Monday, July 17, 2006

Smoke-abused Kids

Look at this picture:


What's wrong with it? Nothing special, apparently.

Law permits smoking in open spaces even in presence of children. As you can see, the smoking mother doesn't seem to care about her little girl's passive smoking. After all, smoke kills only smokers (the label says on the cigarette brand advertisement behind the seat), not the people around smokers who are forced to breathe the residual smoke they produce (maybe the most dangerous). In this situation, children are more defenseless than adults since they are stuck with their parents and cannot choose to leave the smoking area.

Once before this snapshot, I was waiting at the bus station in Rome and a mother sitting next to me begun smoking just in face of her little kid. I asked her if she was aware of the dangers of passive smoke for children. She angrily replied by saying that she perfectly knew how to take care of her kid and impolitely recommended me to mind my own business.

I guess that I would have received the same treatment if I had informed the lady in the picture about the same issue. So I decided to adopt a new strategy: SmartMobbing! SmartMobs has been recently used to expose misbehaving people on the Internet such as the Dog-poop Girl and the Amir's broken laptop sold on eBay (maybe the latter was an exaggerated reaction).

I hope that this picture will trigger some reflection about the danger of passive smoke for children (and people in general) and I encourage to circulate it on the web.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Multimodal interfaces Course

A very nice course in Multimodal Interfaces has been given this year (2006) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Fribourg . Videos of students projects are available here .

Read more at diuf.unifr.ch/courses/0...