Children should be kept away from computer games until they are at least seven.

Children under seven should be banned from playing computer games because it could damage their attention span, it has been claimed.
The rapid pace of computer games is only stimulating basic “fight or flight“ sections of the brain rather than parts responsible for higher reasoning, educational psychologist claims.
As a result, she believes children’s brains are now developing differently and that games can be linked to a rise in the diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder in children, reported Telegraph.co.uk.
Jane Healy spoke of her fears at a seminar discussing the effect of technology on children held at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
She said most children should be kept away from computer games until they are at least seven and their brains have had time to develop.
“If you watch kids on a computer, most of them are just hitting keys or moving the mouse as fast as they can. It really reminds me of rats running in a maze,“ she said.
Researchers from the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre, which aims to investigate links between new technology and learning, said the average age that children in the United States had begun to use electronic gadgets has come down from just over eight to just over six and a half since 2005.
The researchers examined more than 300 products, including computer games, toys, virtual games for children and learning programs to be run on home computers.
They found that too many left children sitting isolated in front of a screen. Other products made unsubstantiated claims about their educational benefits.
A survey for the computer giant Microsoft last month found more than three quarters of parents in the UK were concerned about the content in computer games, but most thought they had little influence or say over what kind of games their children played.

The building of a new school for more than 2,000 children is bringing fresh hope to Nan Gab, a remote town in western Afghanistan blighted by corruption and the drugs trade.
Nan Gab is in Farah province, a huge region that borders Iran and is the country’s fourth-biggest opium-producing province, wrote AFP.
The pressure is on Afghanistan to develop this resource-poor, sparsely-populated province, whose fewer than 400,000 inhabitants are caught in a vice between crime, insurgency and corruption.
Nan Gab’s 1.2-million-dollar new “Center for Excellence“ will provide a technical and religious education to the young people of this desolate area, some 800 kilometers (500 miles) from Kabul.
Local sensitivities dictate religion must be part of children’s education.
The school is just one of a number of projects worth a total of six million dollars being run by the Farah Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).
Comprising small joint civilian-military teams, PRTs are helping promote security and reconstruction across the country.
With unemployment running at 85 percent, the provincial deputy governor Yunus Khan Rasouly says locals have little choice but to turn to crime.
“Unemployment is the most sickening part of the region, the most important part of one’s life... Crime pays, even if it is risky.“
Neither are local literacy rates encouraging, hovering around the national average, with 71 percent of the population--and 86 percent of women--unable to read, according to the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF.
UN figures show that in 2006, opium cultivation grew by 93 percent in Farah, which has a greater problem with crime than with Taliban insurgents.

South Koreans have taken to disciplining their children by sending them to boot camp.
During the experience youngsters feel first hand pain and freezing temperatures endured by marines.
The parents believe the process will instill morals in the teens and deter them from bad behavior in the future, reported Channel4.com.
Around 300 students aged from 12 upwards are admitted at one time and are expected to wear full military uniform.
As part of their training, the children take part in the amphibious landing and grueling team workouts.
The camp’s training officer says the concept is to train the group physically and spiritually and teach them to have the right ambitions in life.
The South Korean Marine Corps has been running camps since 1997 and so far has trained more than 26,000 individuals.

The One Laptop per Child Foundation was started three years ago to sell millions of child-friendly laptops to governments in poor countries for $100 apiece.

Intel’s pullout from the non-profit’s plan may actually help the developing world.
Intel Corp. didn’t win itself any PR points when it pulled out of a deal to spread technology and education to some of the world’s poorest children-- especially when news emerged last week that it had apparently stabbed its nonprofit partner in the back. Yet Intel’s abrupt split with the One Laptop per Child venture may signal a surprisingly beneficial trend for the developing world.
The One Laptop per Child Foundation was started three years ago by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, whose radical goal was to sell millions of child-friendly laptops to governments in poor countries for $100 apiece. That may never happen; it turned out to be impossible to build a decent machine for so little, and the organization’s XO laptop sells for nearly twice Negroponte’s ambitious price point.
It’s still a phenomenal bargain, prompting Peru to buy more than 270,000 XOs for distribution to public schools. Peruvian children who can’t afford books are now surfing the Internet, reading digital texts and taking and sending digital photos, reported Latimes.com.
Intel had agreed to contribute millions to One Laptop per Child as well as to create a microprocessor to use in future generations of the XO (currently they run on chips from competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc.).
When it ended the relationship last week, a furious Negroponte went to the media with tales of double dealing. Intel had for months been urging potential XO customers not to buy the device, he said, because it’s launching a competing low-price laptop for the developing world, called the Classmate PC.
The good news about this apparent betrayal is that Intel sees a market in poor countries that have long been ignored by the tech industry.
It isn’t the only one. Inexpensive laptops, intended for both poor countries and rich ones, are suddenly hot items, with an under-$300 model from the Taiwanese company Asus already available and another on the way from Menlo Park-based Zonbu; top PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are also said to be eyeing the market. With so many players entering the field, further innovation and even lower prices are almost sure to follow.
This commercialization of charity is reminiscent of the market success of microlending.
Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, popularized the concept of “social business,“ in which commercial operations aim to achieve a social good while also turning a modest profit. Yunus was largely ignored when he began providing tiny loans to the desperately poor in Bangladesh in the late 1970s, but now microlending is a hot banking segment that has attracted giants such as Citigroup Inc. and is growing fast; there was an estimated $17 billion in outstanding microloans in 2006, according to McKinsey & Co.
Such free-market development could potentially play a greater role in reducing world poverty than the billions that governments spend yearly on foreign aid. Yet it takes visionaries like Yunus and Negroponte to demonstrate what should be obvious to corporate CEOs: There’s money to be made in the forgotten pockets of the planet.

A little boy at a commemoration ceremony held to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein (AS), Third Imam of the infallible Household of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

Young Japanese people are evolving a new lifestyle for the 21st century based on the cell phones that few are now able to live without.
While about one-third of Japanese primary school students aged 7-12 years old use cell phones, by the time they get to high school that figure has shot up to 96 percent, according to a government survey released last month.
They are using their phones to read books, listen to music, chat with friends and surf the Internet--an average of 124 minutes a day for high school girls and 92 minutes for boys, AFP reported.
While the wired world they now inhabit holds enormous advantages for learning and communicating, it also brings a downside, say experts who point to a rise in cyber bullying and a growing inability among teenagers to deal with other people face to face.
“Kids say what’s most important to them, next to their own lives, is their cell phone,“ said Masashi Yasukawa, head of the private National Web Counseling Council.
“They are moving their thumbs while eating or watching television,“ he said.
The passion in 20-year-old Ayumi Chiba’s voice backs up this assertion.
“My life is impossible without it,“ she says of her cell phone. “I used to pretend I was sick and leave school early when I forgot to take it with me.“
Hideki Nakagawa, a sociology professor at Nihon University in Tokyo, said cell phones have become “an obsession“ for youngsters.
“They feel insecure without cell phones, just the way sales people do without their name cards,“ he said.
As the multi-faceted cell phone takes center stage in teen life, it plays a number of roles--including a weapon that children can wield against each other with no thought for the consequences.
As they reveal personal information about themselves, children can become prey for fraudsters and pedophiles, as only about one percent have blocks on potentially harmful material.
Education professor Tetsuro Saito said a survey of 1,600 middle school students aged around 14 found about 60 percent carried cell phones and nearly half used them to send 20 or more emails a day.
Most middle school cell phone users rarely used their phone to talk, the survey found.
Saito, of Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University near Tokyo, said children seemed to want the security of communicating with someone, without the bother of dealing with a real person.
Saito’s survey found that students can also use their cell phones as an emotional crutch, and the more problems they have at home, the more dependent they seem to become on their phones.

Voting age could be lowered to 16 to encourage young people to get involved in politics, Harriet Harman has suggested.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the deputy leader of the Labor Party and leader of the House of Commons, warned that drastic action was needed to tackle a crisis in Britain’s democracy caused by low turnout among younger voters.
“My concern is that there’s a generation of young people who are never going to get into the voting habit,“ she said.
She added, “We’ve got citizenship classes going on in schools... If people come straight out of the citizenship class into the polling station then there’s continuity and that might be an opportunity for them to get the habit of voting.“
Harman, who is one of the cabinet ministers responsible for constitutional reform, gives the clearest sign yet that the government is seriously considering allowing 16-year-olds to vote.
“There’s a democratic imperative to increase turnout because democracy lacks legitimacy if there’s a dwindling number of people participating in it,“ she said.

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