More miscellaneous details

Tag: children

  • A deadly love affair with a chatbot – Der Spiegel

    In hindsight, one can say that Sewell’s parents tried everything. They spoke with their son. They tried to find out what was bothering him. What he was doing on his phone all those hours in his room. Nothing, Sewell told them. He showed them his Instagram and TikTok accounts. They found hardly any posts from him; he only watched a few videos now and then. They looked at his WhatsApp history but found nothing unsettling – and that in itself was unsettling, given that their son was becoming less and less reachable. They agreed that they would take his cell phone from him at bedtime.

    They had never heard of Character:AI, the app which, with the help of artificial intelligence and information provided by the user, creates digital personalities that speak and write like real people – chatbots, basically. And their son told them nothing of his secret world in which, he believed, a girl named Daenerys Targaryen was waiting for him to share her life with him.

    , , , ,

  • Unauthorised school absence widening ‘disadvantage gap’ in England – The Guardian

    School leaders endorsed the EPI’s analysis. Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “Too often, the burden of ensuring children attend school falls entirely on teachers and leaders, who are then held accountable for absences beyond their control. “Without a broader system of support, it is extremely difficult for schools to drive meaningful change in attendance rates.” Di’Iasio said that “for some families, school seems to have become – at least in part – optional”, and said fines for taking unauthorised termtime holidays were failing to halt that trend. “Far from solving the problem, fines often deepen tensions between schools and parents. Schools, simply enforcing the rules, are left looking like the villains,” Di’Iasio told the ASCL’s annual conference on Saturday.

    , ,

  • ‘Barricade the doors’: Pupil describes school lockdown terror as boy killed – ITV News

    Sixth former Divine said: “I went outside and I saw three year 11s shouting, ‘someone got stabbed, come here’ to a teacher. I didn’t believe it at first so I went outside to see what was going on.” He said he saw a body on the ground. Despite a major emergency services response, the boy died at the scene.”I ran upstairs to the sixth form area and said ‘there’s a lockdown, there’s a lockdown, someone’s got stabbed’,” Divine said. “And then all the teachers started taking people to classrooms. I was really really scared, I didn’t believe it at first, but I saw what I saw… the staff were scared – they didn’t know what to do but then they started saying ‘go into classrooms, lock the doors, shut the blinds, barricade the doors’ because they didn’t know if the person with the knife was on the loose or was trying to get other people as well.” Divine’s brother, Leon, was at home when he was called by his brother. He said: “It doesn’t feel real, it feels like America – but this is Sheffield.”

    , , ,

  • Fears ‘thousands will suffer’ as all Leeds children centres under ‘review’ by cash-strapped council – Leeds Live

    In a cost-cutting initiative by Leeds City Council, the local authority is aiming to save £106.4million in its budget over the 2025/26 financial term in a bid to a support the rising costs of social care services. As part of the iniative, the council is reviewing whether the city’s children’s centres run by schools should instead be operated directly by the local authority. A decision has not yet been made on closures or whether any redundancies will be necessary.

    , , ,

  • From Pong to Pokémon: A history of holiday ‘It’ toys – The New York Times

    1970s: After the initial success of its electronic table-tennis game Pong, the arcade pioneer Atari went big in 1977 with its first major home gaming console, which proved an immediate hit despite its hefty price tag — about $200, or nearly $1,000 in today’s currency. … Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell, with its predictive coding speech synthesizer, gave language learning a talky-robot twist, while “Star Wars” action figures, an early pioneer of the blockbuster movie-to-toy pipeline, flooded the market after the film’s 1977 release.

    , ,

  • Leeds Children’s Hospital Christmas Wish List – Amazon

    If you’d like to buy a gift for a child in Leeds Children’s Hospital this Christmas, simply choose a present from our wish list and it will be delivered straight to the wards. Please make sure you select ‘Lisa Beaumont Children’s Hospital’ as the delivery address at checkout. Thank you!

    , ,

  • ‘You get desensitised to it’: how social media fuels fear of violence – The Guardian

    “Now everyone has seen him running away and his pride is going to make him want to retaliate,” he said. “It will get passed around in group chats and everyone knows that he ran away, so next time he leaves the house he wants to prove himself. That’s what happens. Sometimes the retaliation is filmed.” … “People glamourise them types of things and the smallest thing can be escalated on social media,” he said. “A fight can happen between two people and they can squash it [reach a truce], but because the video’s out there on social media and it looks from a different perspective like one is losing, pride is going to be hurt so you might go out there and get some sort of revenge and let people know, you’re not going to mess with me.”

    , , ,

  • Meta Horizon Worlds has been taken over by children – WIRED

    This cultural shift is only growing more acute as the prices of VR headsets continue to drop, making them more accessible to more families, and as the big platforms build out new content tiers to appeal to younger and younger audiences. Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says that for a long time, people have worried about how VR affects kids. Usually, they’re worried about the prospect of adults harassing kids. That is a valid concern, of course, and still a very real problem. But in some ways, that dynamic has flipped.
    children metaverse video-games vr

    , , ,

  • Gamer role introduced in children’s hospital – BBC News

    A Scottish children’s hospital charity has introduced a gamer in residence for young patients in Glasgow. The new job involves visiting children to play video games with them, preventing boredom and providing some light relief. Steven Mair, who was appointed by the Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity, says gaming has already provided huge benefits to the patients. He said that playing Mario Kart has improved the mobility of a patient’s hand and that it was also a useful tool in distracting the children during medical procedures. “One of my first sessions here at the hospital was a patient who was on a plasma exchange and that can be quite intrusive”, he added. “When I went in to play with that patient, it kept him distracted throughout the whole procedure.” Josephine, the mum of eight-year-old Laura Jayne, said her daughter had been in hospital for six months. She said: “It’s been really good just to pass the time. Sometimes it helps her to interact with the gamers. She really gets a lot out of it.”

    , , , ,

Tags

AI Amazon Apple archives art book reviews books chatbots children China classical commerce computing copyright culture data design Donald Trump economics education Elon Musk environment ethics fakes future gadgets galleries Google health history history of technology humour illustration internet jobs journalism Leeds LLM mental health metaverse mobile phones movies music NASA painting photography politics productivity psychology robots satire schools science sculpture search Second Life social media society software space standards technology television time truth video video games VR watches writing

Archives