The suit, filed today in Los Angeles County Court, accuses Facebook of using the names and images of minors to endorse products--a violation of California law--via its "Like" button. Under the state's law, minors cannot endorse products or services without consent from a parent or legal guardian. When young users of the social network hit the "Like" button, their profiles are updated with this interest for all the publc to see.

Lawyers argue that this is tantamount to an endorsement, and that underage members must obtain permission from a legal guardian in order to use the "Like" button.

"We believe it is a clear case of exploitation of children for the sake of profits," attorney John Torjesen of John C. Torjesen & Associates, a party to the suit, told the AFP. The lawyers are seeking cash damages for two L.A. teenagers, who they say unwittingly broadcast endorsements of products and Facebook itself to friends on the social network and through search engines, which mine data from Facebook.

Predictably, Facebook called the case frivolous. "We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously," responded company spokesman Andrew Noyes, who pointed out that Facebook profiles for users under 18 won't appear on public search engines.

In other words, Facebook didn't "Like" the lawyers' claims. Hopefully, Mark Zuckerberg got permission from his parents to say so.

August 27, 2010
Fast Company
http://www.fastcompany.com/1685422/f...-young-to-like

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Robert Rausch placed an advertisement offering his daughter's free baby-sitting services in the community newspaper in Southlake, a wealthy suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth that is home to business leaders and professional athletes.

The advertisement names Rausch's 16-year-old-daughter and says, "Want a FREE BABYSITTER for a night out?" It explains that she is in trouble for missing her curfew and offers 30 hours of free baby-sitting.

Rausch says he wanted to discipline his daughter and help others at the same time. And it appears his daughter has already learned a lesson. She says she won't violate curfew again or throw any more late-night parties.

http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/D...few-623463.php

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DOVER — Local libraries were recently the subject of a deliberate and calculating attack — of the bookmark variety.

Volunteers and staff at the Dover Public Library spent 30 hours in May collecting more than 5,000 bookmarks secretly placed inside books at the library sometime before May.

The bookmarks contained information about the beliefs of two organizations, the School Sucks Project and Freedomain Radio.

The School Sucks Project is focused on a call to end publicly funded education because of what the group calls an attempt to stifle creativity and a valuing of order and obedience over all else in the school system, according to the group's website.

Freedomain Radio describes itself as a philosophical radio show with topics including politics, economics, science, philosophy, relationships and atheism, according to its website.

The discovery of the bookmarks at the Dover library was accidental.

"What happened was a shelf fell out in our stacks and all the books fell on the floor," Library Director Cathy Beaudoin said. "When they all splayed open, a little blue bookmark fell out of each one."

It's not that it's unusual for people to leave things in books, Beaudoin said, but it was immediately clear that this incident was more than a case of forgetfulness.

"People leave stuff in books a lot, but these were all identical and in every one," she said.

So staff members decided to check the shelf below, and then the shelf above, and realized all the books contained one of the blue bookmarks.

Then the search left the science-fiction section, where the original Freedomain Radio bookmarks were found. Soon staff members had found bookmarks in other nonfiction areas — philosophy, politics, sociology, history.

And in the teen section was where staff found the School Sucks Project bookmarks, with more cropping up on SAT and college preparatory books.

"I think they were very careful in what areas they chose to do it," Beaudoin said, pointing out that the books that were targeted related to the groups' message.

It's not the first time somebody has tried to use library books to advertise a message, but it is the first time locally it was to this scale, Beaudoin said.

"This is the first time we had this kind of inundation of a deliberate attempt to put propaganda in books," Beaudoin said.

Similar bookmarks were also found in libraries in Portsmouth and at the University of New Hampshire.

Although Beaudoin said she didn't want library patrons to think the library supported the messages on the bookmarks, she wouldn't have denied a request to post a poster or literature on a public board or display.

But library policy prohibits the dissemination of information through bookmarks in books, she said.

"If I had found 5,000 bookmarks staying 'Stop the oil spill in the Gulf,' a message I think everyone can get behind, I still would have pulled them," she said. "It's not what it was about, but that the act was done."

She said she did try to send a copy of the library's policy to the group, but the e-mail came back as undeliverable.

Attempts to reach a representative of the School Sucks Project were unsuccessful.

Source

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What this country needs is a movement to lower the voting age to 10. Hear me out.
Wherever you look, from debt to schools to climate to pensions, the distinctive feature of American public life today is a shocking disregard for the future. Yes, politicians blather on about "our children and grandchildren" all the time -- but when it comes to what they actually do, the future doesn't have a vote. If you want to change people's behavior, you need to change their incentives. It's time to give politicians a reason not simply to praise children, but also to pander to them.

About 125 million Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election. There are about 35 million Americans ages 10 to 17. Giving them the vote would transform our political conversation. It would introduce the voice we're sorely missing -- a call to stewardship, of governing for the long run, via the kind of simple, "childlike" questions that never get asked today.

Imagine a phalanx of fresh-faced yet fierce 13-year-olds (like those on my daughter's middle school debate team) shaming the adults with the following, for starters:

-- Is it really a national priority to borrow billions more from us to keep taxes for the best-off 2 percent of Americans lower than they were during the Clinton boom, when we're in the midst of two wars and already piling up trillions in fresh debt?

-- Why are you handing off to us a system of decaying bridges, roads, sewers and airports? Doesn't it embarrass you that you've decided you prefer to devote the resources for such investments to your own current consumption?

-- Even if you're not sure whether global warming is man-made or potentially fatal, wouldn't it be prudent to put a high price on carbon to force us toward a green energy economy, just in case the worst turns out to be true? What will you tell us if you leave behind a scorched planet? "Sorry, kids, you had to be there -- the interest-group politics were really tough"?

-- Why are we the only advanced nation that requires kids to go deep into debt to get a college degree?

-- How can you keep assigning the least qualified teachers in the country to the millions of poor children who need great teachers the most?

-- Is the quarterly earnings craze in a stock market that operates like a casino really the way to fund and build enterprises that will be globally competitive when we grow up?

-- Why do you say Social Security can't be touched, even though you're planning real benefit increases for future retirees now in their 40s despite trillions in existing unfunded promises? Why rule out questioning these built-in increases when there's no similar "trust fund" for great teachers or for universal pre-school?

-- Are you really going to keep letting senators who represent less than 15 percent of the population stop any legislation they want? What about majority rule?

Isn't a children's movement that sounds like this overdue? Still, I know what you're thinking. This is a joke, right? Miller can't seriously be proposing we give fifth-graders an equal say with mature, responsible adults.

Let that objection linger in view of the questions above and decide for yourself if the grown-ups really occupy the high ground here. We're in a topsy-turvy world best captured by my favorite political cartoon from the debt-soaked 1980s:

"Your generation will just have to spend a third of your income to support my generation when you grow up," says a stern father.

"Why us?" his scared daughter asks.

"Because of your failure as children to teach your parents to be responsible."

"I'm sorry, Daddy!"

"So am I."

The fascinating thing would be to get a movement going in six or seven states to enact this lower voting age. The crusade would provide the news hook the media needs to focus on long-term challenges that are routinely ignored amid the breathless daily panting over trivia.

I'm not saying "10" is the only answer. I want creative litigation brought on behalf of minor future taxpayers, suing states and public-sector unions that have recklessly saddled kids with zillions in unfunded pensions. Or anti-debt street protests by 10th-graders eager to redefine community service for their college résumés.

It would be nice if the kids didn't have to take up this burden, but we are where we are. To those who say this is all unseemly if not insane, I have four words: Got a better idea?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...d=opinionsbox1

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A £235m government database containing the records of England's 11 million children is being switched off.

ContactPoint was established in the wake of the Victoria Climbie child abuse case to aid child protection.

The report into her death highlighted the need to improve the exchange of information between different agencies working with vulnerable children.

The government argued the system was disproportionate to the problem, so is looking at developing other solutions.

The system, which has been running since January last year, was always controversial and was set to cost a further £41m a year.

After successive delays, it was rolled out to only 15,000 users, out of the initial target of 330,000.

The system was used by doctors, social workers, schools, charities and other individuals involved in the protection of children.

Many said it was useful in tracking children and discovering the truth about the way they are cared for.

But civil liberties groups criticised it as intrusive and disproportionate

'Not the answer'

They were concerned about keeping information on all of England's children in one place and feared that it was not secure.

In July, Children's Minister Tim Loughton confirmed that the government was scrapping the scheme.

He said he recognised the problem that the previous administration was trying to solve when it established ContactPoint.

"Frontline practitioners need to be able to provide support for our most vulnerable children when they move across local authority boundaries or access services in more than one area," he said.

"Experience shows the potential value of a quick and reliable means of discovering whether another professional has worked with such a child.

"It is worth considering a national approach to that issue."

However, he was clear that ContactPoint was not the answer.

Instead, he is looking at establishing a new national service which would focus on helping practitioners find out whether another practitioner is working, or has worked, in another authority area with a child.

Decommissioning of the information contained on the database will begin at noon on Friday.

BBC News---08/05/10---http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-10887082

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DeMint is lead sponsor of S.Res.519, a resolution to protect parental rights, which is co-sponsored by 30 senators total. Only four more senators need to sign on to inform President Obama that he does not have enough votes in the Senate to ratify the treaty, DeMint said.

DeMint has also introduced a joint resolution, proposing a constitutional amendment to protect parental rights.

Under Article 2, Section 2 of the US Constitution, treaties must be approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate for them to take effect.

The UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child on Nov. 20, 1989. By Sept. 2, 1990, 20 nations signed on to enforce the treaty. Currently, with the exception of the United States and Somalia, 193 nations have signed on to enforce it.

Nations that ratify UN treaties are bound to adhere to them by international law.

The convention established an 18-member panel to oversee children’s rights in nations that are part of the treaty. If approved by the Senate, the United States would fall under the jurisdiction of this panel.

DeMint said the threat to parental rights is “not some theoretical threat.”

He also said that ratification of the treaty would be “a terrible precedent” not just for parental rights, “but in other areas that we’ve looked at. It submits our federal laws, our national laws to this treaty,” DeMint said. “And the fact is that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to run, but we know how bureaucracy works. Once a precedent is established and we have yielded control, we know that it will continue to grow. So the precedent is almost worse than the immediate details.”

DeMint also said that the treaty is superfluous because there are laws already that safeguard abused children in the United States.

“We have laws in place,” DeMint said. “And when we have a parent that abuses a child, in our country, we have laws to protect our children. So we don’t need an international law that was developed for a third world country.”

Asked by a reporter how to hold child abusers accountable, given high levels of child abuse in the US, according to statistics, DeMint said that the social services system may not be perfect, but that it is at least under US control. “The fact that there’s not perfection in our system does not mean that we go to the United Nations for help,” he added.

While DeMint is in the forefront of opposition to the convention, liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (P-CA) is leading the charge for its adoption.

Site: http://www.newmediajournal.us/govern...itics/0807.htm

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The once flourishing sport of NASCAR has struggled in recent years, hurt by the effects of the recession. But there's hope on the horizon, in part from a 12-year-old driver who aspires to be the best ever, as CBS News correspondent Jeff Glor reports.

Gray Gaulding is nothing if not focused.

"People say you have friends on the racetrack, but when you put the helmet on and are strapped in there are no friends," Gaulding said.

This is coming from a 12-year-old. A 12-year-old with his own racetrack in the backyard, his own table at a local restaurant, his own sandwich on the menu, and his own racing team.

"Gray is a great son," his father Dwayne Gaulding said. "I was very blessed to have an awesome son."

Gray also has a very supportive family.

"We moved from Virginia to here just for my racing career," Gray Gaulding said.

The Gauldings picked up and moved from Virginia to North Carolina in 2008 just so Gray could be closer to the charlotte motor speedway.

He began racing motorbikes at age three and is now the youngest driver in racing's Legends Division, racking up 10 wins in 30 starts and winning $20,000 this year alone, speeding down the track at 130 mph.

Gray has his sights set on one day topping the record seven overall NASCAR championships won by Dale Earnhardt or the four straight won more recently by Jimmie Johnson.

Asked by what age he thinks he could accomplish those feats, Gray replied, "You know really I don't know, but I just gotta thank my sponsor gunbroker.com."

That's right, gunbroker.com, an internet seller of handguns which Gray mentions often.

"There ain't no other sponsor come along I feel comfortable with," Dwayne Gaulding said.

Dwayne negotiates gray's sponsorships and manages his media training. They practice interviewing on car trips.

"Some people say that I have too much camera. But there's never too much of the camera, because you never know who's watching," Gray said.

Dwayne Gaulding bristles at the notion he pushes his son too hard. He calls gray "highly self-motivated." with self-imposed daily runs - even a racing simulator in his bedroom.

"Some people choose to play sports, or go to camps on days like that, but I choose to go racing," Gray said.

Even though he can hardly wait, Gray will have to show a little patience. He can't race on the Sprint Cup NASCAR circuit until he turns 21.

URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/...tml?tag=excls

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The British teen—who lives in Corby, Northamptonshire—got his first computer age seven. Three years later he got a Mac and taught himself web design. Four years later—at age 14, in 2008—he started his first company. It was a simple site that some of you may know: Mac Bundle Box. The site was pretty, rooted into Apple's own design guidelines and style, but actually was even closer to MacHeist, which has done the same package-bundling price plan for a while now.

The page sold a package of very neat Mac OS X applications for a discounted price and for a limited time. He would negotiate with the developers to get a discount deal on their apps. The resulting bundle had a combined retail value of around $400, but he would sell it for a tenth of that price. (You know, like MacHeist, which we've featured before.)

Not only that: If enough people bought the package, a new application would get unlocked for all buyers, which guaranteed very good word-of-mouth promotion. And to top it all, Owens dedicated a percentage of all sales to charity.

The idea did well. Very well, in fact: In its first two years, Mac Bundle Box made $1,000,000 (700,000 British Pounds).

Not happy with that success, Owens jumped into a new venture called Branchr, a pay-per-click advertising company that distributes 300 million ads per month on over 17,500 websites, iPhone, and Android applications. The company, which claims to deliver "contextual, behavioral, publisher-defined, and geographically" targeted ads in those platforms, has already made $800,000 in its first year and employs eight adults including his 43-year-old mother, Alison.

He doesn't know where he would be in 10 years, but the next thing he wants to do is to make one hundred million British pounds with Branchr. He seems to be on his way to success. He claims his business is growing strong—Branchr has already bought another company—and he reinvests all the money back into the company.

His secret to success? There's no secret, he says:

"There is no magical formula to business, it takes hard work, determination and the drive to do something great."

And also copying MacHeist.

In an age of idiotized kids who can't focus on anything, we salute you, Christian.

August 13, 2010
Gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/5612145/how-a-16%...ero-steve-jobs
(Great Britain)

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"The bottom line is that if we don't allow beatings in prisons or in mental institutions, then it's time we stop allowing it in our schools," said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-New York.

McCarthy recently introduced legislation into Congress that calls for a national end to paddling, a form of corporal punishment, in all schools in the United States. She calls corporal punishment a safety issue in schools, saying it can aggravate students and make them violent.

The "Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act" would ban any form of physical discipline on students in public and private schools that receive federal funding. The bill would also provide federal grants to schools dealing with disciplinarily issues to promote nonphysical ways to change student behavior.

But other education officials believe that schools need corporal punishment to keep students in line.

"Our public education is in a state of crisis because the current discipline system in this nation is being ineffectively implemented," said Kenneth Whalum Jr., a board commissioner for Memphis City Schools in Tennessee. "Corporal punishment would be an arrow in the quiver for teachers to use at their disposal. It's the best way to get the system right."

It is legal in 20 states to use paddling, a form of corporal punishment that allows teachers and administrators to hit students on the buttocks with a flat wooden board, according to a recent report released by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.

It is a form of discipline that "causes immediate pain, and in some cases, lasting injury and mental trauma," the report stated. Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee are the six states with the most cases of corporal punishment.

In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled in the Ingraham v. Wright case that corporal punishment in schools is not cruel or unusual.

But Jordan Riak, executive director of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education, says that all violence is wrong.

"Hitting a student in the classroom does what wife beating does to a marriage. Assaulting and battering someone does not achieve anything positive because it just simply relieves the frustration of the hitter," he said.

The most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, states that 223,190 students nationwide were paddled at least once in the 2006-07 school year, including at least 41,972 students with disabilities.

Minority students are among those most likely to be paddled, which raises questions about the fairness of using corporal punishment.

The Temple Independent School District in Texas reinstated corporal punishment in 2009 after a push from parents who wanted consistency in discipline.

"Parents that supported corporal punishment wanted a seamless discipline plan between the home and school. This stems from parents saying there was a disconnect with a child at home and in school and they wanted to improve student behavior," said Dr. John Hancock, assistant superintendent of Temple schools.

"We worked to define what is considered corporal punishment and made that clear to parents. Corporal punishment is not used at a first resort; it is used in extreme cases of student behavior," he said.

Mississippi leaves decisions about corporal punishment up to local school districts.

But Mississippi PTA President Deloris Irving says her state organization follows the position of the national PTA, which favors the abolishment of corporal punishment in all schools.

Irving acknowledged that discipline can provide for a better learning environment. But she also said parental concerns about corporal punishment center on whether it would be administered properly, at the right time and without abuse.

The fear that disproportionate paddling will increase violence by students is what most concerns McCarthy, who attended Catholic school as a child and was rapped on the knuckles with a ruler for misbehavior.

"Some people believe children are too young to understand, that corporal punishment is a quick fix to deal with behavioral issues," she said. "But emotional scars [from paddling] are very deep. I have met young people who were paddled, and they say it has affected them in so many ways."

Paddling and other forms of corporal punishment create "a violent, degrading school environment in which all students -- and particularly students with disabilities -- may struggle to succeed," the ACLU reports.

Without paddling, students would be less likely to become antisocial or aggressively violent, McCarthy said, and this is especially important for minorities and students with disabilities who may have a harder time fitting into certain social situations.

Marjorie Gunnoe, a psychology professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, agrees that physical acts have an effect on children's development. "A child's behavior plays a key role to how they will function in other aspects of their life, including education," she said.

However, before making national decisions on whether or not corporal punishment should be eliminated, Gunnoe said that legislators will need more proof that children who aren't spanked or paddled are actually better off.

Gunnoe recently conducted a study with 180 teenage children on spanking and its risk factors in childhood. She found that children who remembered being spanked on their bottom with an open hand performed better in school academically, did more volunteer work and were more optimistic in terms of their future, compared with children who had never been spanked.

"I'm not advocating or promoting spanking," Gunnoe said. "If we are going to outlaw it, we need some evidence that kids that have never been spanked actually perform better, and we really don't have that yet."

The belief that physical discipline promotes good behavior, which is necessary for academic progress, is what keeps Whalum pushing for corporal punishment to remain in schools.

Whalum was elected to the Memphis City School Board by running on a pro-corporal punishment platform in 2004. This past June, he attempted to push through a resolution to bring corporal punishment back to Memphis City Schools, after it was abolished in a 5-to-4 vote in 2004, but his proposition failed to receive enough support from other board members.

Whalum says legislators need to understand that environment plays a major role in producing certain behaviors in students.

"The problem in Memphis, like many other large, poor and urban school districts, is that poverty creates an insurmountable boundary against a child receiving a well-rounded education," he said. "When you remove the ability for the school to discipline students, as they did in the old days, you are creating a system that serves to undermine students' progress in school."

Whalum supports corporal punishment not as a lone resource but as part of a larger disciplinary plan that works toward decreasing classroom interruptions that take away from instruction time.

Julian Mansfield, a 19-year-old student who lived in Memphis and attended public schools there, agrees with Whalum's support for corporal punishment. He says the potential shame caused by corporal punishment is more a deterrent than the threat of pain.

"It's the fact that you're going to get embarrassed in front of all your peers that keeps you from wanting to act up," he said. "I think people need to understand there is a psychological effect in corporal punishment, more than the physical, that really helps to curb bad behavior in schools."

But this style of ridicule, McCarthy said, does not set a good example for students.

"Paddling does not send children the right message," the congresswoman said. "It reinforces the idea that being violent is the only way to handle a conflict. Corporal punishment goes against what we have been teaching students for years."

The idea of a positive behavior system, like McCarthy's plan, does not work in urban areas like Memphis, Whalum said.

"The problem now with a behavior-reward system is that there is nothing being done to discourage misbehavior," Whalum said. "You have to show students that there are consequences, or they won't learn to behave."

Outrage over the increase of misbehavior by urban students in Memphis is pushing teachers and administrators toward a revolution in public education, Whalum said. He said that of the nearly 700 teachers and parents that he polled, 75 percent supported the reinstitution of paddling in schools.

Stories of violent behavior are not uncommon in areas like Memphis. Teachers tell of being attacked by defiant 12-year-olds and of amassing medical bills for injuries caused by students. Whalum said that the most disturbing issue is that schools are suspending and expelling kindergartners and elementary school students for aggressive behavior, actions that can result in the criminalization, rather than education, of students.

Gunnoe is wary of giving schools the power to discipline someone else's child. "It's really the parent's business to discipline the children, not the school," she said. "It becomes a very risky situation when schools become responsible for children long term, and moreover if hitting or any form of physical punishment is involved."

But parents don't always step up to the task, says Riak, and that can also harm the child.

"In the inner city, children grow up in families where they are neglected, and that's just as bad as hitting because they don't have the right guidance and support. On the other hand, you can't let students run around and do what they want to do. Permissiveness is not an alternative to spanking either."

August 5, 2010
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/08/05...iref=allsearch

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U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

A student and his family sued the district in February, claiming officials invaded his privacy by activating the software. That case continues.

The district has acknowledged capturing 56,000 screen shots and webcam images so it could locate missing laptops.

Memeger says he decided to make Tuesday's announcement to close the matter before the start of the school year.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...p-spying_N.htm

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