Teenagers who play violent computer games for extended periods tend to be more aggressive.

In view of the rapid growth in computer sciences, the computer game industry has become a powerful force in modern lives.
Ever-improving technology provides players with better graphics that give a more ’realistic’ virtual playing experience. The interactive quality of computer games allows players to become active participants in games. They benefit from engaging in exciting acts and imitate these games in reality. What has added to the popularity of the games is that they are being offered at low prices.
However, similar to other innovations, this one brings about both positive and negative impacts.
Games containing minimal violence have following positive results:
-Educational games encourage children to learn while having fun.
-Develop their creativity and imagination.
-Improve their cognitive skills and manual dexterity.
-Are sources of entertainment for children.
Chronic players exhibit following physical maladies:
-Visual complications arising from regular exposure to the monitor.
-Spinal and skeletal complications as well as cervical and shoulder rigidity.
-Skin complications arising from constant exposure to radiation.
-Nausea and dizziness particularly in children with a past history for epilepsy.
Teenagers who play violent computer games for extended periods show the following behaviors:
1. Tend to be more aggressive.
2. Are unable to establish proper social ties.
3. May become isolated from the rest of the family.
4. See a decline in school achievements. They devote all their energy to the task and even wake up early in the morning to save time to play more.
Suggestions for decreasing the negative impact of computer games:
-Encourage children to play games that develop creativity.
-Spend more time with your child.
-Take them to parks, mountains and sport clubs.
-Set intervals between every time the child plays.
-Adjust the desk and the chair according to the child’s body.
-Inform the child of the negative effects of computer games.

Quality of education in the Arab world is falling behind other regions and needs urgent reform if it is to tackle unemployment, the World Bank has said.
In a report, bank officials said Arab states had to make improving education their top priority, because it went hand-in-hand with economic development, BBC reported.
Djibouti, Yemen, Iraq and Morocco were ranked the worst educational reformers.
In its report, the World Bank issued a stark warning about the need for better education in the Arab world.
It said that although education was becoming more accessible and the gender gap was being reduced, the region had not witnessed the positive changes seen in Asia and Latin America, particularly in literacy rates and enrolments in secondary schools and universities.
A senior World Bank official, Marwan Muasher said that educational reform had to take top priority if the region’s youth were to be better equipped in a fast-changing world and high unemployment combated.
“The time has come for countries to focus their energies on the quality of education and making sure that students are equipped with what they need for the labor market now--the ability to solve problems, critical thinking, innovation, and teacher retraining,“ he said.
The report said unemployment in the Arab world averaged 14 percent, which is higher than other areas in the world, except Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Palestinian territories coming highest with nearly 26 percent.
Muasher said educational reform went hand in hand with economic development, especially given the region’s extremely high youth population.
“It’s a very youthful region--60 percent of the region’s population is under 30 years of age--and close to 100m new jobs will need to be created over the next 10 to 15 years in the Arab world,“ he explained.
“If we are to create such jobs, then we have to start with education.“
The report concluded that Jordan and Kuwait were the top educational reformers in the region, while Djibouti, Yemen, Iraq and Morocco ranked lowest in terms of access, efficiency and quality of education.

Only 20 percent of the babies with hearing problems return for specialized care within their first six months of life in the US.

A groundbreaking study reports that most very low birth-weight babies born to low-income women failed to get critical follow-up care within their first two years of life in the US.
The study illustrates how these premature infants, who are vulnerable to vision, hearing and speech impairments, are falling through the cracks of the US health-care system, the researchers said, reported HealthDay News.
Only 20 percent of the babies with hearing problems returned for specialized care within their first six months of life, while fewer than one in four underwent recommended vision tests between 1 and 2 years of age.
On average, it costs $250,000 to treat an extremely premature baby in the hospital, said study author Dr. C. Jason Wang, an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health at Boston University’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health. “When they go home, the least we could do is make sure they can see and they can hear, to make sure they can be successful.“
At issue are babies born at less than 3.3 pounds, typically because they are extremely premature.
According to Wang, babies can now survive being born as early as after six months of gestation, although the infants often suffer from a variety of serious health problems.
“If they’re earlier, their lungs aren’t really developed, so they will have trouble breathing, taking in oxygen, and a lot of them will develop something called chronic lung disease,“ he said. “And there will be trouble in the brain because they don’t get enough oxygen to the brain. If it’s severe, that could have some consequences later on in terms of cognitive and other functions.“
Wang and his colleagues chose to look at babies from poor families on Medicaid in South Carolina because the state has especially good records. Also, Wang said, poor and black women are prone to having very low-birth-weight babies.
The researchers reviewed the medical records of 2,182 very low-birth-weight children born between 1996 and 1998.
Among those with hearing loss, just 20 percent received hearing “rehabilitation“ by the time they were 6 months old, as guidelines recommend. And only 23 percent received eye exams between 1 and 2 years of age, the study found.
“People have suspected for a long time that very low-birth-weight infants weren’t getting the care that they need,“ Wang said. He added, “We show for the first time that there’s a significant gap in providing needed services.“
The findings seemed valid to Dr. Maureen Hack, a professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, who believes the health-care system’s lack of organization is to blame.
Another study in the same issue of Pediatrics found other signs of disparities in health care based on race. Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reported that children in five minority groups were less likely than whites to have recently visited a doctor or been given medical prescriptions.

Children lacking enough shut-eye face a greater risk of becoming obese than kids who get a good night’s sleep, according to a study.
Each extra hour of sleep cuts a child’s risk of becoming overweight or obese by nine percent, according to an analysis of epidiomogical studies by researchers from the US Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
By contrast, children who got the least sleep had a 92 percent higher change of being overweight or obese than children who slept enough, said the study published in the journal Obesity, reported AFP.
“Our analysis of the data shows a clear association between sleep duration and the risk for overweight or obesity in children. The risk declined with more sleep,“ said Youfa Wang, a senior author of the study.
“Desirable sleep behavior may be an important low cost means for preventing childhood obesity and should be considered in future intervention studies,“ Wang said in a news release.
“Our findings may also have important implications in societies where children do not have adequate sleep due to the pressure for academic excellence and where the prevalence of obesity is rising, such as in many East Asian countries.“
The researchers reviewed 17 published studies on sleep duration and childhood obesity.
Some research recommends that children under five years old sleep 11 hours or more a day, while children age five to 10 should get 10 or more hours of sleep, and children older than 10 should sleep at least nine hours.

Iranian children gather in front of the United Nations office in Tehran in support of Palestinian children on Jan. 29.

Bullied children are known to be more likely to have anxiety and depression.

Being bullied can cause children to develop depression and anxiety, a new study says. Among identical twin pairs in which one experienced bullying between the ages of 7 and 9 and the other did not, the bullied twin was significantly more likely to have symptoms of internalizing problems at age 10, Dr. Louise Arsenault of King’s College, London, and her colleagues found.
Internalizing problems are psychological problems in which negativity is directed inward toward the self, such as depression, as opposed to outwardly, such as conduct disorder.
This research “really supports the assumption or the belief that being bullied is bad for children’s health,“ Arsenault told Reuters Health. And the fact that children were having these symptoms, which include frequent crying, fear of being alone, and stomach aches--at such a young age strongly suggests that they need help, she added.
Bullied children are known to be more likely to have anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide, as well as to experience social isolation, Arsenault and her team note in their report. But the question of whether bullying itself is the cause of these mental health problems remains open. It’s possible, the researchers explain, that bullying and mental health problems stem from the same risk factors, such as living in a poor neighborhood or parental neglect, or even that a child with mental health problems is more likely to draw bullies’ attention.

More than six million Chinese have received college-level education over the past three decades through distance education programs on television, radio and the Internet.
Another 40 million have received training via the country’s radio and television colleges, according to sources from a distance education symposium held recently in Beijing, Xinhuna reported.
Since 1978, the Central Radio and Television University and 44 provincial radio and TV colleges have been built. It was in that year China first launched distance learning to provide education opportunities for those who can’t go to universities.
Such students, those who failed the national entrance exams to universities, could get access to courses broadcast through television and radio nationwide.

The Vietnamese government has approved a program totaling 25.2 trillion Vietnamese dong (VND) (nearly $1.6 billion) to build more permanent schools and boarding rooms for teachers nationwide from now until 2012.
All temporary classrooms, including thatched-roofed and dilapidated ones, will be replaced by concrete structures. There will be 141,300 new concrete classrooms for kindergarten to high school levels.
This will eliminate the need for three-shift classrooms by 2012, reported Xinhua.
Also under the program, there will be boarding rooms with a total area of 1.6 million square meters for teachers in remote and rural areas.
The program will be funded by the state budget and support from local and foreign donors. The state hopes two trillion VND ($125 million) will come from donations by companies and organizations at home and abroad.