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                   New Website Gives Kids An ¡®Ad-ucation¡¯ About Marketing Aimed at Them

 

        The United States government has launched a website to help children think critically about the advertising that is aimed at them. The new site is called Admongo. It claims to provide visitors with an "ad-ucation" through games and other entertainment.

A cartoon man dressed in old time pilot clothing greets visitors to Admongo. "Call me Haiz" he says upon arrival in a rocket ship that opens up with a crazy world inside it. Spacey dance music plays in the background as Haiz tells visitors that they need to learn about advertising. Why, he asks? Because, he says, advertising is everywhere -- online, on television, even outside on buses and billboards.

The Admongo website is aimed at children eight to twelve years old. Its inventors say that is the age kids develop their critical thinking abilities. Kids that age are also a big market for advertisers.

      The idea behind Admongo is to teach children three things: To identify the advertiser. To know what the advertiser is really saying. And to know what the advertisement is trying to get the child to do.

      Children learn these things through a video game. They create their own game character. They can choose different skin colors, hair styles, eye and mouth shapes. Then they begin a trip through ad-land. They take a walk through the neighborhood. They seek out the advertising and capture treasures. There are ads on buses and billboards. The players have to find all the marketing in the neighborhood before they can move on to the next level.

The Admongo game takes players inside a home, to the advertising studio and everywhere else ads can be found. It is a complete exploration of the world of marketing.

      One such area is food marketing. The Federal Trade Commission says it is an especially big business. The F.T.C. estimates that food, drink and fast-food restaurants spent more than one and a half billion dollars on advertising to young people in 2006.

The F.T.C. says children are important for three reasons. They buy products. They influence parents and caregivers to buy. And they are the future adult buyers of the products.

      A recent study says most advertising aimed at children is for foods of the lowest nutritional value. First Lady Michelle Obama has said she would like to see advertisers marketing healthy foods for children.

 

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"The Lost Symbol"

      American writer Dan Brown has another mystery in the bookstores and people are buying the new novel in record numbers. "The Lost Symbol" takes place in Washington, D.C., over a period of just twelve hours. The mystery is linked to the Freemasons, a secret men's group with an estimated five million members around the world.

       Dan Brown's earlier novel, "The Da Vinci Code," was a very popular book.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing group released the book in 2003. It has since sold eighty million copies in forty-four languages. It was made into a popular movie. All in all, "The Da Vinci Code" made Dan Brown a very successful writer.

           What that novel did not do, however, was sell one million copies the day of its release. That honor goes to Mister Brown's third book, "The Lost Symbol," released on September fifteenth. By the end of its first week on the market it had sold two million copies. The record-breaking sales made "The Lost Symbol" the fastest-selling adult novel in history. The book entered The New York Times Best Sellers list at the number one position on September 25.

          The novel re-visits the character of Robert Langdon, the Harvard University professor from Brown's first two books. Langdon is an expert on symbols. In this mystery, he is presented with a symbol tattooed on a hand. The symbol itself might not be so unusual. But the hand has been recently disconnected from its body.

         So begins the novel that takes Langdon hunting and hurrying around Washington, D.C., through museums, monuments and government buildings. The professor has a vicious enemy to defeat, central intelligence agents to outsmart and a friend to save.

That friend is Peter Solomon, the secretary of the Smithsonian and a Freemason. The Freemasons are a secret society hundreds of years old with a whole set of mysterious symbols that only they know.

          Book critics have been mixed in their reviews of "The Lost Symbol." But, the Web site Internet Movie Database reports that the book is already "in development" to be a movie.

 

 

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       One of the teacher¡¯s rewards is that he is using his mind on valuable subjects. All over the world people are spending their lives either on doing jobs where the mind must be kept numb all day, or else on highly rewarded activities which are tedious. One can get accustomed to operating an adding machine for five and a half days a week, or to writing advertisements to persuade the public that one brand of cigarettes is better than another. Yet no one would do either of these things for its own sake. Only the money makes them tolerable. But if you really understand an important and interesting subject, like the structure of the human body or the history of the two world wars, it is a genuine happiness to explain them to others, to welcome every new book on them, and to learn as you teach.

 

       With this another reward of teaching is very closely linked. That is the happiness of making something. When the pupils come to you, their minds are only half formed, full of black spaces and vague notions and oversimplification. You do not merely insert a lot of facts, if you teach them properly. It is not like injecting 500 cc. of serum, or giving a year¡¯s dose of vitamins. You take the living mind, and mould it. It resists sometimes. It may lie passive and apparently refuse to accept anything you print on it. Sometimes it takes the mould too easily, and then seems to melt again and become featureless. But often it comes into firmer shape as you work, and gives you the incomparable happiness of helping to create a human being. To teach a boy the difference between truth and lie in print, to start him thinking about the meaning of poetry or patriotism, to hear him hammering back at you with the facts and arguments you have helped him to find, sharpened by himself and fitted to his own powers, gives the sort of satisfaction that an artist has when he makes a picture out of blank canvas and chemical colorings, or a doctor when he hears a sick pulse pick up and carry the energies of new life under his hands.

 

 

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                              Humans to Asteroids: Watch Out!

 

A FEW weeks ago, an asteroid almost 30 feet across and zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour flew 28,000 miles above Singapore. Why, you might reasonably ask, should non-astronomy buffs care about a near miss from such a tiny rock? Well, I can give you one very good reason: asteroids don¡¯t always miss. If even a relatively little object was to strike a city, millions of people could be wiped out.

 

Thanks to telescopes that can see ever smaller objects at ever greater distances, we can now predict dangerous asteroid impacts decades ahead of time. We can even use current space technology and fairly simple spacecraft to alter an asteroid¡¯s orbit enough to avoid a collision. We simply need to get this detection-and-deflection program up and running.

 

President Obama has already announced a goal of landing astronauts on an asteroid by 2025 as a precursor to a human mission to Mars. Asteroids are deep-space bodies, orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, and traveling to one would mean sending humans into solar orbit for the very first time. Facing those challenges of radiation, navigation and life support on a months-long trip millions of miles from home would be a perfect learning journey before a Mars trip.

 

Near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets ¡ª mineral-rich bodies bathed in a continuous flood of sunlight ¡ª may also be the ultimate resource depots for the long-term exploration of space. It is fantastic to think that one day we may be able to access fuel, materials and even water in space instead of digging deeper and deeper into our planet for what we need and then dragging it all up into orbit, against Earth¡¯s gravity.

 

Most important, our asteroid efforts may be the key to the survival of millions, if not our species. That¡¯s why planetary defense has occupied my work with two nonprofits over the past decade.

 

To be fair, no one has ever seen the sort of impact that would destroy a city. The most instructive incident took place in 1908 in the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, when a 120-foot-diameter asteroid exploded early one morning. It probably killed nothing except reindeer but it flattened 800 square miles of forest. Statistically, that kind of event occurs every 200 to 300 years.

 

Luckily, larger asteroids are even fewer and farther between ¡ª but they are much, much more destructive. Just think of the asteroid seven to eight miles across that annihilated the dinosaurs (and 75 percent of all species) 65 million years ago.

 

With a readily achievable detection and deflection system we can avoid their same fate. Professional (and a few amateur) telescopes and radar already function as a nascent early warning system, working every night to discover and track those planet-killers. Happily, none of the 903 we¡¯ve found so far seriously threaten an impact in the next 100 years.

 

Although catastrophic hits are rare, enough of these objects appear to be or are heading our way to require us to make deflection decisions every decade or so. Certainly, when it comes to the far more numerous Tunguska-sized objects, to date we think we¡¯ve discovered less than a half of 1 percent of the million or so that cross Earth¡¯s orbit every year. We need to pinpoint many more of these objects and predict whether they will hit us before it¡¯s too late to do anything other than evacuate ground zero and try to save as many lives as we can.

 

So, how do we turn a hit into a miss? While there are technical details galore, the most sensible approach involves rear-ending the asteroid. A decade or so ahead of an expected impact, we would need to ram a hunk of copper or lead into an asteroid in order to slightly change its velocity. In July 2005, we crashed the Deep Impact spacecraft into comet Tempel 1 to learn more about comets¡¯ chemical composition, and this proved to be a crude but effective method.

 

It may be necessary to make a further refinement to the object¡¯s course. In that case, we could use a gravity tractor ¡ª an ordinary spacecraft that simply hovers in front of the asteroid and employs the ship¡¯s weak gravitational attraction as a tow-rope. But we don¡¯t want to wait to test this scheme when potentially millions of lives are at stake. Let¡¯s rehearse, at least once, before performing at the Met!

 

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has just recommended to Congress that NASA begin preparing a deflection capacity. In parallel, my fellow astronaut Tom Jones and I led the Task Force on Planetary Defense of the NASA Advisory Council. We released our report a couple of weeks ago, strongly urging that the financing required for this public safety issue be added to NASA¡¯s budget.

 

This is, surprisingly, not an expensive undertaking. Adding just $250 million to $300 million to NASA¡¯s budget would, over the next 10 years, allow for a full inventory of the near-Earth asteroids that could do us harm, and the development and testing of a deflection capacity. Then all we¡¯d need would be an annual maintenance budget of $50 million to $75 million.

 

By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.