Just joking

Did you know that the ability to understand a joke is one of the signs of being human.

This is why humor, in a way, is a sort of Turing test for humans. One of the surest ways to figure out that someone comes from a totally different background, culture, generation, whatever, is to make a joke … and then realize they’re staring at you with a completely blank expression.

The article talked about the difficulty programmers have making a computer understand humour. One group have developed an AI program that understands knock knock jokes. But, these are the simplest jokes there are. And even that sounded like a mammoth project.

So perhaps to redefine Descartes,

“I laugh, therefore I am human.”

Some scary statistics regarding child safety online

These are statistics compiled by Protectkids.org.They highlight the dangers that our kids face while online.

• By the end of 1998, more than 40 percent of all American homes had computers, and 25 percent had Internet access. This trend is expected to continue. Children and teenagers are one of the fastest growing groups of Internet users. An estimated 10 million kids are online today. By the year 2002, this figure is expected to increase to 45 million, and by 2005 to 77 million.
  Youth Internet Safety Survey
  
• Only 1/3 of the households with Internet access are proactively protecting their children with filtering or blocking software.
  Center for Missing and Exploited Children
  
• 75% of children are willing to share personal information online about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services.
  eMarketer
  
• About 25 percent of the youth who encountered a sexual approach or solicitation told a parent.
  Youth Internet Safety Survery
  
• One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via the Web. Solicitations were defined as requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk, or to give personal sexual information.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• One in 33 youth received an aggressive sexual solicitation in the past year. This means a predator asked a young person to meet somewhere, called a young person on the phone, and/or sent the young person correspondence, money, or gifts through the U.S. Postal Service.
  Youth Internet Safety Survey
  
• 77% of the targets for online preditors were age 14 or older. Another 22% were users ages 10 to 13.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• 75 percent of the solicited youth were not troubled, 10 percent did not use chat rooms and 9 percent did not talk to strangers.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• Only 25% of solicited children were distressed by their encounters and told a parent.
  Crimes Against Children Research Center
  
• Only 17 percent of youth and 11 percent of parents could name a specific authority, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), CyberTipline, or an Internet service provider, to which they could report an Internet crime.
  Youth Internet Safety Survey

These statistics reflect the use of the internet in most developed countries. The increasing use of the internet as a place where young people meet and communicate socially has introduced a range of new opportunities for them to be exploited. Most parents are unaware of the dangers faced by their children online.

What is needed is for parents to provide their children with the resources to be able to guard against any unnecessary danger. Just like we teach our children at a very young age not to cross the street without an adult, then as they get older to look both ways before they cross and then we allow them to venture out on their own as they mature the same applies to web use.

At a very young age it is very important for a parent to be in total control of their children’s online environment. But, as they mature it become more a matter of supervised learning. Children don’t know what they don’t know.. Hopefully by controlling the level of risk and implementing the appropriate safeguards children can use the web safely.

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Hoopaa

Hoopaa (http://www.hoopaa.com) comes from a Polynesian word that means safe or keep secure. The idea of hoopaa is to keep your kids safe while online because you are aware of where they have been and what they are doing. There is a range of programs available to purchase that allow you to keep track of what the kids are up to online.

Hoopaa is free. And it boasts and impressive range of features:

• Continuous monitoring of all web sites visited;
• Enables you to block web sites from any place at any time;
• hoopaa can automatically block web sites according to their category; Sexuality, Games, Hate, Personal, Gambling or Religion. It’s the parents not hoopaa that makes the decision which categories are to be blocked.
• All Internet access from a computer can be blocked during specified periods of the day.
• The ability to provide a screen capture (an image of the page) of each web page visited; very important if you wish to track blog’s that children may access on a frequent basis;
• Tracking and capturing of all MSN Messenger conversations from all computers in your house that hoopaa has been installed;
• Daily email sent to you containing all web sites visited by each user of each computer registered to your hoopaa account and all MSN Messenger conversations;
• You can login to hoopaa at any time to view all tracked information in real-time;
• hoopaa only monitors what you, the Account Administrator authorizes;
• You can cancel the tracking of any specific web site or MSN Messenger account at any time;
• hoopaa can monitor your children’s MSN Messenger conversations even when they are at a friends house – as long as hoopaa has been installed on that computer;
• hoopaa does not share or make available any information that can be tracked back to your email, your computer or MSN Messenger accounts;
• hoopaa is an absolutely 100% free service to all end users;

The main downsides of this program is that it runs best on Internet Explorer a program that I don’t like because of its security issues. And, it only runs on Windows XP. For most users this will be ok for a while but I expect that as more users move to Vista hoopaa will be upgraded to that OS.

I plan to use it on my children’s computer over the next week so I will keep you up to date on how it goes. I also plan to review a couple of the more popular commercial programs over the next few months and we will see how they stack up against this free service. At first glance hoopaa seems to provide most of the resources that you would expect from the commercial software that is available.

“CyberPatrolâ€, NetNanny” and “CyberSitter” are examples of filtering software. http://www.cyberpatrol.com , http://www.netnanny.com and http://www.cybersitter.com

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Create a safe environment for you children

This is a very important aspect of keeping your children safe. Don’t just rely on monitoring software to keep your children safe online. More and more of our lives are going to be spent on the web and we need to make sure that the web world is as safe for our children as the physical environment that they live in.

from PC Magazine 2006

Just like the real world there are lots of hazards that face our children online. But with good management these risks can be minimized.

The first step is to create a safe environment for your children to use the internet. As I have mentioned my children are quite young so I need to recognise that at this stage in their life this is primarily my responsibility. Again life online closely parallels the principles of good parenting in the real world.

Make sure they use the computer in a public area. Don’t allow them to use the internet unless you are prepared to supervise them physically. Most parents wouldn’t send their children to another suburb to use a playground by themselves. The same is true of the internet, don’t let them go to an internet site unless you are aware of what that site contains.

Get familiar with the web yourself. Do a bit of research yourself about what are the best sites for kids and set up the computer so that they have easy access to those sites. Firefox has an excellent system for creating bookmarks in a toolbar near the top of the browser. Use this to provide sites that will keep the children’s interest. We tend to use the same sites over and over. I know that I have my favourites that I use to help me in my work and in creating my blog. This also applies to kids, they will mostly want to use the same sites over and over so make sure that you play a big role in choosing those sites.

Set up your search for safety. There will be times when children will need to go outside their familiar areas. This may be for a school research project or they may just be curious about what else is out there. Google has a number of options that you can choose to create a safer search. To do this in Google go to preferences and then choose safe search filtering. You can then choose the filtering level to stop explicit images and text at the extremely safe level. Google is the search engine of choice for most internet users today.

Educate your children about the web. Communication about what is going on is vital. Make sure you talk to your children about some of the dangers of the web. For example by nature they are trusting souls but make sure that they know not to give out their personal details to anyone. Make them aware of the dangers of opening files that they don’t know anything about. Talk to them about the sites they are visiting and let them know that not all websites are good.
Check your browser history.This is not as effective for older children but most younger children will not be aware of the trail they leave in their browser’s history. Even if you have minimal monitoring software you can keep an eye on where they have been by simply clicking on the browsers history button and having a look at all the sites that have been visited. Get to know where you children go on the web.
Set guidelines for their time on the web. Monitor the amount of time they spend on the web. Just like watching too much TV, too much time on the web is not healthy for a child’s overall development. They need to have time to do other creative things as well.

How to keep your children safe on the internet – Introduction

For many parents this is a big concern. We have friends who have banned their children entirely from the internet. They are not allowed to email, search or even play on designated kid’s sites. This will definitely keep their kids safe from any harm on the web but it certainly create problems for the way that they are able to deal with the modern world.

Keeping your children safe on the internet is not a one step solution. It takes a range of strategies to ensure that they are as safe as they possibly can be online.

“What parents have to realize is that there is no silver bullet,” says Herbert Lin, senior scientist at the National Research Council of the National Academies, where he directed a 2002 study on protecting children from sexual exploitation and online pornography. “Filtering software has certainly gotten better, but do parents rely on it too much? In my opinion, they do. A filter is brittle. Even if it stops 90 percent of the bad stuff, what
do you do about the other 10 percent? You still have to have a thorough educational process.”

I use my computer nearly every day for work. But more and more my daughter was wanting to search for things online for school projects or because she had heard about a particular subject. When I wasn’t busy I would let her use my computer to google the subject that she was interested in. However I could see that this was less than ideal because I wanted to work on my computer and she wanted to explore the web.
Recently we acquired a second computer specifically for the kids. I had a number of reasons for this:

1. It got them off my computer. There is no excuse for any nasty accidents happening to it.
2. It protects me from getting any nasties on my computer. My kids click and click. They don’t always understand what they are clicking on they will just do it so that the computer responds in some way. They know that much. The danger of this approach is that they could just as easily click on something that will introduce something undesirable to my computer.
3. It gives them the freedom to explore when they need it not when I am not busy.
4. It is a desktop PC that is placed in the play area that is overlooked by the kitchen and has a constant stream of traffic past it. It has gotten them out of my office and into the open. Whatever they are doing on the web is easily visible by myself or April.

The trouble with the internet is that it is full of unknowns once your kids are out there. The question that many parents ask is what can I do about this? What do we need to protect against?

There are the obvious and not so obvious things that we all know about like:

• Pornography
• Viruses
• Online child predators
• Dangerous chatrooms
• Stealing personal information
• Trojans
• Spyware
• Malware
• Phishing
• and so on

With my kids out their on the web I felt that I had to do some things to ensure that they were as safe as I could possibly make them without wrapping them up in a protective cocoon that didn’t allow them access to the resources and fun that they could have on the web.

The two main steps that I took were to:

1. Protect them from any nasties – Install some monitoring software
2. Protect the computer from any nasties – install user privileges

How I went about this I will outline in some coming posts. I will also take a look at some of the more popular software programs that are on the market ie. NetNanny and the like and see what you get for your dollar.

I actually installed a program called Naomi that has the following features:

• Heuristic analysis capable of recognizing new material automatically.
• Semantic analysis of web pages contents and analysis of their addresses and links.
• Recognizes all the major languages (10+).
• Recognizes ICRA labelling system.
• Monitoring is not limited to web sites, but covers the whole local internet traffic.
• Works with all service providers and software applications, and does not alter settings.
• Allows blocking of file-sharing applications.
• Password-protected (the password is chosen during the installation).
• Easy to use: does not require configuration.
• Can be used on slow connections (it does not perform any download in background).

And, its completely free. You cant get better value than that.
My kids are quite young and this system works just great I don’t want them to even get a glimpse of any pornography. Naomi does a great job in shutting it down very quickly. What all this means and how this compares to other commercial versions I will outline in the coming posts.

I realise that this is a bit of a diversion from the normal theme of ChrisGribble.com but I really want to be a responsible father and ensure that my children are safe. I am sure that there are plenty of other people who feel the same.

Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up – living with failure

Sometimes I feel like the biggest failure. Thankfully I am not a depressive personality so this usually doesn’t get me down. But, it does affect the way that I see myself. This week I have failed. Stuffed up, mixed things up and generally fallen far short of my own expectations of myself.

“You won’t get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it.” I am not sure where I got this from but it is very true. Whatever we do will never be right the first time, or sometimes the second time or the third time. In these situations ,”Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up“.
If we think we got it right the first time we are probably wrong. I have often fallen for this. I have done something that I have thought was pretty good but hadn’t realised that it still required more work. This is a mistake that we can all fall for, the belief that we have arrived in some way. When we do this we preclude the possibility that there may be more for us to learn. And, there is always more for us to learn. “Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up”.

I was talking to a friend today who told me that the person who said those words suffered from depression. Winston Churchill’s legacy as a great politician was the image of tenacity. He was the true British bulldog who worried away at his task until he got what he wanted.

There will always be things that we will fail at in some way. It’s important to be able to live with that lack of perfection. Learning to live with failure is one of the most important lessons that we will ever learn in life. It is a character lesson that will stand us in good stead to live in this less than perfect world.

Once we learn the lesson of living with failure it frees us to be able to see glimpses of perfection. It opens up possibilities of greater love – because one of its fundamental requirements is the ability to overlook minor irritations. It opens up our personal potential and allows us to generate a positive influence on others around us. It always for greater possibilities for satisfaction in every area of our lives. It releases new opportunities to conquer new frontiers in every area of our lives.

So when things go wrong some of the best advice ever is to, “Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up“.

I found this riff from Seth Godin,

“Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that’s a good thing, even when they fail. It’s frustrating for me to hear, “stick to your blogging,” when people criticize a project created by a blogger–because it’s part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what’s unfolding. I’d rather read a book that’s informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I’d rather read a blog that’s based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger.”

Facing Criticism – Who am I?

Criticism always seems to be unfair. Even constructive criticism my have a barb to it and even though it may be intended for my good there may be a prick as the point is made.

Because I have often held positions of leadership over the past 15 years I have often been the target of criticism. I have seen people want to inflict damage and hurt upon others and myself because of their perception about what I should or shouldn’t have done or what I did or didn’t do.

My conclusion - I will never make everyone happy all of the time. And I will make most people unhappy some of the time.

It is very important for me to know who I am if I want successfully lead, take the initiative and be a positive influence on my world. For some reason there will be people who will want to criticize even my noblest efforts. Why, I really don’t know. I can’t understand such a mentality that seeks to destroy and tear down. But they will are a part of my reality. Therefore to face this I need to have a solid sense of my own reality.

I need to know who I am. Or in the words of someone else, “know thyself.” Otherwise I will wrongly draw my self concept from the criticism that I face.

1. If I know myself I do not immediately need to defend myself against everything that is said against me.
2. If I know myself I can learn to laugh easily at the sillier aspects of the criticism that I face
3. If I know myself  i don’t have to try to change to suit everyone else’s perception of what I should be.

Who am I? I am Chris. I am over 40. Going a bit gray. Father of 4 kids. Husband to April. A bit intense in personality. I have some obsessive traits but I try to control them. A bit useless practically. But someone who cares deeply, tries to be a good friend to others and tries to make a positive contribution to other’s lives.

Thats me. Welcome.

Lose weight in 8 seconds – We’ll see?

Yes it’s time. Time to make a few changes in my life. This year has been a year of changes but this could be one of the more important ones that I make. Like many Australians I have slipped into a fairly sedentary lifestyle. I enjoyed a burst of energy during my mid 30’s that lasted for a few years and slowly I have slipped into a lifestyle of less and less activity.
But I realise that I cannot continue this way. I have always enjoyed bike riding so this one is right up my alley.

A REVOLUTION in weight loss is about to hit Sydney after scientists devised a workout that burns three times the amount of fat.

They found their specific brand of interval training prompts the body to click into a metabolic response that allows more fat to be burned under the skin and within the muscles.

Researchers at the University of NSW and the Garvan Institute studied 45 overweight women over 15 weeks, putting them through a 20 minute cycling regime in which they sprinted on a stationary bike for eight seconds followed by 12 seconds of cycling lightly.

“They lost three times more weight as other women who exercised at a continuous, regular pace for 40 minutes,” UNSW Associate Professor Steve Boutcher said.

I intend to lose about 10 kg all up. Theoretically this should take me about 10 weeks but I will give myself 3 whole months. I don’t intend to blog all the time about it but it is an important part of the development of myself as a person.

A crucial figure is my waist measurement. It is 2 inches above what it should be and at my age this becomes increasingly important. So I need to reduce it.

Lets go!

ABC’s of Fatherhood – O

O is for openness.

I want to be very open with my children. One of the common experiences of children of my generation is that they never really got to know their fathers. That is they knew about them but they never really got to share some of the more intimate aspects of their life.

I try to be very open with my kids. In many ways that’s easy because of my personality. With people that I know and trust I can be very open. I tend to be more reserved with new acquaintances and unfamiliar circumstances.

My children need to see in me the full range of emotions. Not just when I am irritable or enforcing discipline or even frustration because someone has drawn over the covers of our newly covered lounge. They also need to see the other emotions, sadness, disappointment and happiness in a range of situations.

Too often we can be guilty of not having enough time to sit with  our kids and explain in their terms what is really going on. So we end up just having closed relationships that only deal with externals.

The other day my daughter was talking on the phone to a friend. And she told this friend a whopping story because she thought that no one could hear here. But, I did.

That day I took the time to talk to her about why she told the story. I tried to go beyond just dealing with the obvious lie. I had an opportunity to open up to her and say that I love her for who she is not for who she would like to be. I said that she didn’t need to tell stories for people to be her friend and that if they really wanted to be her friend they would like her just the way that she is.

We talked about it. We were open. I was open to her about the fact that she was so very special just the way that she was.

In the busyness of life it can be easy to just deal with problems quickly. Openess required the committment of time and effort into the relationship to ensure that we are able to talk about the stuff that does and doesn’t matter. Because it all matters in some way.

Changing my world – becoming a PPP

Today I experienced the power of somone who was a positive presence person (PPP). PPP(people) are able to bring people to almost immediately into a positive state of mind.

I walked into a corner store to by a can of pepsi. The young person behind the counter was dressed in a singlet and shorts, was covered in tatoos and had a number of piercings on various appendages. My immediate expectation was that I could expect only a very basic level of customer service. And at worst I could experience a certain amount of contempt.

I was wrong. Completely, totally and utterly wrong.

It started when he served the lady in front of me. He was helpful and smiled and wished here a nice day. I found that my expectation of service was beginning to change. But, she was far more attractive than me and I am a not overly attractive middle aged man.

I was wrong.

It was even better than I thought. Somehow this young man made my purchase of a can of pepsi into one the highlights of my morning. It wasn’t just what he said or how he served me. It wasn’t what he did in the end that made a mundane task into something special.

It was his attitude to life that changed everything. He was a prime example of a PPP. He is an influencer, a leader who is able to change his world.

PPP’s do some of the following things regularly:

• They change their world, they are not limited by their present context.
• They change other people’s world – they are a positive influence and are able to change the attitudes of people around them.
• They don’t worry about their present circumstances – they know that they are not the permanent thing in their life. Attitudes remain with us far longer.
• They are not lmited by their present circumstances. Hope is a key element of being a PPP. It is a key component of being a whole person, living without hope is living a half life in which we survive with a part of our humanity missing.

 

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