George Soros @georgesoros outlines his theory of reflexivity, the errors in the European banking system, and a small window when Germany can help with prospects.

… I should like to put before you a radically different approach to financial markets. It was inspired by Karl Popper who taught me that people’s interpretation of reality never quite corresponds to reality itself. This led me to study the relationship between the two. I found a two-way connection between the participants’ thinking and the situations in which they participate. On the one hand people seek to understand the situation; that is the cognitive function. On the other, they seek to make an impact on the situation; I call that the causative or manipulative function. The two functions connect the thinking agents and the situations in which they participate in opposite directions. In the cognitive function the situation is supposed to determine the participants’ views; in the causative function the participants’ views are supposed to determine the outcome. When both functions are at work at the same time they interfere with each other. The two functions form a circular relationship or feedback loop. I call that feedback loop reflexivity. In a reflexive situation the participants’ views cannot correspond to reality because reality is not something independently given; it is contingent on the participants’ views and decisions. The decisions, in turn, cannot be based on knowledge alone; they must contain some bias or guess work about the future because the future is contingent on the participants’ decisions.

Fallibility and reflexivity are tied together like Siamese twins. Without fallibility there would be no reflexivity – although the opposite is not the case: people’s understanding would be imperfect even in the absence of reflexivity. Of the two twins, fallibility is the first born. Together, they ensure both a divergence between the participants’ view of reality and the actual state of affairs and a divergence between the participants’ expectations and the actual outcome.

Obviously, I did not discover reflexivity. Others had recognized it before me, often under a different name. Robert Merton wrote about self-fulfilling prophecies and the bandwagon effect, Keynes compared financial markets to a beauty contest where the participants had to guess who would be the most popular choice. But starting from fallibility and reflexivity I focused on a problem area, namely the role of misconceptions and misunderstandings in shaping the course of events that mainstream economics tried to ignore. This has made my interpretation of reality more realistic than the prevailing paradigm.

Soros describes the defect in the design of the Euro.

When the euro was introduced the regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital; and the central bank accepted all government bonds at its discount window on equal terms. Commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate the bonds of the weaker euro members in order to earn a few extra basis points. That is what caused interest rates to converge which in turn caused competitiveness to diverge. Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, undertook structural reforms and became more competitive. Other countries enjoyed housing and consumption booms on the back of cheap credit, making them less competitive. Then came the crash of 2008 which created conditions that were far removed from those prescribed by the Maastricht Treaty. Many governments had to shift bank liabilities on to their own balance sheets and engage in massive deficit spending. These countries found themselves in the position of a third world country that had become heavily indebted in a currency that it did not control. Due to the divergence in economic performance Europe became divided between creditor and debtor countries.

The future solution requires that imbalances between stronger and weaker euro members be reduced.

In my judgment the authorities have a three months’ window during which they could still correct their mistakes and reverse the current trends. By the authorities I mean mainly the German government and the Bundesbank because in a crisis the creditors are in the driver’s seat and nothing can be done without German support.

I expect that the Greek public will be sufficiently frightened by the prospect of expulsion from the European Union that it will give a narrow majority of seats to a coalition that is ready to abide by the current agreement. But no government can meet the conditions so that the Greek crisis is liable to come to a climax in the fall. By that time the German economy will also be weakening so that Chancellor Merkel will find it even more difficult than today to persuade the German public to accept any additional European responsibilities. That is what creates a three months’ window.

Correcting the mistakes and reversing the trend would require some extraordinary policy measures to bring conditions back closer to normal, and bring relief to the financial markets and the banking system. These measures must, however, conform to the existing treaties. The treaties could then be revised in a calmer atmosphere so that the current imbalances will not recur. It is difficult but not impossible to design some extraordinary measures that would meet these tough requirements. They would have to tackle simultaneously the banking problem and the problem of excessive government debt, because these problems are interlinked. Addressing one without the other, as in the past, will not work.

Banks need a European deposit insurance scheme in order to stem the capital flight. They also need direct financing by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) which has to go hand-in-hand with eurozone-wide supervision and regulation. The heavily indebted countries need relief on their financing costs. There are various ways to provide it but they all need the active support of the Bundesbank and the German government.

That is where the blockage is. The authorities are working feverishly to come up with a set of proposals in time for the European summit at the end of this month. Based on the current newspaper reports the measures they will propose will cover all the bases I mentioned but they will offer only the minimum on which the various parties can agree while what is needed is a convincing commitment to reverse the trend. That means the measures will again offer some temporary relief but the trends will continue. But we are at an inflection point. After the expiration of the three months’ window the markets will continue to demand more but the authorities will not be able to meet their demands.

Remarks at the Festival of Economics, Trento Italy | George Soros | June 2, 2012 | georgesoros.com at http://www.georgesoros.com/interviews-speeches/entry/remarks_at_the_festival_of_economics_trento_italy/.

The Festival of Economics Trento (Italy), May 31 – June 20, 2012, had a theme of “Life cycles and intergenerational transfers”.

It was the Lemon Bucket Orkestra @lemonbucket that preceded me at the Pearson Airport arrivals gates on May 31, when I was coming back from Dallas.

Linking the experience with the musicians was easier with the Sunday newspaper article.

The 14-member band are doing something long forgotten by most Romanians — playing complex folk and Roma gypsy tunes, and belting out boozy choruses in Ukrainian, Serbian and other regional languages. But to the surprise of many, these minstrels are not Romanian old-timers. The Lemon Bucket Orkestra is mainly comprised of muscular Canadian party animals in their twenties who look and act like punks with long blond hair, neon mohawks, and a wild spirit formed in guerrilla street performances in downtown Toronto and most recently, on board a delayed Air Canada flight at Pearson International Airport.

“Isn’t it nice that a nice group of Canadians are playing nice music from your country?” band leader and violinist Mark Marczyk asks a crowd of about 150 on a Sunday night in May at Bar Mosckva in the baroque city of Oradea near the Hungarian border.

“Lemon Bucket Orkestra bring Romanian music to Romania” | Christopher Johnson | June 3, 2012 | Toronto Star, at http://www.toronto.com/article/731116–lemon-bucket-orkestra-bring-romanian-music-to-romania

This also led discovering the performance on the outbound flight on Air Canada.

Somehow, I’m not surprised that the Lemon Bucket Orkestra is Canadian.

Even pro financial traders buy in bubbles, writes @timkiladze citing neuroscientist John M Coates. Builds on behavioural science research by Charles Holt, Vernon Smith, Daniel Kahneman, Scott Huettel.

John Coates, a Canadian-born research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge and a former trader at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, has run experiments on trading floors in the City of London.

“Once you start making above-average profits, as most people do during a bull market, you start getting this high,” he says. “I think it’s enough to pretty much squash memory” of previous bubbles.

His new book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, details these findings and ties them back to what the behavioural economists started studying years ago.

Prof. Coates admits that even he, someone equipped with a PhD in economics from Cambridge, has fallen victim to the testosterone highs. “I don’t think I ever would have hit on this if I hadn’t experienced it myself,” he says. “We have an unstable biology, and it’s very powerful.”

Yet there are people – even whole firms – who appear to effectively game these bubbles. At a recent luncheon, Prof. Holt, the University of Virginia behavioural economist, had a conversation with a successful hedge- fund manager who confided that he did not trade on companies’ long-term fundamentals.

Instead, he looked at the previous seven days of trading and read newspaper headlines and television talking points, going by the theory that economist Burton Malkiel espoused – that “a blindfolded chimp throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal” had a 50-per-cent chance of beating the market, because humans are so subject to their irrational psychology.  [...]

Human biases are “so ingrained that just knowledge isn’t enough to overcome them,” Dr. Huettel says.

“From an evolutionary point of view,” says Caltech’s Prof. Camerer, controlling urges “basically isn’t something that any other species needed the capacity to do.” Add in the financial incentives on Bay Street and Wall Street, and we practically jump at bubbles.

For traders, “there’s no downside to rolling the dice,” Prof. Coates says. “Bubbles occur once every five years, but in the meantime you’ve pocketed four bonuses, and you don’t give them back.”

Why do we keep falling for economic bubbles – and will we ever learn? | Tim Kiladze | May 26, 2012 | The Globe and Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/why-do-we-keep-falling-for-economic-bubbles-and-will-we-ever-learn/article2444187/singlepage/#articlecontent.

John Coates is at Cambridge Neuroscience at http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?jmc98

External hires underperform internal workers for 2 years, are paid 18%-20% more, and exit faster.

According to Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell, “external hires” get significantly lower performance evaluations for their first two years on the job than do internal workers who are promoted into similar jobs. They also have higher exit rates, and they are paid “substantially more.” About 18% to 20% more. On the plus side for these external hires, if they stay beyond two years, they get promoted faster than do those who are promoted internally.”

Most jobs are entered into through a variety of different routes, sometimes by being hired from the outside and sometimes by moving up from inside the firm,” says Bidwell. “I was curious as to what the effect of these different routes would be” on an individuals job performance. His research is presented in a paper titled, “Paying More to Get Less: The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility.”

The issue has significance for organizations, Bidwell says, as they think about where they source their employees, especially higher-level ones. Do they “grow their own” or do they go out into the job market and hire outsiders? “My research documents some quite substantial costs to external hires and some substantial benefits to internal mobility,” he notes.  [....]

For his research, Bidwell analyzed personnel data from a U.S. investment banking division from 2003 to 2009. [....]

Unlike other promoted workers, those who were simultaneously promoted and transferred to another group did not perform any better than external hires. Bidwell speculates that “the skills that are important to our jobs may be very specific to the positions that we are in. Even large changes in the nature of jobs within the organization were associated with performance declines.”

Yet overall, Bidwell says, external hiring has grown much more frequent since the early 1980s, especially for experienced high level positions and especially in larger organizations. “It used to be that smaller organizations always did a lot of outside hiring while big ones focused more on internal mobility. But now the pendulum has shifted toward external hiring and away from internal mobility for large organizations as well.

“Companies should understand that it can often be harder than it seems to bring in people who look good on paper,” says Bidwell. “In addition, there is a suspicion that ‘the grass is always greener’ attitude plays a role in some companies’ desire to hire from the outside. Managers see a great CV and get excited about playing ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ even when it’s hard to know what weaknesses the external hires bring with them.”

On the other hand, “to promote more people internally also means that companies need to have a long-term perspective and know how big a pipeline of people will be needed in the future,” notes Bidwell. It also requires managers to ensure that internal people are aware of the opportunities open to them. “Finally, there are clearly some costs to internal mobility — for example, the cost of training people in-house versus piggybacking on someone else’s training.”

Why External Hires Get Paid More, and Perform Worse, than Internal Staff (Matthew Bidwell) | March 28, 2012 | Knowledge@Wharton at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2961.

Original publication as Matthew Bidwell, “Paying More to Get Less
The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility”, Administrative Sciences Quarterly, September 2011, vol. 56, no. 3, pp 369-407, doi:10.1177/0001839211433562

Designers need to get beyond “trinket architecture”, says @darrylcondon. Story by @erinmillar suggests Seven Rules for Sustanable Communities by Patrick Condon at UBC.

[Darryl] Condon did some research. The World Bank estimates that a more conservative 200-million new cars will be on the road in India by 2040, meaning that a new car enters the system every five seconds. In contrast, Mr. Condon considered his recent LEED Gold project, four years in the making, which saves an impressive 450 tons of carbon dioxide annually. Every eight minutes, that accomplishment is cancelled out by the CO2 output of new cars in India. “In the time I’ve been speaking to you, four years of efforts at reducing greenhouse emissions from one project have been offset,” he says.

This realization is the kind of disruptive revelation that can change the way people think about their entire field. For Mr. Condon, the disruption didn’t discourage him but instead provoked increased motivation to find creative solutions. “We’re proud of our work, and there’s a lot to celebrate,” Mr. Condon says. “But we really need to challenge our assumptions to make sure we’re actually having the greatest impact.”

Too often, our society approaches its formidable environmental challenges by focusing on technological innovation, according to Patrick Condon (no relation to Darryl), an urban design professor at the University of British Columbia and author of Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities. “When we think about how to reduce greenhouse gases, the strategy is often to figure out some kind of technology to deal with that. We decide that the solution is X meters of solar panels. These types of additive, green-gizmo fixes often don’t deal with the fundamental entropy of our systems.”

“Trinket architecture” is Darryl Condon’s term for buildings designed in this manner. “The solution isn’t adding fancy technologies to buildings that are fundamentally unsustainable.” He agrees that there are lots of valuable ideas for sustainable technologies; however, he believes we need to find ways to implement them broadly. “The trophy buildings that we build in central areas of cities like Vancouver are really meaningful in terms of learning new [sustainable] ways to do things, but until we find a way to transform what 99 per cent of the built fabric is in North America [the suburbs], we aren’t really dealing with the issues.”

Many sustainability experts agree that if Canada suffers a creativity gap, it’s not evidenced by a deficiency of good ideas, the kind of ideas that result from intense focus on a narrowly-defined problem. Instead they point to a lack of the type of creativity that leads to rethinking whole systems, producing large-scale solutions and implementing valuable ideas. Because the nature of climate change is global, government leadership is essential. Yet, governments are hesitant to act for fear of damaging their economic competitiveness.

Patrick Condon suggests that this is a central reason to foster critical, creative thought and re-examine the fundamentals of our society, such as how we quantify success. “According to our mechanism for economic analysis, increased gasoline sales, car wrecks, and ambulances all show up on the GDP. Those things are seen as good,” he explains. “But what are we innovating for? Presumably to increase access to the good things in life − financial security, a good home, enough leisure to enjoy your family. Isn’t human happiness for our citizens without encumbering others’ happiness the end, not inventing the next widget and controlling the global marketplace?”

Yet reinventing systems as deeply ingrained as the GDP requires radical thinking. A key element is understanding how challenges are broadly connected, rather than attempting to solve problems solely through expertise. For instance, transportation experts may become so focused on how to engineer a new bridge, they lose sight of how it affects housing or water issues. “There is this need to think in cross-disciplinary ways, to depend more on your intuitive powers, the part of the brain that allows for integrative thought and holistic concept generation, which may not have a linear genesis,” says Patrick Condon.

Only radical thinking will solve environmental problems | Erin Millar | May 30, 2012 | The Globe and Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/growth/only-radical-thinking-will-solve-environmental-problems/article2447562/singlepage/#articlecontent.

Excerpt from Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities, Patrick M. Condon.

Seven rules for sustainable, low-carbon communities

1. Restore the streetcar city

The North American city was and is a streetcar city. Streetcar cities are characterized by easy access to transit, a wide variety of house types, and services and job sites very close at hand — the exact elements of a sustainable city. We have largely ignored this fact. It needs rediscovering.

2. Design an interconnected street system

Fine-grain interconnected street networks ensure that all trips are as short as possible, disperse congestion and are compatible with walking, biking and transit.

3. Locate commercial services, frequent transit and schools within a five-minute walk

People will walk if there is something to walk to. The most important walking destinations are the corner store and a transit stop. A minimum gross density of 10 dwelling units per acre is required for this to work.

4. Locate good jobs close to affordable homes

The trend toward ever larger commute distances for workers must be reversed. “Good jobs close to home” is a fundamental requirement. The vast majority of new jobs in the United States and Canada are compatible with complete community districts.

5. Provide a diversity of housing types

Zoning laws have tended to segregate communities by income. Communities designed for only one income cannot be complete, and when repeated throughout the region, they add to transportation problems.

6. Create a linked system of natural areas and parks

Keeping our waters clean and our streams and rivers healthy requires a rethinking of urban drainage systems and stream protection policies. Maintaining the integrity of these systems must be a first design move when planning new communities. Far from protecting these systems through restriction, these systems must form the public space armature of new and restored communities.

7. Invest in lighter, greener, cheaper and smarter infrastructure

Suburban homes have at least four times more infrastructure per dwelling unit than do walkable streetcar neighbourhoods. Exaggerated municipal standards for roads and utilities cost too much to build and maintain, and they destroy watershed function. Smarter, cheaper and greener strategies are required.

The final rule: Love one rule, love them all

These principles represent the elements of a whole. Achieving one without the others — particularly if it is at the expense of the others — will be of limited value and could be counterproductive.

Excerpt from a series starting September 15, 2010, The Tyee at http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/09/15/SevenSustainableRules/

When crossing between Dongxing China and Mon Cai Vietnam, maybe having U.S. dollars for small change would be a good idea.

Crossing an international border on foot was something I had done before, but this was a standout: We were using one that isnt well known to foreigners, between Dongxing, China, and Mong Cai, Vietnam.

Dongxing turned out to be a normal southern Chinese town with more than the usual number of conical straw hats. At the bus station, a swarm of aggressive minivan drivers offered us rides to the border for 10 renminbi RMB. This is not a lot of money by any means. But how far was the border? Perhaps we could walk. It turned out to be a kilometre away – easily walkable – but we had a lot of luggage. We also had no Vietnamese dong, so we had to exchange some of our RMB first.

We were directed to the Bank of China, branches of which you can find in such far corners of the Earth as Spadina and Dundas in downtown Toronto. In the Dongxing branch, we were told that they couldnt change our RMB to dong “because we dont know the exchange rate.”

After a bit of talk and some encouraging smiles on our part, which were designed to cover up our private thoughts, one of the bank officials called in a “friend,” who arrived laden with a large stack of bills, each sporting many zeroes and a portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Did the banker just call in a black-market moneyman? His leather jacket and dirty fingernails made a remarkable contrast to the groomed bank staff. Of course, he arrived by motorbike.

During a conversation largely in Chinese, secondarily in Vietnamese and with a smattering of English thrown in for good measure, the exchange rate mysteriously rose not by small increments but by orders of magnitude. We ended up with 3,000 dong for each RMB, which seemed reasonable.

In other parts of China, a visit to the Bank of China can pad your pockets, not just with bills, but with lots of little pieces of paper with official stamps to prove your right to those bills. In Dongxing, I felt as if I was looking through the wrong end of the Byzantine Chinese money-transaction telescope. But no red ink was stamped on any forms this time. No forms were seen at all.

If the bank visit provided a bit of comic relief from the officiousness of the Chinese, the actual border crossing made up for it. We had to buy a ticket to cross the bridge, and Chinese officials insisted that we put our bags through one of their ubiquitous X-ray machines. Were leaving, folks! After the 10-minute crossing, we were welcomed by friendly Vietnamese waving us past their X-ray machines, which werent even turned on.

The first thing we saw was a bank machine spewing out Vietnamese dong five million at a time. The second? A hotel advertising prices in – wouldnt you know it – U.S. dollars.

Did the bank really just call in the black market? | Bryne Harris | March 30, 2012 | The Globe and Mail at via http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/destinations/travel-asia/did-the-bank-really-just-call-in-the-black-market/article2387058/.

Vince Barabba added as discussant panelist for ISSS 2012 plenary. Author of Decision Loom, was at General Motors and U.S. Census Bureau.

Vincent Barabba

• Chairman and Founder, Market Insight Corporation
• Commissioner, California Citizen Redistricting Commission
• Author, The Decision Loom: A Design for Interactive Decision-Making in Organizations 2011; Meeting of the Minds: Creating the Market-Based Enterprise 1995
• General Manager of Corporate Strategy, General Motors Corporation 1985-2003; Director Market Intelligence, Eastman Kodak 1980-1985; Director, U. S. Census Bureau 1973-1976

Plenary dialectics | ISSS San Jose 2012 | International Society for the Systems Sciences at http://isss.org/world/2012-plenary-dialectics.

When the Governor General of Canada visited Queen Elizabeth II with her family, she did the dishes with the monarch.  Relationships with Canadian federal leaders have been warm and enduring.

In her 60 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II has presided over 20 Parliaments in Canada, featuring 11 prime ministers and 11 governors general.

What is it like to work for the Queen? An array of former prime ministers and governors general offer glimpses of working life under Her Majesty’s rule.

Michaëlle Jean

No one tells you when you are named governor general that you might end up doing dishes with the Queen. But this is exactly what happened in early September 2005, as Michaëlle Jean was preparing to take up her new role as the Queen’s representative in Canada.

About three weeks before her formal installation, Jean flew across the Atlantic to spend some time with the Queen at her summer residence, Balmoral Castle. Rather unusually, in terms of protocol and precedence, Jean had asked to make it a family visit; to bring along her husband, filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond, and their daughter, Marie-Eden, then 6 years old. There was much fuss and back-and-forth among the protocol people about this business of bringing the whole family. Usually appointees arrive for these visits with only a spouse, if anyone at all.

“We had to negotiate that; it was an ‘adjustment,’” Jean said. In addition, Jean and the family received extensive, detailed instructions on all the protocol minutiae for dealing with that first meeting. “It was pretty heavy.”

So it was a pleasant surprise for Jean to pull up at Balmoral, family in tow, and find the Queen and Prince Philip standing at the front door like any weekend hosts, casually walking out and extending their hands. Philip pulled Marie aside and asked if she wanted a Coca-Cola. Marie said she wasn’t allowed to have this at home. “It’ll just be between you and me,” Philip replied.

Jean realized, then and there, that she could start breathing.

The Queen led the family to their quarters, which happened to be Queen Victoria’s old suite, and showed them how to use the tub, including the fussy new faucets installed after a recent renovation. “She wanted to greet us in her home, herself,” Jean said.

The entire stay, in fact, turned out to be a remarkable glimpse into the warm family life of the royals.

The Queen told Jean that they would be dining at a favourite cottage on the property, about a half-hour’s drive from the castle. And the driver turned out to be none other than the Queen herself, behind the wheel of a new, fully outfitted Range Rover, which clearly was a prized possession. Tearing along the road, with Lafond in front, Jean and Marie in the back seat, the Queen told of how she had learned to take apart car engines in her service as a volunteer mechanic during World War II.

“She drives very fast,” Jean said. “(Yet) she handles the car very well … We got a great sense of her character and her independence.”

Pulling up to the cottage, Jean noticed a man by the barbecue, wearing hunting plaid, who had obviously been given the task of cooking the dinner. While the Queen and the rest of Jean’s family went inside the cottage, Jean wandered over and discovered another surprise — Prince Philip doing barbecue duty. They chatted and Philip gave Jean a bit of advice: compliment the Queen on her salad dressing. Apparently it’s a recipe that Her Majesty invented, and she is quite proud of it.

Walking inside, Jean discovered a hive of kitchen activity. “And who do I see cooking? The Earl of Wessex (Edward, the Queen’s youngest son), cooking the appetizers.”

No staff members were in sight — this was a dinner entirely created by the royals, for their Canadian visitors. It was one family, dining with another. “It was great conversation, fun … no protocol,” Jean said.

It also happened to be Jean’s 48th birthday — a fact she hadn’t disclosed. But a cake was magically produced at the end of dinner, with “21 Forever” written in icing.

And at the end of the dinner, both families gathered up the plates, went into the kitchen and did the dishes.

In addition to the story by former Governor Generals Michaëlle Jean and Adrienne Clarkson (getting lost in Windsor Castle), and accounts from former prime ministers Joe Clark, John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin give a sense of the Queen as a person.

When the Queen is your boss | Susan Delacourt | May 26, 2012 | Toronto Star at http://www.thestar.com/news/world/royals/article/1193874–when-the-queen-is-your-boss.

By 2015, 50% of IBM segment profit will come from Software, and 30% of geographic revenue will come from Growth Markets, says IBM Annual Report 2011 in “Business Mix Changes” from the “Generating Higher Value” section.

Generating Higher Value at IBM | March 2012 | IBM Annual Report 2011 at http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2011/ghv/#two.

Kids predisposed to smartphones, because 39% of moms give them to play with, says @eMarketer, citing @StacyDeBroff and @JKC888, nearly as much as DVDs or Nintendo.

A Mom Central Consulting survey from January 2012, for example, found that 39% of US mothers who use the internet, have a mobile phone that they pass on to their children to keep them engaged during a car trip. Only the Nintendo DS and the car DVD player or video were used more often to keep kids engaged during car travel (at 40% and 47%, respectively). And just over one-quarter of the moms surveyed shared their iPads with their kids.

[....]
Another survey conducted in July 2011 by BlogHer and The Parenting Group dovetails with Mom Central’s findings. Some 33% of Gen Y and 20% of Gen X moms who use the internet told BlogHer that their children had used smartphones by age 2. Slightly higher percentages of moms said their children age 2 or younger had used mobile phones and laptops.

Smartphones Are Mom’s New Babysitter | May 9, 2012 | eMarketer http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1009031&R=1009031.

First referenced article is “Moms Share the Top 5 Ways Technology Impacts Family Life” | Stacy DeBroff | April 13, 2012 | momcentralconsulting.com at http://insightblog.momcentralconsulting.com/2012/04/moms-share-teh-top-5-ways-tech-impacts-family-life.html

Second referenced article is “Today’s E-Moms: Engaged, Enabled, Entertained” | Jane Collins | August 2, 2011 | blogher.com at http://www.blogher.com/todays-e-moms-engaged-enabled-entertained