Saturday, July 07, 2012


And I remember when getting a valentine was a big deal...
Teenage Sexting Is Becoming The Norm
“Under most existing laws, if our findings were extrapolated nationally, several million teens could be prosecuted for child pornography,” explains a new study on teen sexting, which finds that a whopping 28% of teenagers text fully-nude pictures of themselves. We took a deep dive into the much reported Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine article, and found some weird insights into a 21st century trend that is quickly becoming the norm among teenagers.
1. White kids love sexting.
2. “Several million” teens could be held liable for child pornography, as some states do not define inappropriate sexual behavior as only between an adult and a minor.
3. If you find sexting pics sent from your kid’s phone, there’s a strong possibility that he or she is sexually active.
4. Gender stereotypes hold true with new technology: boys are bothered by being asked to sext much less than girls.
5. The suburbs aren’t safe from the trend either: socio-economic status had virtually no effect on whether teens sexted.


I'll have to download these since I want to appear to be following all that “politically correct” nonsense.
July 06, 2012
EPIC: Industry Association Publishes Guidelines for Drone Operators
Follow up to previous postings on drones, via EPIC: "The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the organization representing drone manufacturers and operators, has released an Industry "Code of Conduct". Compliance with the guidelines is both voluntary and not enforceable. The association acknowledges that invasive drone surveillance technology poses a risk to the public, and specifically tasked users to "respect the privacy of individuals." In February, EPIC, joined by over 100 organizations, experts, and members of the public, submitted a petition to the FAA requesting a public rulemaking on the privacy impact of drone use in U.S. Airspace. The Agency has not yet responded or addressed these concerns. For more information, see EPIC: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Drones."


The “Ponderous Pendulum of Public Privacy Perception” swings again.
California Court Suspends Sacramento Judge’s Order For Juror Facebook Postings
July 6, 2012 by Dissent
From AP, the latest in the “Juror Number One” case:
The California Supreme Court has suspended a Sacramento judge’s order requiring a juror to submit his Facebook postings about a criminal trial so the judge could decide if the juror’s comments constituted misconduct.
The justices on Monday granted the juror, Arturo Ramirez, a temporary stay of Judge Michael Kenny’s order compelling Ramirez to give Facebook permission to turn over his postings about the 2010 trial involving a gang-related beating.
Read more on CBS.
If you feel like you’re watching a judicial ping pong [That works too Bob] match, you’re in good company. It was on May 31 that the California Court of Appeal in Sacramento had denied Ramirez’s petition.


If this is believed to be true, at what point will social networks be required to identify suicidal users and notify someone?
"The data that is available in social networks is often used to detect the opinion of the crowd — but can it reveal the state of mind of the individual. New research suggests that some simple but non-obvious characteristics of social network use are related to suicide. Data mining is usually about determining things of economic advantage, but in this case, suicide we have a personal loss and an economic one. A new paper by a group of Japanese researchers Naoki Masuda, Issei Kurahashi and Hiroko Onari claims to have found ways of detecting suicidal tendencies — or at least the tendency to think about suicide, so-called 'suicide ideation.' The study used the Japanese social network mixi, which has over 27 million members and allows users to join any of over 4.5 million topic groups — some focusing on the subject of suicide. This provided a study and control group to compare. The most interesting finding is that while users in the suicide group had lots of friends, they didn't have as many transitive relationships i.e. where A friends B friends C friends A. This suggests that it isn't lack of friends but a lack of tight social groupings that is a factor. The same technique could be used to investigate similar problems such as depression and alcohol abuse." [and voting Democrat... Bob]


Geek tools
Opera’s ‘SPDY’ Sense Tingling in Labs Release
The latest Labs release of Opera’s flagship desktop web browser adds support for the nascent SPDY protocol.
You can download the latest Opera Labs build for Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit, Mac and Linux from Opera.
… The SPDY protocol handles all the same tasks as HTTP, but SPDY can do it all about 50 percent faster.
If you’d like to get your own site serving over SPDY, check out mod_spdy, a SPDY module for the Apache server (currently a beta release) or read up on Nginx’s preliminary support.


Attention Ethical Hackers. During the Blitz, England was able to “bend” the radio beams the Germans were using for navigation. Your assignment is to “bend” a concave shape to the detection grid in our goal and a convex shape to the other guy's... Don't make it too obvious – no scoring when the ball is at mid-field.
Soccer Finally Comes to Its Senses With Goal-Line Tech
Soccer has finally come to its senses.
After years of discussion and debate, the sport has at long last approved the use of goal-line technology at all levels of the game. Thursday’s decision by the International Football Association Board will all but end flubbed calls that have decided games as monumental as the World Cup final and made the sport look embarrassingly Jurassic in a hyper-connected age of instant replay and instant communication.


Odd & ends I find interesting...
A federal judge has struck down the Department of Education’s “gainful employment” rules, which the Obama Adminstration issued last year and were designed to stop career training and for-profit schools from leaving students with massive amounts of debt but no job prospects. The for-profit schools had opposed the regulation, and Judge Contreras agreed saying that the provisions meant to measure schools’ preparation of students had "no real basis." [Wow! There goes a whole bunch of laws... Bob]
… Stanford University recently announced that computer science has become the largest major on campus, with more than 90% of its students taking at least one CS class. The school is now considering how it might redesign the degree and its core curriculum.


There are more than a few books out there...
The PDF file format is widely used by book publishers and manual creators whenever they decide to share their work online. Sometimes these books are downloaded by people and then converted into other PDF versions and re-uploaded. While searching for books, you are mostly looking for the high quality versions. This is where a site called Top HQ Books can help.

No comments: