Joseph Wayne

Emma Stone Talks Jim Carrey's Creepy Love Video

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:59:00 +0000

Facebook Updates Camera App, Changes Name to 'Camera•'

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:04:00 +0000

Criminals always think they can escape from the heli

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Geri Halliwell 'lacks chemistry' as an X Factor judge

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:15:00 +0000

Elton John Dedication to Robin Gibb

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:36:00 +0000

Today in History

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Sat, 05 May 2012 21:48:00 +0000

Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:37:00 +0000

Carley Rae Jepsen on Boss Bieber

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:33:00 +0000

Jennifer Garner's Post-Baby Red Carpet Style

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Jada Pinkett Smith Speak Out About Split Rumors

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:44:00 +0000

Michael Strahan and Nicole Murphy go Porsche shopping.

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:04:00 +0000

EastEnders cast paid for Cheryl Fergison's leaving do, after bosses refused

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:30:00 +0000

Nicollette Sheridan Desperate Housewives Case a Mistrial

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:10:00 +0000

Jessica Alba Poses for Parenting Magazine April 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:09:00 +0000

Tracy Morgan Hospitalized

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:13:00 +0000

Workout Swaps Drab Routine for 'Drag'

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:11:00 +0000

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers | Star Wars | PBS

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:09:00 +0000

Rap Wins Overall, but Loses at the Grammys

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:06:00 +0000

Heidi Klum and Seal Confirm Split

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:10:00 +0000

Scores of Whales Die on New Zealand Beach

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Italian Officials: Fuel Removal Imminent

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:06:00 +0000

Bruce Willis Is the Favorite

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:03:00 +0000

Computer meltdown leaves Aussies without cash

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:50:00 +0000

SYDNEY (AFP) – A freak computer glitch at Australia's biggest bank froze cash machines and left millions of people struggling to access their money.

National Australia Bank (NAB) said a corrupted file wiped out a huge number of transactions, including salary payments and transfers, and crashed some ATMs, angering many customers who were facing a weekend without money.

Spokeswoman Meaghan Telford said NAB was opening branches on Saturday and Sunday and bringing in extra call-centre staff as technicians scrambled to fix the problem.

"We're very apologetic," she told AFP. "We recognise this has caused people a lot of inconvenience. We're just working to resolve the problem."

Telford said the rogue file knocked out transactions on Wednesday, including salary deposits, bill payments and transfers to other banks, and then work to fix the problem hit Thursday and Friday's business.

As the electronic system buckled, some ATMs had crashed, she said, without revealing how many.

"There's been some issues with the electronic system because of the pressure the system has been under as a result of trying to resolve these issues," she said. "This has meant some ATMs have experienced issues."

Customers using microblogging site Twitter reported chaos with their bank accounts as mystifying sums appeared and disappeared, leaving many unable to withdraw cash.

Telford said NAB had cleared most of the delayed transactions but could not predict when the system would be back to normal. She did not estimate how many of NAB's 11.5 million customers were affected.

According to national news agency AAP, international banking giant HSBC's transactions to other banks, payroll deposits and direct debits were also affected, as NAB clears payments for HSBC in Australia.

NAB also warned on its website that its Internet banking was slow as millions of customers checked their accounts.

The meltdown comes at a time of growing discontent towards Australia's "big four" banks over rising interest rates and a swathe of minor fees, with even Prime Minister Julia Gillard urging unhappy customers to switch lenders.

Last week 250 investors brought a multi-million dollar lawsuit against NAB claiming it failed to properly disclose its exposure to toxic US debt during the financial crisis.

Are texting and Facebook worse for teens than TV?

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:34:00 +0000

NEW YORK – Let's face it: Teenagers spend hours texting, socializing on Facebook and playing video games. And it's driving their parents nuts.

Sure, there are real dangers associated with all this screen time — everything from cyberbullying to couch-potato obesity. Not to mention driving while texting, shortened attention spans and Internet porn.

But many of today's parents spent hours as kids sitting in front of screens too — only they were TV screens.

Which raises an interesting question: Is Facebook really worse for teenagers' brains than the mindless reruns of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch" that their parents consumed growing up?

Douglas Gentile, a child psychologist and associate professor at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, who studies the effects of media on children, says texting, Facebook and video games are not inherently bad. Nor are they inherently better or worse than watching TV, although they do pose different risks, such as cyberbullying.

But research has shown that the more time kids spend in front of screens — whether it's TV or instant-messaging — the worse their school performance. "That doesn't mean it's true for every kid, but it makes sense, that for every hour a kid is playing video games, it's an hour that they're not doing homework or reading or exploring or creating," he said.

Gentile calls this the "displacement hypothesis. If screen time is displacing doing their homework, that's bad. But if their homework is done, well, so what?"

Gentile, who admits that his own teenager crossed the "9,000 texts in one month barrier" last summer, acknowledged that parents are struggling to adjust to a world in which kids would rather look at words on a cell phone screen than have a conversation.

"The older generation, it's not their culture," he said. "There is a resistance to it."

Watching TV as a family, as mindless as that experience can be, is now regarded with nostalgia by parents. If your kid is sitting in the living room watching "American Idol," you can plop on the sofa with them, and "it's a shared experience," Gentile said. But if they're texting or video-chatting with a friend from school, "it's a private experience. It's like they're whispering secrets. And we find it rude."

Patti Rowlson, a mother of two in Everson, Wash., says this "has been a topic of discussion in our house for years now." She and her husband started out limiting TV time when their kids were little, but "then technology crept in. Cell phones, laptop computers, iPods with Wi-Fi. We, as parents, were no longer in control of screen time because we could not even tell when they were using it."

Recounting a struggle that will sound familiar to many parents, Rowlson said that at first, she and her husband imposed limits on tech use.

"There were battles and even groundings," along with the confiscation of iPods, she said. "We were constantly policing and the kids were constantly getting in trouble. We were trying to fight for the old ways, and it was causing a lot of stress and tension in the family. It was ridiculous. So we loosened up. And it's made everybody happier. We were fighting something that you can't hold back. It's how they communicate with their peers."

What's been the result? Two good kids, she said. "In the end I'm not sure if having boundaries early on helped them or made no difference at all."

Ron Neal, who lives in West L.A., has a teenage daughter who is "tech-driven and passionate about it. ... I don't know how it's going to play out, but I don't have this fear and dread about it."

Neal, who admits to watching a lot of "Gilligan's Island" growing up, added: "We had our minds numbed by TV, and maybe they're looking at useless things on the Internet or YouTube, but I also think they're developing a lot of skills through this technology that we could never comprehend. For my daughter, when she is home, she does have everything going — the TV, the computer, communicating with friends, and doing the homework at the same time."

He admits, though, that there are some frightening aspects to the dependence today's teenagers have on technology. "They are so emotionally connected to being tied in with their friends 24 hours a day, if they get a text, they feel obligated to respond in seconds," he said. He recalled a group of girls showing up for a birthday party at a restaurant, and "everyone of them had their head down, texting."

The explosion in teen screen time is well-documented. A recent Associated Press-mtvU poll found that one-third of college students use computers, cell phones or gaming consoles for six or more hours daily. A Kaiser Family Foundation study published in January found that total media use among 8- to 18-year-olds, including TV, music, computers, video games, print and movies has increased from six hours, 21 minutes daily in 2004 to seven hours, 38 minutes in 2009.

"Try waking a teenager in the morning and the odds are good that you'll find a cell phone tucked under their pillow," the Kaiser report said.

The Kaiser study also found that the more time kids spend with media, the lower their grades and levels of personal contentment are.

Gentile said the impact of screen time on school work can be mitigated by what he calls "protective factors." Those might include good teachers and a high-performing school, love of reading, coming from a family where education is valued, and exposure to experiences that are culturally and intellectually enriching. "If you had all these protective factors," said Gentile, "then that one little risk factor (screen time), who cares?"

He added that surprisingly, the amount of time kids spend watching TV has not declined precipitously with the popularity of computers and gaming, but "they don't pay nearly the attention (to TV) that they used to." The TV might be on, but "they're also instant-messaging, they're on Facebook, they're texting."

One thing parents should worry about, Gentile said, is the way electronic devices encourage multitasking.

"Multitasking is not really good for anyone," he said. "Your reflexes speed up, you're quicker to look over your shoulder and notice little noises or lights. This is not what they need when they get to the classroom and you're supposed to ignore the kid next to you. Scanning to see when the next message comes, this may not be good for kids. The more distractions you have, the worse your performance is." Getting kids to turn off their phones, iPods, and computers in order to concentrate on homework and reading, he said, "I think that's a fight worth having."

Bottom line: Never mind that your kid is spending two hours on Facebook each night. As long as they do their homework without texting in between math problems, it's probably no better or worse than the hours you spent watching "Star Trek."

North Korea seizes South Korean fishing boat

noreply@blogger.com (Daryl Lorette) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:42:00 +0000

SEOUL — North Korea has seized a South Korean fishing boat off the peninsula's east coast, Seoul's coastguard said Sunday, amid high tensions between the two sides over a major naval exercise by the South.

The boat with four South Korean and three Chinese crewmen was detained while presumably operating near the North's exclusive economic zone in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) the coastguard said in a statement.

It was being towed Sunday to the North's northeastern port of Songjin.

"We urge North Korean authorities to handle this case in accordance with international norms and practices and return the ship and the crew at the earliest possible date," the coastguard said.

It was not immediately clear whether the 41-ton Daeseung 55 was suspected of illegal fishing.

The seizure was reported on the fourth day of the five-day exercise in the Yellow Sea on the other side of the peninsula. The drill has stirred anger and threats of retaliation from the North.

Cross-border relations have been stormy since South Korea and the United States, citing findings of a multinational investigation, accused the North of torpedoing a South Korean warship in March.

The North denies involvement in the sinking and has threatened retaliation for what it calls a provocative drill staged in response to the sinking.

The exercise, which involves 4,500 troops, 29 ships and 50 fighter jets, is one of a series planned in coming months -- some of them with South Korea's ally the United States -- in a show of strength against the North.

YTN television said the fishing boat sent a message at 11:00 am Sunday (0200 GMT) saying it was heading for Songjin.

The television quoted a Seoul government official as saying the boat had been operating in or near a fishing area jointly shared between Russia and North Korea, 270 kilometres (170 miles) east of the North's Musudan region.

The 41-ton vessel's home port is Pohang in the southeast of South Korea. It left port on August 1 and was scheduled to return on September 10, Yonhap news agency said.

The current naval drill follows a major joint South Korean-US naval and air exercise in the Sea of Japan late last month. That ended without incident despite the North's threats of military retaliation.

As part of its own drill due to end Monday, the South's navy has staged intensive night-time exercises aimed at detecting North Korean submarines.

The navy came in for strong criticism for failing to detect the alleged submarine night attack on March 26 which split a corvette in two with the loss of 46 lives.

"The anti-submarine exercise... is a prelude to a war of aggression against the North," the newspaper of the North's ruling communist party, Rodong Sinmun, said Saturday.

In July last year a South Korean squid fishing boat, the Yeonan, accidentally crossed into North Korea's waters and was towed to a nearby port. It was released about a month later.