parents

I don't know about you, but there was a lot of excitement at the Tiemann household when this image popped up on the screen. It meant that nights of field work, evenings of programming, and a weekend of multimedia production all pointed at one, inescapable conclusion: my crazy bat project was a SUCCESS and the promise I made to my daughter was KEPT!!

First things first. If you have been following this blog, you know that a week ago I had the crazy idea of trying to record bats. After finally having an opportunity to use my aforementioned SONY PMC-D1, and after spending another few hours trying to convince myself I had captured something, in the end I felt a bit like one of the members of the Warren Commission looking at the Zapruder film and asking "you want me to make a finding based on this?" If I was going to convince my daughter that we had, in fact, captured and identified bat sounds beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was going to take more than a few suspicious noises of post-processed audio before I could be satisfied that the burden of proof could be met. In the days after my first blog posting, things were looking fairly bleak for the project, but I was determined to prove that with a little technology (a little more than you might suspect), I could, in fact, make good.… Read more

The first time I saw Education.com a few weeks ago, I immediately thought I was looking at a work of genius.

With articles titled "Getting Your Pre-Kindergartener Ready to Read" and "Scientists Say Kids Need More Video Games" the site hones right in on the fears and anxieties of the modern parent. "Look. An article on 4H programs. I think that'd be a good way to round out the extracurricular activities." "Is there any information on a home spectroscopy system for trans fats testing?"

I know this target audience. I … Read more

Type the word "education" into Google and the search engine will spit up 690 million results, with top links to a U.S. government site, Wikipedia, the New York Times and Apple Computer.

For PTA types, that much information could be a curse. That's why a Silicon Valley upstart aims to cater to time-pressed parents with a new reference Web site that's all about child-age schooling.

The site, called Education.com, launched in beta Thursday. According to CEO Ron Fortune, the site is designed to be "the WebMD of education" for parents and teachers … Read more

An e-mail exchange with another Craver yesterday, for one reason or another, led to my embarrassing revelation that photos exist of me at a very young age wearing a pair of big, fake fennec fox ears. It's embarrassing, yes, but after reading this post on Geekologie I realized that things could be much, much worse. The poor little munchkin in this photo will have to deal for the rest of his or her life with the fact that there exists visual evidence that he or she used to get pushed around in a Star Wars stroller. To be more … Read more

This is just sad. Technology is a wonderful thing, but there are times when it's just unnecessary--especially in parenting.

Take, for example, the "Reverse Alarm Clock," a prototype device from Carnegie Mellon University. Using icons such as the moon and sun, Electronista says, it supposedly trains kids to sleep and wake up at appointed hours. (Good luck with that.)

Apparently, some university researchers need to get out of the lab and spend a little more time around living beings, particularly families with small children. Otherwise, they'll continue to come up with ideas like the "Intellicot,&… Read more

This may seem silly if you haven't experienced parental sleep deprivation, but anyone who's cared for a newborn for any length of time will undoubtedly understand its usefulness. The "Itzbeen Timer" tells you how long it's been (get it?) since a baby's last nap, feeding, diaper change or anything else you're sure to forget a minute later.

Could a pencil and paper do the trick too? Sure, but that assumes you can remember your own name after the first week back from the hospital. In addition to alerting you for each appointed task (… Read more

If you're a parent, chances are you've tried a baby monitor. And chances are even greater that you've tried one that sucked. That, at least, has been our experience and that of practically every other mom and dad we know.

Hammacher Schlemmer is trying to right this widespread wrong with a $200 "Superior Baby Monitor" that does address one obvious flaw in many other models: This one uses "digital enhanced cordless communication" (DECT) that will automatically find an open frequency among 60 channels, avoiding interference from phones, microwaves and other electronic appliances. (In … Read more

AT&T rolled out a new security portal today called Smart Limits. Designed for parents who want to monitor all aspects of their children's activities, the site provides instructions for parental controls of the Internet, cellular phones, television watching, and regular landline telephone calls. There is one catch, though: all the information is for AT&T's services, so it's not going to work on your Comcast cable box or Verizon cell phone.

There's obviously a big push for parental controls, as Windows Vista and Web services like MySpace recently have pushed out new child protection initiatives. … Read more

Announced today at Demo 07, security company Inilex is launching its own GPS car security system. Like competitor Lo Jack's early warning system, Inilex has a GPS hardware unit that's installed in your vehicle and alerts you if your car is moving when you're not in it. The unit also lets you know how fast your car is going. You can secure your vehicle via phone or a Web-based interface. What's really cool is that Inilex has created a way to make your own perimeters called "geo fences." Going outside of or (in some … Read more