The Good, The Bad & The Unsettling

 The Good

In my youth, Lady Allen of Hurford, a prominent British landscape architect and president of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, built Adventure Playgrounds out of the destruction of World War II.  The playgrounds encouraged kids to take risks and get dirty.  My folks built playgrounds too, and on a US visit they picked up Lady Allen in New York.  She came off the plane carrying a skateboard and proceeded to skate down the terminal walkway.  She was in her 70′s.  A mere decade later, imagination and risk was pushed out of playgrounds in America by insurance companies an d fearful adults.  The work of those like my parents was dismissed as too dangerous.  My new hero is architect David Rockwell, who designs playgrounds to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play. With a focus on loose parts, Imagination Playground offers a changing array of elements that allows children to constantly reconfigure their environment and to design their own course of play. Giant foam blocks, mats, wagons, fabric and crates overflow with creative potential for children to play, dream, build and explore endless possibilities.

 Kids sit in front of televisions and computers thinking they are playing.  As adults, we encourage and let them do this.  Technology controls most of our lives- but we will have failed to produce good minds to design the technology if we do not honor the authentic precepts of play.  Thank you, Imagination Playground.  Let’s get one in the Front Range.

 Mapping out the brain to help computers think like us is becoming a reality.  

From the International Business Times- Using Thought Generated Words to Automatically Search the Web

Have you responded inappropriately to an email too fast and regretted it?

Google tests a hidden ‘instant regrets’ email button.  Thank you Google!

The Bad Use iTunes?  Watch your Paypal and credit card carefully.  Scammers have been racking up unauthorized charges on iTunes accounts, leaving Apple’s customers chagrined. Apple can’t stop ongoing iTunes charge scam  Sexploitation of kids increases on the web.  Feds: Online ‘Sextortion’ Of Teens On The Rise Viruses and malware go where they have an audience such as gaming sites, adult sites, social networking, etc.  We suggest you become a little independent from pop culture and the mainstream.  Do you really need to care about Hollywood?  How Googling Cameron Diaz Can Mess Up Your Computer from the Christian Science Monitor.