Screen Time

Smith has employed a variety of methods to study linguistic development and object learning. But one of her best-known approaches is the use of head-mounted video cameras, eye trackers , and motion sensors to view a child’s visual world from his or her own point of view. The bulk of this work is being conducted through the Home-View Project, an initiative that Smith and her Indiana University colleague Chen Yu developed with support from the National Science Foundation. The purpose of this program is to add information on various indices of anthropometric status for children aged birth to 24 months to an already existing dataset. Tear apart your sister’s diary for paper wads to throw, steal your brother’s squirt gun, or find out what happens when you put a sandwich in the VCR!

The filtering was achieved by comparing each received pulse with the previous pulse, and rejecting both if they were identical, leaving a signal containing only the images of any moving objects. To store each received pulse for later comparison it was passed through a transmission line, delaying it by exactly the time between transmitted pulses. Some parents think that because their babies aren’t saying words yet, the parents don’t need to talk to them, but precisely the opposite is true, Kuhl says. The brain is waiting for the back-and-forth that helps it sort language out of the sound soup that surrounds the baby. It is the first time the WHO has made recommendations on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under five.

Zettl, who joined the faculties at Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, became a pioneer in nanotechnology, a field involving the creation of incredibly small materials and devices. In 2003, a team led by Zettl created a functioning electric motor that was just 500 nanometers across. It was about 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair — so tiny that it could ride on the back of a virus.

She is also an enthusiastic believer in the brilliance of babies, with plenty of scientific data to back her up. When you see a baby gazing on the world, you might imagine a little sponge passively soaking up information. What’s actually going on is computational wizardry so sophisticated that it outpaces any known machine, sorting multiple data feeds and running statistics millisecond by millisecond to extract and analyze essential information about the baby’s environment.

This baby laptop is designed for kids between 3-7 years of age, but we wouldn’t be surprised if your 2 year old baby started to play with this laptop toy, as a training laptop. Even babies may log an average of two hours of screen time per day, despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under the age of 2 have no screen time at all. Last fall, in fact, the AAP urged all pediatricians to start asking parents about their child’s technology usage at every well visit.

But Kamen’s Segway PT was designed to be much more than simply a two-wheeled form of recreation, but rather a convenient form of transportation that would reduce pollution and traffic congestion. The electric-powered Segway PT incorporates sophisticated electronics and a gyroscope that enables it to self-balance, and it’s able to maneuver based on the driver’s subtle body shifts. While Segway PTs have yet to become ubiquitous, Kamen’s concept of environmentally friendly personal transportation already has spurred competitors such as Toyota to develop similar vehicles. Dean Kamen, born in Long Island, N.Y., in 1951, was an inventive prodigy.