Tag Archive for: opinion

How parents can foster ‘positive creativity’ in kids to make the world a better place | Opinion

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Sareh Karami, Mississippi State University; Mehdi Ghahremani, Mississippi State University, and Robert Sternberg, Cornell University

Creativity involves the production of ideas that are both new and also useful or effective. This definition makes it sound as though creativity is quite positive. And often it is.

During the pandemic, creativity gave birth to new ways to work, attend school, tour museums, experience concerts and more – not to mention to develop vaccines and cutting-edge COVID-19 treatments.

As university professors who have collectively studied creativity for over 50 years, we know the many personal and social benefits of creativity.

But we also know that there is a dark side of creativity, too.

Cybercriminals, for example, used their creativity to take advantage of the disruption and fears caused by the pandemic to attack countries, businesses and institutions and steal personal information from people.

Or think about how hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin were promoted as COVID-19 treatments. Some people gained something from these novel treatment ideas – perhaps money, power or the prospect of reelection – but the drugs had no empirical support and people who took them may have bypassed drugs that could have actually helped them.

The point is, creativity is not always socially desirable. So, merely teaching kids to be creative does not cut it in the modern age. Here we offer tips for parents and caregivers on how to minimize the negative forms of creativity in children – and themselves – and foster positive creativity instead.

1. Identify the purpose of a new product or idea

Discuss with children the objectives of innovations – their own or ones they use in everday life. Assess the objectives not only for novelty and usefulness or meaningfulness, but also for how they contribute to the common good. Like criminal hacking, creativity can be used to benefit the inventor but harm other individuals. Hacking itself is not bad unless done with the wrong intention. Ethical hackers use their creativity to help companies locate weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their information systems by using the same skills and tactics of criminal hackers….

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Kaimar Karu: Estonia deserves better from the presidential election | Opinion

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Even though the President of Estonia has no political power, the compatibility of the person’s political views with those of the party is of high importance for all five party leaders. This has increased relevance in the light of the local elections coming up later this year. The pronoun in “our president” could easily be misunderstood for that of the party, rather than the nation’s people.

Estonia’s constitution is very clear on the president’s responsibilities within our parliamentary democracy. None of these is dependent on the person’s political views, yet, the last five years have changed the public’s perception of the role, and this, in combination with fond memories of the first post-soviet president, Lennart Meri, has created an incompatible set of requirements for the next president.

The role could be unnecessary, but it is definitely needed. The person should be like our current president, but not at all like our current president. They should be apolitical, but definitely an active politician. They should unite, but definitely take sides. They should be smart, but not smarter. They should be older, but definitely young. The role belongs to a woman, but definitely not a woman etc.

It is difficult to imagine a person active in politics today, fighting for their party’s policies and against those from other parties representing roughly 80 percent of the voters, not always with the kindest of words, suddenly abandoning their raison d’être and becoming a party-agnostic, policy-agnostic promoter of common principles and decency over partisanship and one true answer to everything.

Before setting the selection criteria and definitely before speculating with any names, it would be good to think about what the country needs. What are the challenges Estonia and its people have to deal with in the coming years, considering our geopolitical position, threats and opportunities? We need to discuss how the head of state, in their international and domestic roles, can help achieve our objectives and mitigate risks. The role of the president is an active one, rather than a political trophy.

Those discussions, if happening, have gone unnoticed by the general public this time.

Again and again,…

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Iranian cyberattacks threaten our daily operations – opinion

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According to a Sky News report based on classified documents allegedly from Iran, a cyber attack could sink a cargo ship or blow up a fuel pump at a gas station.

The Sky News report also details how satellite devices are used by the shipping industry globally and how a computer-based system controls lighting, heating, and ventilation in smart buildings worldwide.

According to a security source with knowledge of five research documents, the 57-page collection was gathered by an offensive cyber unit called Shahid Kaveh, part of Iran’s terrorist-linked Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

 “They are creating a target bank to be used whenever they see fit,” said the source, who requested to remain anonymous for the documents to be discussed directly.

 Almost all of the files include a quote that appears to be from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: “The Islamic Republic of Iran must become among the world’s most powerful in the area of cyber.” Sources describe this quote as something like a “commander’s intent statement.”

The front pages of only two of the reports mention the date of completion.

The first examines what is known as a building management system – the computer technology that controls things like lights, heating, and ventilation in smart buildings – from November 19, 2020.

Companies that provide these services are listed in the documents. Several manufacturers were involved, including Honeywell in the…

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President Ilves: More reflection, please | Opinion

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I decided at the start of my ten years as president that I will dedicate my June 23 or Victory Day speech to security and national defense. These have been the most pressing maters for our people throughout the 20th century.

And throughout history, threats the world and Estonia faced had always been kinetic – bullets, shells, cannons, bombs, tanks, artillery – at least until 2007. Force is mass times acceleration, if we recall our Newtonian physics. Things fly and destroy, while heavier things fly and destroy more. It has been the case since the early man discovered he can more easily destroy his fellow humans by using a weapon or a tool for slaughtering, as portrayed by Kubrick in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Our whole understanding of security changed in 2007 when cyberattacks perpetrated in Russia brought life to a halt in Estonia. It was something the world had never seen before, where one country shut down or disabled another without using kinetic force. Based on the words of German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz that war is the continuation of politics by other means, it was the first cyber war.

The world did not believe us at first. NATO did not take cyberattacks seriously. What is this about war? It is unheard-of and obviously a figment of imagination of the Russophobic Eastern Europeans. Nine years on, NATO decided at its 2016 summit that cyberspace would become the fourth domain of war, in addition to land, sea and air. For the first time since its founding in 1949, NATO had decided that wars can be waged in other ways than kinetically.

Every even remotely thorough article or book on cyberwarfare starts with the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia these days.

Concept broadening

However, non-kinetic warfare went beyond cyberattacks. The dizzying pace of Internetization resulted in social media in the early 2000s the first flagship of which was Facebook. Things picked up even more momentum when social media moved to smart portable devices that made the Internet and social media universally attainable. Facebook alone has nearly three billion users today to which we can add China’s Weichat and the Russian vKontakte.

It only took a few years for social media to fan the…

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