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Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Friday 12 October 2012

The Idiot Box: How TV Is Turning Us All Into Zombies - re-wires your mind and alters your consciousness -

The Idiot Box: How TV Is Turning Us All Into Zombies - re-wires your mind and alters your consciousness - 



TV turns you into a zombie.
While these words are more often than not used as a tiresome metaphor to highlight how much crap we are forced to endure on television today, they do in fact serve as a deadly accurate literal statement.
Two separate studies this month alone have found that excessive amounts of television, even if it is merely on in the background, can detrimentally effect the development of children’s brains, to the point where they struggle to socially engage when they become older.
Add to this the already extensively documented impact that the television has on all of us, the power it has to literally alter our consciousness and shut down critical thinking, and it is no wonder that it was long ago dubbed the idiot box.
As reported by Reuters this month, researchers from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), found that background noise emitted from television is so distracting and mesmerizing to children that it is impacting their ability to interact with other human beings and potentially slowing down cognitive thinking and language development.
The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that children in the US are now exposed to more than five hours a day of television. Matthew Lapierre, who led the study, explained that children who are subjected to the most TV spend less time interacting with other children and parents.
Lapierre also found that younger children are subjected to the most background television.
“This is a clear warning signal to parents that if they are not watching TV, they ought to turn it off,” said Dr. Victor Strasburger, a pediatrician from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque who has previously studied media exposure among children. “[It is also] a reminder that parents should be avoiding screen time in infants under two.” he said.
“It’s confusing for babies who are trying to get their language together to have indistinguishable voices in the background.” Strasburger also noted, telling reporters that when parents bring their children to him, he can tell which toddlers are over exposed to TV.
“The babies that are being read to are just chattering away, and the babies that sit in front of a TV are silent,” he said. “It means their language development is threatened – they may catch up, but it’s a concern.”
In a separate study, doctors at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in London found that children born today will have watched a full year of television by the time they are seven years old. The study also found that on average children now spend more time watching television than they do in school.
Dr Aric Sigman published the study in the Archives Of Disease In Childhood, a medical journey jointly own by the British Medical Journal group.
Sigman noted that such extensive exposure to television can lead to a void when it comes to social relationships, can lead to attention deficit problems, and can promote significant psychological difficulties.
Sigman also noted that over exposure to new technologies such as 3D televisions and consoles could seriously affect the development of depth perception in children.
The study recommends preventing children under three years old from watching television altogether, and says that all children should be limited to less than two hours of TV per day.
“As health risks are reported to occur beyond exposure of two hours of screen time per day, although the average child is exposed to three times this amount, a robust initiative to encourage a reduction in daily recreational screen time could lead to significant improvements in child health and development.” Sigman noted.
In a report issued one year ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out that scores of previous studies have come to the same conclusions; that there is a direct link between increased TV time and developmental delays in children.
In 2010, another study published in Pediatrics, found that during analysis of over 1,000 children between the ages of ten and eleven, those who spend at least two hours a day in front of a television screen are 60 percent more likely to have psychological problems than children who spend less or no time. The study also noted that even children taking part in physical activities but still watching TV are still fifty percent more likely to suffer problems such as hyperactivity, difficulty with peers and friends, poor conduct and antisocial kinds of behavior.
Further studies published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that children exposed to more TV are significantly more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior and perform poorly in school. In addition, the findings noted that children who watch more TV are more likely to eat more junk-food and suffer bullying at the hands of classmates – consequences that have their own brain re-wiring effects.

Read more -
http://www.infowars.com/the-idiot-box-how-tv-is-turning-us-all-into-zombies/

Woman wrangles with phone company over $15-quadrillion phone bill -

Woman wrangles with phone company over $15-quadrillion phone bill - 



A French woman spent hours on the phone last month with telecom customer service reps, trying to convince them her $15-quadrillion phone bill was a mistake.

Solenne San Jose, from Pessac, in the Bordeaux region of France, terminated her contract with Bouygues Telecom in September, reports the French news service Sud Ouest. When she got her bill on Sept. 28 with the cancellation fee, she said she "almost had a heart attack."

She was told 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros — which is about $15 quadrillion, or nearly 6,000 times more than her country's GDP — would automatically be withdrawn from her account.

"It was so many zeroes I couldn't even figure out how much it was," she told the newspaper.

Eventually, Bouygues admitted the amount was a mistake, but not before many frustrating hours of San Jose pleading and arguing with customer service reps on the phone.

"When I explained it was a mistake, they'd say it was all automatically calculated and withdrawals would begin shortly," she said. "The first time I called, I spent at least 45 minutes on the phone with one operator. He replied, 'It's automatic. There's nothing I can do.'"

One operator told her she could pay in instalments — 11,721 million of them.

"How many thousands of generations would it take to pay this bill?" she said.

Finally, they admitted the error. Her actual bill? $149.

Read more - 
http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/2012/10/12/french-woman-wrangles-with-phone-company-over-15-quadrillion-bill

House-size asteroid gives Earth a close shave today -

House-size asteroid gives Earth a close shave today - 



An asteroid the size of a house will buzz Earth today (Oct. 12) but poses no risk of hitting our planet, scientists say.
The asteroid 2012 TC4 will pass Earth at a range of just 59,000 miles (95,000 kilometers) —about one-fourth the distance to the moon — when it makes its closest point today, NASA scientists said. The asteroid was discovered by astronomers on Oct. 4 and is about 56 feet (17 meters) across.
"Small asteroid 2012 TC4 will safely pass Earth Oct 12 at just .25 the distance to our moon's orbit," scientists with NASA's Asteroid Watch program wrote in a Twitter update this week. On average, the moon's orbit is about 238,000 miles (383,000 km).
The asteroid is large enough to be seen by backyard astronomers using a small telescope, the night sky events website Spaceweather.com has reported.
Near-Earth flybys of small asteroids like 2012 TC4 pass inside the orbit of the moon fairly often, Asteroid Watch scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explained.  On Sunday (Oct. 7), the 100-foot-wide (32-meter) asteroid 2012 TV also passed inside the moon's orbit, missing Earth by about 158,000 miles (255,000 kilometers).
NASA scientists and astronomers regularly watch the skies for potentially dangerous asteroids that could pose and impact threat to Earth. In fact, by a fluke of timing, a group of asteroid hunters announced Thursday (Oct. 11) that it is on track for a 2017 launch of a private space telescope dedicated to seeking out potentially dangerous space rocks.
Officials with the B16 Foundation said their plan to launch the Sentinel Space Telescope to scan for near-Earth asteroids has passed a major review milestone. The new space telescope is designed to search for asteroids from an observation spot near the orbit of Venus.
In September 2011, NASA announced that its surveys had found about 90 percent of the largest asteroids that could post a threat – space rocks the size of a mountain or bigger.
Asteroid 2012 TC4 is too small to pose a risk to Earth. Past estimates by astronomers said that an asteroid about 460 feet wide (140 meters) would cause widespread damage on the planet.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2012/10/12/house-size-asteroid-gives-earth-close-shave-today/?test=latestnews