Dr. Sameer Hinduja of Florida Atlantic University and Dr. Justin Patchin of University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire work together to research the causes and consequences of cyberbullying. In addition to advice for parents and teens about how to prevent and deal with cyberbullying, the professors provide a current list of anti-cyberbullying laws by state: http://www.cyberbullying.us/Bullying_and_Cyberbullying_Laws.pdf.
Cyberbullying Research Center
http://www.cyberbullying.us
Listen as Irene McDermott, author of The Internet Book of Life, shares with Georgia’s Barbara Dooley her own story of finding romance over the internet . This interview originally appeared on WGAU AM, News and Talk radio in Athens Georgia.
http://wgauam.media.streamtheworld.com/audio/barbara_dooley_101541241.mp3
Canadian computer guys Raul Rupsingh and Stephen Beath volunteered in senior centers and tested their simple 5-button interface with genuine grandmas. Now, their web-based subscription software is used in many Canadian retirement and nursing-home chains. The home version costs $8 per month or $149 for a year of access, support, and upgrades. It is available in eight languages including Hindi and simplified or traditional Chinese. PointerWare works on Windows-based PCs and tablets. It is not compatible with Apple products.
PointerWare
http://www.pointerware.com/c/pages/home
In Canada, there is a group called “Seniors for Seniors” (http://seniors4seniors.ca) in which “junior seniors” age 60-65 can volunteer to assist “senior seniors” aged 85-90 as personal caregivers and drivers. That brings up the question of:
what exactly is a senior?
“Baby boomers” is the name for that abundance of children born between 1946 and 1964. The oldest of these are now over 65 (and the youngest are developing problems reading small type.)
Tony Vagneur, boomer and actual cowboy in Aspen, Colorado declares, “I don’t understand why there’s a dichotomy, separating ‘older people’ from the rest of the world? If it weren’t for older people (over 50, the largest marketing demographic), there wouldn’t be profitable demand for those products that claim to be youth-oriented.”
Of course, he’s a sharp, fit Colorado outdoorsman. It is ridiculous to put him in the same marketing category as a people old enough to be his parents. Yet, young engineers have a hard time imagining the needs of either baby boomers or the older silver generation who now live to be age 90 and beyond.
A Silver Field of Dreams
http://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/silver-field-dreams
Susan Estrada reports from the Silvers Summit, the senior tech segment of the 2012 CES (Computer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas (http://silverssummit.com). She quotes Marty Cooper, the engineer credited with inventing mobile phones, as saying that, although young designers long to tap into the senior market, “they can’t ‘think’ like an older adult.”
Apple’s tablet is easy to use and the screen text can be enlarged with the spread of two fingers. “My 76-year-old Mom got an iPad, initially to use as a reader,” writes college buddy Laurie Howlett. “But she and her husband fought over who got to use it so they bought another!” Professional organizer Tracy McCubbin also says that many of her older clients “have loaded up the Kindle app on it for easy reading.” They also use the iPad for email.
iPad2
http://www.apple.com/ipad
All of the elegant, intuitive Apple products seem to be popular with tech savvy older folks. McCubbin’s 83-year-old client had her load an iPod Nano with meditations that she listens to at night to go to sleep. Writer Kathy Talley-Jones notes, “My father likes to listen to books on his iPod Touch and gets every new iPod Shuffle, Nano, etc. when it is released!”
Dummies.com offers these lessons for new old owners of iPads:
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/consumer-electronics/iPad-For-Seniors.html
The video phone of the future has arrived and it’s free. What a blessing for seniors who are separated from their families. “My 91-year-old grandmother in Tokyo uses Skype to keep in touch with my mother in Los Angeles,” writes special librarian Takako Nagumo. But Skype has practical implications beyond family cohesion.
“My 95-year-old grandfather is lucky enough to have found doctors who will make house calls, but my grandmother is always concerned that she may not understand all of the doctor’s instructions, so when the doctor comes, she and my mother both log on to Skype, so my mother can take notes and confer with the doctor, too.” Install Skype on any web-enabled device that is equipped with a camera and a microphone, including smart phones. Computers designed for seniors feature easy access to this generation-spanning technology. Skype was recently purchased by Microsoft.
Skype
http://www.skype.com
After I turned on my Aunt Bert’s Wow! computer for seniors (http://www.mywowcomputer.com), I began to hook up her internet modem. Did it get its signal over a cable or the phone line? No! Following the suggestion of the Wow! computer people, Bert had contracted with Clear.com to receive her internet signal wirelessly through the 4G mobile network. We placed the modem near a window, plugged it in and voilà, it picked up the signal and began feeding high speed internet into the computer.
Bert’s plan costs $50 per month and she can end the contract at any time. Clear.com is now available in 80 cities across the United States. The company Clearwire, based in Bellingham, Washington, plans expansion of its network over the next year. Check the site to see if your city has coverage.
If you want a simple interface for a senior but don’t want to buy a dedicated computer for it, consider a subscription to a web-based system.
Toronto’s Jonathan Seliger’s company offers a web-based subscription solution for easy senior browsing. For about $150 per year, InTouchLink offers a simple interface designed to be used through the Firefox browser (http://www.mozilla.org) on any computer or tablet including Macs and iPads. It offers only large eight buttons including one for email, photos, and the web. InTouchLink stores the email and photos on its own server so that users can’t accidentally delete them. InTouchLink also sells licenses for multiple users in retirement communities.
InTouchLink
http://www.intouchlink.com
Download it today in this handy Kindle format.
When the National White Collar Crime Center (http://www.nw3c.org), the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA; http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/) and the FBI (http://www.fbi.gov) join forces, we get the Internet Crime Complaint Center, the place to register beefs against Nigerian letters, phishing, and even auction fraud. File your internet crime complaint here!
Use the Web to Grow Richer, Smarter, Healthier, and Happier
Life Lived on the Edge of Pasadena
Use the Web to Grow Richer, Smarter, Healthier, and Happier
Thoughts on skiing, movies, politics, and the West
Use the Web to Grow Richer, Smarter, Healthier, and Happier
Use the Web to Grow Richer, Smarter, Healthier, and Happier
Use the Web to Grow Richer, Smarter, Healthier, and Happier
News and resources covering social media, search engines, databases, archives, and other such information collections. Since 1998.
The Internet Book of Life 