As an occasional gamer I was mildly shocked to discover that one in 10 youth in the US are considered as "addicts". According to a study of the gaming habits of eight to 18-year-olds, playing games for 24 hours or more a week is addiction.

This Iowa State University study should force bad parents - and they must be if they let school goers play for more than 24 hours a week - to reconsider what they let their children do.

Gamers were considered pathological if they exhibited at least six of 11 symptoms considered as signs of gambling addicts. The pathological gamers in the study played video games 24 hours per week, about twice as much as non-pathological gamers.

Here are the signs so you are better armed to deal with a potential problem: They were more likely to have video game systems in their bedrooms, reported having more trouble paying attention in school, received poorer grades in school, had more health problems, were more likely to feel "addicted" and, in some cases, stole to support their habit.

Pathological gamers were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with attention problems such as Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Of course, gaming has positive effects: You really have to have quick reflexes on many of them, and you have to think fast to figure out some of the puzzles placed in your way.

With the ability to play games with others over the Internet I would go further. Playing games is much better than having your teenager plunk themselves down in front of the TV and zoning out to re-run of Friends. At least there is social interaction. All it takes is some parenting. I know, many will say it is difficult since every child really should have access to a computer and the Internet at home. Yet, the study points out that only half of the 1,178 in the survey had rules at home that limited access to games.

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Google has released some more test functions to its Internet offerings. The Google News Timeline (http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com) is a fascinating way to waste a few hours at work. The function gathers the same material you find through a Google News Search and lets you navigate the results using a timeline.

It is a useful way of organising the news in a more readable format than simply a straight list of what came up through the Google search engine. You get a calendar of events you can see by day, week, month, year and even decade.

The News Timeline also goes further by allowing users to search content from blogs, magazines, news photos, videos, movies or books.

In addition to searching the Google News database, you can search through content from specific blogs, magazines, newspapers, books and movies, among other categories. For example a movie search for Matt Damon (I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley recently) brings up a timeline of all the movies he appeared in. For some fun and education, type in "Bermuda" under the different categories and over different timelines to see how the Island is sliced and diced by Google.

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I also advise you to point your browser to the new UN World Digital Library site (www.wdl.org), which is still in the making, but already forges ahead in creating an online digital library of the world's cultural heritages.

The UN's task is to put online "significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials". So far there is one entry for Bermuda. It is a map of Bermuda made by Vincenzo Coronelli (1650-1718), billed as "one of the most important figures in the history of Western cartography".

The library is designed to hold an unlimited number of texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute. So, here is a shout out to librarians in Bermuda to get going and put any useful heritage online. It will be useful to teachers and others who want to do research.

Send comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com