean developers are less likely to get rich quick, more run a reasonably profitable business based on hard work and good knowledge of the market socio demographic. Also unemployment in this sector is still rising in many countries because there was a hang over of projects (read rabbit hutches) which institutional investors amongst others were patient enough to run out the finance crisis,-  which suggests something acute rather than what it turned into - a chronic failure in the ideologies of the free market to function without more 'federal'  governance. So there is a scene set to have quite a lot of supply in rabbit hutches, and developers who see them standing empty and families trying to shoe horn themselves in, and then look to actually listening to the market and building to the demographic. Major employers will put pressure on local and national politicians to plan or free up land as the ideological dogma would presuppose. You then have labour available and cheaper than before for a while.

There will be booms and bubbles again, but a lot of people on interest only mortgages are going to be looking in their midterm to the need to pay capital down to avoid negative equity and to increase ROI. ..

so given the two above as "for example" in a scenario build you could then throw bones and tea leaves and say that there will be now a longer term adjustment in the western world, especially in some of the very over valued "provinces" .. I ramble but there will maybe be then a long term correction in enough of the market as to render the property shine into a dull glow and as I say, return home and property to being a long term, responsible and low risk investment instead of a short term, high reward, high risk invesment in enough of the populations to affect this change.