The debate is now back in focus after the Heavensfield Retreat Center announced that it has opened what appears to be the first addiction recovery program for Internet Addiction Disorder in the U.S. Called reSTART, the 45-day program is designed to take serious sufferers of IAD and bring balance to their lives. It already has its first patient, a 19 year old who could not remove himself from World of Warcraft.
The Program
reSTART is a 45-day treatment program out of Fall City, Washington (near Seattle) that takes 2-6 people at a time and essentially cuts them off from the web and works with them to “reprogram” their social skills. It includes work with a recreation coach, a therapist, exercise and yoga instructors, and more. Their website actually provides a detailed sample schedule, which includes exercise, nature hikes, “discovery quests,” career development, therapy, and more.
To qualify for admittance to reSTART, you have to display symptoms of its nine guidelines for IAD. They are as follows:
1. Have a strong desire or impulse to use the internet.
2. Decreasing or stopping of the internet leads to withdrawal symptoms (e.g., general malaise, restlessness, irritability, lack of concentration, dyssomnia); and the above mentioned symptoms may be relieved by similar electronic media (e.g., TV, handheld games, gaming devices).
3. Continually increasing the amount of internet use and the extent of internet involvement to reach sense of satisfaction.
4. Use of internet in spite of its harmful effects; despite knowledge of harmful effects, internet use is hard to stop.
5. Difficulties controlling beginning, and finishing, and the duration of time of internet use; efforts to modify internet use may be attempted multiple times without success.
6. As a result of internet use, interests, recreation or social activities are decreased or abandoned.
7. Internet use is seen as a way to escape problems or to gain relief from negative feelings.
8. The extent of internet use is denied or minimized to teachers, schoolmates, friends or professionals (including actual time and expenditure of internet contact).
9. Everyday life and social function is impaired (e.g., in social, academic and workability.)
For more on Internet Addition Disorder and the debate surrounding it, be sure to read the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Of course, this program is not free. For 45 days, the price is a hefty $14,500. Rehabilitation programs have never been cheap, though, so this price does not particularly shock us.
What Are We to Think of These Programs?
It’s getting tougher and tougher to argue that there is no such thing as Internet Addiction Disorder, especially if you watched the CNN video above. The sad truth is that it’s possible to become addicted to just about anything, and that the web (and World of Warcraft) has sucked many people in so deep that they ignore social interactions and forget real-world obligations.
Does a rehab center for extreme cases make sense? Yes, especially if reSTART can provide scientific proof of success in breaking the addictions of its patients. Still, rehab doesn’t work for all drug addicts, and it probably won’t work for all Internet addicts. And unlike drug addiction, you can’t simply avoid and abstain from using the web; it’s too central to our economy, our work, our education, and our lives to be ignored.
This debate isn’t going away anytime soon, and most likely, neither is reSTART. We want your opinions in the comments below. Do you think IAD is real? Do you think reSTART is a good idea? Is it possible to “recover” from something as central to our lives as the Internet? Please chime in on the discussion.
Southwest Airlines is joining Virgin America, American, Delta, United and others in offering Wi-Fi on its flights. The airline just finished its first round of testing on four different aircraft and has decided to roll out Wi-Fi across its entire fleet. In fact, we covered the original tests last year.
The Wi-Fi wil be powered by Row 44, a satellite and broadband service company. This is interesting because Wi-Fi on Delta, American, and Virgin are all powered by rival Aircell.
While everything from YouTube
There’s no word on prices or exactly when every flight will have Wi-Fi, but the target is the first quarter in 2010. That’s not all that far away. Let’s hope other airlines keep picking up on this trend and offer us our Internet fix in the sky.
Edit: As some commenters point out, push email has been available on the iPhone for other email providers, just not for Gmail
A new 99-cent application from Tiverias Apps called GPush (iTunes link) aims to change that. Calling GPush simple would be an understatement – this app literally has a one-track mind. The only thing it does is provide push notifications for new emails in Gmail. It doesn’t open emails, or send emails, it just lets you know when new ones arrive, as soon as they arrive, and no matter what you’re doing.
Easy Set Up, But a Bit Flaky
GPush is extremely simple to set up: you just enter your Gmail username and password and that’s literally all there is to it (though you can also control sounds and alert permissions from the iPhone’s settings menu). GPush would definitely make Ron Popeil proud – you really can just set it and forget it. Unfortunately, in my testing today, I ran into some issues, and apparently I wasn’t the only one.
The app had two undesirable bugs in my testing. First, it would occasionally pop up alerts for old but unread emails. Second, it would sometimes miss new emails entirely. Resubmitting my account credentials would usually fix it for a bit, but missing emails is a rather egregious offense for an app that’s sole function is to push notifications of new messages.
Still, if they work the bugs out, GPush is certainly worth the 99 cents for anyone who needs to be kept in the loop on a more instant basis than the iPhone’s current fetch functionality offers. According to Tiverias, a premium version is coming that will support push for multiple Gmail accounts. We hope it also emulates some other BlackBerry features, such as notification profiles, so we could control when we get pushed alerts for email on specific accounts (or better yet, for specific filters).
The benefits of digital textbooks are numerous: they’re potentially cheaper, they’re better for the environment (at least so long as you don’t continually need to upgrade your electronic book reader), they weigh less, they can be updated more easily, and they’re more easily searched. But for all that, a number of hurdles still exist.
1. Cost Savings Must be Greater
In theory, digital textbooks should cost a lot less than their printed counterparts. Textbook publishers will always have overhead costs (they must still compensate authors, editors, typesetters/designers, proofreaders, indexers, etc.), but the costs associated with physically printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping the book are eliminated when going digital. Further, many textbook publishers already publish electronic editions of their books. McGraw-Hill, for example, which is one of the largest textbook publishers in the United States, publishes nearly 95% of its books electronically.
In practice, though, the cost savings for electronic textbooks are miniscule. “Human Biology,” a textbook published by Pearson imprint Benjamin Cummings, for example, costs about $50 used, and about $80 new in its printed/hard copy form (according to BigWords.com). Via electronic textbook publisher CourseSmart, the digital version costs just over $70, a savings of about 12.5% over the printed version. However, the printed version can be kept forever or sold back at the end of the semester to mitigate costs, while the electronic version is automatically deleted after 180 days, and requires additional equipment, such as an ebook reader or a laptop computer. As a student, which of these options makes more sense?
“At the moment, there’s not a lot of [cost savings],” Tom Rosenthal, the senior manager of electronic product sales at textbook publisher Academic Press, told the Wall Street Journal. Those cost savings will have to become more significant for students to start opting for electronic texts over printed ones.
2. A Standard Format is Needed
When Amazon announced the larger format Kindle DX in May, and along with it a pilot digital textbook program at several major US universities to be launched this fall — including Princeton, UVA, Case Western, Arizona State, and Reed College — we called it “a game changer.” But it also raises a very important question about formats and ebook compatibility issues.
There are many different competing ebook formats and a huge number of textbook publishers that don’t all use the same format. If I buy a book on the Kindle, it may not necessarily be available on my Sony reader (and I certainly won’t be able to transfer that specific purchase from one reader to the other), and if I buy a book through CourseSmart, I need to use their proprietary software to download it. What that means for students in a practical sense is that vendor lock-in might prohibit them from going print-free even if they wanted to, because not all of their required course materials may be available for the reader or software they invested in. Because buying an ebook reader is a significant initial cost outlay, it’s hard to expect students to make that investment without assurances that all, or at least nearly all, of their required books will be available in that format.
With ebook readers expected in the next year from Plastic Logic, Hearst, and News Corp., and the much-rumored “Apple Tablet” on the horizon, things may only get more muddled.
3. Questions of Ownership
One of the most important stumbling points for the adoption of digital texts is the question of who actually owns the books. CourseSmart’s books, for example, generally only last for 180 days before being automatically deleted, which means that students are essentially renting them for a set period of time. That’s not a consideration students need to make when purchasing a hard copy book from a bookstore, where the answer to question of ownership is very clear.
Further, the recent Orwellian (literally) case of Amazon remotely deleting books from Kindle readers, has rightly raised a number of eyebrows. One high school student even filed a lawsuit against the ecommerce giant when, as he claims, the notes he had made on the book for school were “rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book,” as a result of the remote deletion.
“Amazon.com had no more right to hack into people’s Kindles than its customers have the right to hack into Amazon’s bank account to recover a mistaken overpayment,” said Jay Edelson, the lawyer who filed the case.
If students feel that they don’t actually own the textbooks they purchase, or that their books might be taken away before they are done with them (or that their notes might be damaged), they’re unlikely to embrace electronic textbooks.
Conclusion
Digital textbooks are indeed a potential game changer, and they are likely going to be a major part of the future of academia. A year from now, the National Associated of College Stores estimates that digital textbooks could account for 15% of all textbook sales. However, for that to happen, textbook publishers, ebook reader manufacturers, and schools must first address some of the major hurdles that are making students wary of electronic books.
Further, in addition to the problems that exist with the digital books themselves, electronic textbook publishers also need to overcome deeply ingrained student behavior. For many students, the idea of reading words on a screen is not as appealing as on a printed page. That may change as more so-called digital natives progress into higher education and as ebook reader technology gets better, but for now, 60% of students would rather pay for a low-cost printed book than use a free digital version.
“We may have actually made enough progress for this to be a landmark device, but the caveat that humans have proven is that they are resistant to change,” said Andrew Dillon, Dean of the University of Texas School of Information about the Kindle DX device. “Fighting 700 years of human familiarity with paper is a huge challenge.”
Would you use electronic textbooks if available? Let us know in the comments.
Earlier today, a Grand Jury indicted a U.S. man and his two co-conspirators for stealing 130 million bank card numbers in 2007. Albert Gonzales of Miami is charged with hacking and compromising major credit card hubs, including 7-Eleven, Heartland Payment Systems, and Hannaford Brothers.
According to the indictment, the men sold some of the numbers, which were used to make illegal withdrawals from multiple banks. They apparently got around the security of these systems with database injections that helped them intercept credit card transactions in real time.
Gonzales has already been indicted for similar crimes, according to The New York Times. Last year, he was indicted for the theft of 40 million credit cards from companies including Barnes & Noble, OfficeMax, Forever 21, and Boston Market. And even more interesting, in 2003 he was working with federal agents to identify his associates after he was arrested for hacking.
This is yet another reminder of how important it is to secure and monitor your credit cards, financial data, and passwords for any anomalies. This type of thing can happen to anybody. Always rotate your passwords and cancel your credit card if any unknown charges start appearing in your bank statement.
But while Canon has dominated, there’s another camera that’s been zipping up the Flickr charts. Actually, camera phone would be more precise, because we’re talking about the iPhone.
That smartphone, with its weak 2 MP camera and its lack of zoom, is now set to overtake Canon Rebel XTi as the #1 camera on Flickr
So what does this development mean? First, it’s a reflection of the intense popularity of mobile smartphones and specifically the rise of the iPhone. You always have a camera in your pocket (and with the 3GS, a camcorder too). Just as important is that it’s easy to upload your pictures directly from your mobile phone to your Flickr account. That’s something most digital cameras can’t do, since they aren’t connected to 3G or Wifi connections.
This doesn’t mean people prefer lower quality images over the higher resolution photos that can be captured with cameras of the Rbel XTi’s quality. Instead, it’s a sign that the world is becoming a more mobile place. Being able to get your photos to all of your friends while on-the-go is part of that mobile revolution.
Chromium got a new feature, as it occassionally does, but this one definitely caught our eye. The Chromium team announced the addition of bookmark syncing in the developer’s build of Chromium. The new feature will let you keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple machines as well as store them in your Google Docs
Here’s how Google
As of today’s dev channel build, we’re adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access.
To activate this feature, launch Google Chrome
A note: the Chromium Dev version is the least stable of the Chromium browsers. Windows can crash, new features can need tweaks, and we may never see bookmark syncing ever reach Google Chrome itself. However, this new feature still tickles our fancy, so if you’re brave, subscribe to the dev channeland get the update
1. What is Facebook Lite?
A: It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitter
2. What does Facebook Lite look like?
A: Here is what we believe to be a screenshot of Facebook Lite, courtesy of Hacker NewsVery stripped down, very basic, very reminiscient of Twitter and FriendFeed
3. Is this Facebook integrating with FriendFeed?
A: Most likely not. The deal is still new to integrate their technologies in this way, and we’re hearing reports that these tests have been ongoing for the last 2-3 days. That would put its development well before the FriendFeed acquisition4. What’s the point of Facebook Lite?
A: Speculation says it’s a direct assault on Twitter. Facebook continues to find ways to make itself competitive with Twitter. This is why Facebook has been launching features such as public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, and realtime search. Twitter is simple, so Facebook’s fighting back with the same.However, we don’t know for sure. They may just be making a speedier version for slow connections. We’ll find out more from the Facebook team soon.
5. How can I access it?
A: It’s a limited test for only a subset of users. The fact that thousands, if not millions of users got the test notice was a bug. Most likely Facebook will open up the test to more users very soon, especially since everybody now knows about it.
We’ve contacted Facebook and are awaiting a response on this development. In the meantime, we want to hear your thoughts. Do you think it’s a good idea? What do you think is the social network’s goal is with Facebook Lite? And will people use it?
Facebook
Here’s the full text you see on the homepage if you were selected:
“You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite!
We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.
Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.”
The link doesn’t seem to work, but this feels very much like a new and direct shot over Twitter
Core to that promotion is a YouTube contest to win a trip to the Great Barrier Reef and a new notebook. The goal is to create an “extreme crazy video” with an MSI notebook; the company will then choose 15 winners.
However, it isn’t the contest that’s making buzz, but apparently one of the insane demo videos. One where acrobats catch laptops with their butts.
Yes, seriously. The video, launched two days ago (August 10th) has become a viral sensation, growing to over 75,000 views – this is up from just 7000 a few hours ago. The video literally depicts one man in tights using his rear to grasp onto laptops thrown at him.
The video’s so insane that many YouTube
Form your own opinion by watching the video below and telling us what you think. Is this a smart campaign? Do you think this is real? Are you as disturbed as we are? Let us know in the comments.
