Mediaboss Marketing

MOSCOW, April 10. /TASS/. The proposals to prohibit children under the age of 14 to use social networking websites and introduce registration in social networks on the basis of one's passport information look unrealistic, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday commenting on a bill on the issue submitted to Russias State Duma (lower house of parliament).

"We have not seen the essence of this bill. We only read in the media the provisions it could possibly contain, something we are not sure about," the Kremlin said. "The provisions that are discussed in the media are, of course, unrealistic, so it is hardly necessary to have any stance on the issue," Peskov underscored.

"Member of Russias State Duma, Vitaly Milonov (the United Russia political party), earlier submitted to the lower house of the Russian parliament a bill on the legal regulation of social networks, which envisages, in particular, a ban on the use of social networking websites for children under the age of 14. Those who would like to register in social networks will also be required to provide their passport information.

In other media

Read more:
Kremlin calls ban on use of social networks for children 'unrealistic' - TASS

Alternative Press

Mastodon the band have fun trolling Mastodon the... Alternative Press With roughly only a quarter of a million words in the English language, an overlap is bound to happen. Which was the case with the band Mastodon and a new social networking site (it's like an anti-Twitter) by the same name. Read more: Mastodon's Brent ...

Go here to read the rest:
Mastodon the band have fun trolling Mastodon the... - Alternative Press

Researchers have found that the more time children spend chatting online, the less happy they feel about their life overall. Photograph: Mark Mawson/Getty Images

Perhaps Facebook should carry a health warning. A study has revealed that the children who spend more time on online social networks feel less happy in almost all aspects of their lives.

The research by a team of economists at the University of Sheffield, to be presented at this weeks Royal Economic Society annual conference in Bristol, shows that the more time children spend chatting on Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram, the less happy they feel about their school work, the school they attend, their appearance, their family and their life overall. However, they do feel happier about their friendships.

Economists found that spending just one hour a day on social networks reduces the probability of a child being completely happy with his or her life overall by around 14%. They found that this was three times as high as the estimated adverse effect on wellbeing of being in a single-parent household and larger than the effect of playing truant.

The findings are likely to stoke the debate about the upsides and downsides of social media.

More than 90% of 16- to 24-year-olds use online social networks and while most sites stipulate a minimum user age of 13, few apply any checks. A BBC survey found that more than three-quarters of 10- to 12-year-olds have social media accounts. A report by the media watchdog Ofcom found that more than half of children aged as young as three and four use a tablet while one in seven has their own device.

The amount of time that children between eight and 11 and those aged 12-15 spend online has more than doubled in a decade, the Ofcom report found. Teenagers now spend nearly three and a half more hours a week online than they do watching television.

Social networking has altered childhood dramatically in the past decade and is becoming a concern for politicians and organisations responsible for safeguarding children. The NSPCC cited social media as a major cause of the dramatic increase in the numbers of children admitted to hospital after self-harming. The new research, which asked 4,000 10- to 15-year-olds to rate from one to seven how happy they were with different aspects of their lives, reveals that girls are more adversely affected than boys, as online social networking makes them feel less happy about specific areas of their life, in particular about their appearance and the school they attend. Boys were less happy with their friendships.

The research suggests that going online makes children more likely to make negative social comparisons with others.

The problem with making comparisons in online media is that people tend to portray themselves in an idealised state, said Philip Powell, one of the economists who conducted the research. There is evidence that people think other people are happier than them after interacting with them online because we tend to post videos and chat that presents this positive image.

Powell and his team split the data so that they could compare the effects of going online on children with low and high self-esteem. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they found the effects were worse for those who lacked confidence.

Powell said cyberbullying could be another explanation for links between unhappiness and childrens use of social media. Theres evidence the longer young people spend online the more likely they are to be victims of bullying, he said.

However, the economists were surprised to find nothing to support the popular theory that time spent on social networks had an adverse effect on children because it left them less time to do other, potentially more rewarding, activities.

Our findings show that social media use can be detrimental on average to young people and this is consistent with a number of findings in previous studies, Powell said. We cant say any social media is bad but we can say that the more social media children use, the higher the likelihood that they will be dissatisfied with different domains of their life and their life overall.

Go here to see the original:
Revealed: the more time that children chat on social media, the less ... - The Guardian

April 7, 2017 The researchers conclude that there is significant potential for social media monitoring to be included in mainstream disease surveillance and response systems. Credit: DENYS Rudyi / 123rf

That social networking sites are a pervasive force won't come as a surprise to the billions of users worldwide. But how effective are they when it comes to informing the public health response to disease outbreaks? To answer this question and provide clear, quantitative data on how social media supports disease monitoring and response, a joint study between the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Institute of High Performance Computing and Singapore's Ministry of Health examined the 2013 avian flu outbreak in China.

Avian influenza A (H7N9) is a severe viral infection characterized by pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. China announced its first three human cases in March 2013. International concern about the impact of this infection on global health and security grew quickly. Obtaining documented information on cases is key to limiting disease spread. To assess the efficacy and accuracy of social media in reporting incidents, researchers compared the timing of reporting new cases by means of conventional news agencies, public health agency reports (like the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China and the World Health Organization), and posts from Sina Weibo, a popular social networking site with more than 500 million registered users at the time of the outbreak.

Their results illustrate that Weibo was significantly faster in reporting new cases of infection than conventional reporting sites and public health agency reports. Weibo also provided access to additional crowdsourced information, such as updates on patients' health conditions, exposure history and family contacts, which were not readily available through official sources. This rapid disclosure of information helped accelerate official responses and recording by Chinese health authorities. In addition, the authorities were able to leverage Weibo as an interactive platform for risk communication to the general public, by holding, for example, real time question and answer sessions.

The researchers conclude that there is significant potential for social media monitoring to be included in mainstream disease surveillance and response systems. Their research also indicates that it could provide an early warning system for unusual public health events abroad.

Explore further: Bird-flu deaths rise in China, shutting poultry markets

More information: Zhang, E. X., Yang, Y., Shang, R. D., Simons, J. J. P., Quek, B. K. et al. "Leveraging social networking sites for disease surveillance and public sensing: the case of the 2013 avian influenza A (H7N9) outbreak in China." Western Pacific Surveillance and Response Journal. (2015).

China is experiencing its deadliest outbreak of the H7N9 bird-flu strain since it first appeared in humans in 2013, killing 79 people in January alone and spurring several cities to suspend live poultry trade.

The World Health Organization says an increase in bird flu cases in China this year has not shown sustained human-to-human transmission, but it vows to remain "vigilant" over the puzzling outbreak in which affected fowl don't ...

When epidemiological data are scarce, social media and Internet reports can be reliable tools for forecasting infectious disease outbreaks, according to a study led by an expert in the School of Public Health at Georgia State ...

Nine people have died of bird flu in China this year, state media reported Wednesday, after the World Health Organization (WHO) urged all countries to promptly report human infections.

Weibo Corp.'s shares are rising in the Chinese social media company's debut in the U.S.

A popular social networking service used by Chinese people to vent their anger over a deadly July train crash now has more than 200 million users, owner Sina.com said Thursday.

Uber is scoffing at claims that its expansion into self-driving cars hinges on trade secrets stolen from a Google spinoff, arguing that its ride-hailing service has been working on potentially superior technology.

A sci-fi staple for decades, laser weapons are finally becoming reality in the US military, albeit with capabilities a little less dramatic than at the movies.

Facebook on Thursday launched its digital assistant named "M" for US users of its Messenger application, ramping up the social network's efforts in artificial intelligence.

YouTube TV, Google's new streaming package of about 40 television channels, is the tech industry's latest bid to get cable-shunning millennials to pay for live TV over the internet. It offers intriguing advantages over rivals, ...

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have found an innovative new use for a simple piece of glass tubing: weighing things. Their glass tube sensor will help speed up chemical toxicity tests, shed light on ...

Proteins are the most abundant substance in living cells aside from water, and their interactions with cellular functions are crucial to healthy life. When proteins fall short of their intended function or interact in an ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Visit link:
Social networking sites could be used to monitor and respond to global disease outbreaks - Phys.Org

Dominic Tarr is a developer who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand; he created Scuttlebutt, a secure messaging system that can run without servers, even without ISPs.

Scuttlebutt users host append-only, cryptographically signed logs of all the public messages they've seen in their journeys, and when they meet, they sync up these messages, using their local network, or even by exchanging USB sticks of cryptographically signed files.

Thought Scuttlebutt doesn't require an ISP or servers, it can supercharge its throughput and synchrony by connecting to public servers (called "pubs") that act as clearinghouses: but taking down all the pubs will not destroy the network, only slow it down as it falls back on slower, higher-latency, lower-reliability P2P meshes.

It reminds me a lot of Fidonet, Tom Jennings' classic BBS networking infrastructure that linked millions of people around the world by programming local dial-up BBSes to call one another during off-peak/low-tariff hours and swap messages destined for one another, or more distant nodes. Fidonet eventually got a bridge into Usenet (thanks to The Little Garden, John Gilmore's trailblazing San Francisco ISP) that supercharged it in much the way of Scuttlebutt's pubs.

In Scuttlebutt, the mesh suffices. With simply two computers, a local router, and electricity, you can exchange messages between the computers with minimal effort and no technical skills. Each account in Scuttlebutt is a diary (or log) of what a person has publicly and digitally said. As those people move around between different WiFi / LAN networks, their log gets copy-pasted to different computers, and so digital information spreads.

What word of mouth is for humans, Scuttlebutt is for social news feeds. It is unstoppable and spreads fast. Once the word is out (just an arbitrary example) that Apple is releasing a new iPhone model, there is no way to restrict that information from spreading. A person may tell that piece of information to any of their friends, and those friends may in turn spread that information onwards.

With typical gossip, however, information deteriorates as it spreads and eventually becomes harmful rumor. Scuttlebutt on the other hand makes word of mouth secure with cryptography. Each Scuttlebutt account is comprised of simply two things: an append-only diary and private/public asymmetric crypto keys. An accounts identity is its public key. There are no unique usernames, because you cant guarantee two people in separate places from choosing the same username, much like you cannot forbid the name John Smith to be given to a newborn in Canada if it is already taken by another person in Australia.

All information a person has published is registered in their diary. Public messages (like in Twitter) are the most common type of message in a diary, but youll also see I am friends with that person type of messages. To send a private message to someone, I simply record a message in my diary, but encrypt it first, so the message isnt plainly readable by anyone who gets their hands on a copy of the diary. Authenticity of diaries is preserved in that all diary entries reference the message that was written before, and then is signed. This prevents tampering and makes replication easier.

Scuttlebutt

AN OFF-GRID SOCIAL NETWORK [Andre Saltz]

(via 4 Short Links)

report this ad

The latest crayon-scrawled, unconstitutional, sure-to-be-challenged plan from the Trump White House for Americas borders would require visitors to the US to reveal their social media passwords so CBP officers could read their private messages and look at their friends lists; they will also have to answer questions about their political beliefs the plan would []

This web page needs to be interrupted by a lightbox effect and a modal dialog asking me to sign up for a mailing list, said no one ever.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when all you have is clip art of a hooded hacker figure

Blue Apron delivers perfectly portioned ingredients so you can cook beautiful homemade meals easily, with subscription plans that match size of your household . Or appetite.If you want to wrangle in your restaurant habit and start cooking at home, Blue Apron eliminates the time-intensive trips to the grocery store to ensure that you have fresh, []

Just ask this guy! The G-BOOM Wireless Bluetooth Boomboxdelivers 10W of balanced sound in a package that was built to live on your shoulder. Its like the loudest, most in-tune mechanical parrot youve ever owned.Bluetooth audio has vastly simplified the search for the right sound system. Many people dont have the need or the space []

Perhaps your pockets might be the easiest place to store cash and other loose objects. But unless youre a big fan of cargo pants, keeping your personal items, especially little ones,organized without some kind of bagis a tough task. This Key Safe keeps important odds-and-ends separate from lint and wadded-up receipts.With its screw-top design, you []

report this ad

Read the original here:
Scuttlebutt: an "off-grid" P2P social network that runs without servers and can fall back to sneakernet - Boing Boing