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Talk about your movie-plot threats:
Wissahickon is the most recent district to mandate see-through backpacks, joining several other area suburban districts and private schools as they look to avert tragedies like the 1999 gun killings at Columbine and last December’s gunshot suicide by a student inside Montgomery County’s Springfield Township High School.
Yeah, like that’s going to help.
Look at the last line of this article, about an Ohio town considering mandatory school uniforms in lower grades:
For Edgewood, the primary motivation for adopting uniforms would be to enhance school security, York said.
What is he talking about? Does he think that school uniforms enhance security because it would be easier to spot non-uniform-wearing non-students in the school building and on the grounds? (Of course, non-students with uniforms would have an easier time sneaking in.) Or something else?
Or is security just an excuse for any random thing these days?
Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney’s ToonTown.
Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that’s inappropriate for children to hear.
Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called “Speedchat,” a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.
Users found ways to pass code strings to strangers anyway. This page describes several protocols, using gestures, canned sentences, or movement of objects in the game.
After you read the ways above to make secret friends, look here. Another way to make secret friends with toons you don’t know is to form letters/numbers with the picture frames in your house. Around you may see toons who have alot of picture frames at their toon estates, they are usually looking for secret friends. This is how to do it! So, lets say you wanted to make secret friends with a toon named Lily. Your “pretend” secret friend code is 4yt 56s.
- You: *Move frames around in house to form a 4.* “Okay.”
- Her: “Okay.” She has now written the first letter down on a piece of paper.
- You: *Move Frames around to form a y.* “Okay.”
- Her: “Okay.” She has now written the second number down on paper.
- You: *Move Frames around in house to form a t* “Okay.”
- Her: “Okay.” She has now written the third letter down on paper. “Okay.”
- You: *Do nothing* “Okay” This shows that you have made a space.
- Repeat process
Randy writes: “By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.”
Completely ridiculous:
It seems like “We want to protect children” really means, We want to give the appearance that we’ve made an effort to protect children. If they really wanted to protect children, they wouldn’t use the honor system as the sole safeguard standing between previews filled with sex and violence and Internet-savvy kids who can, in a matter of seconds, beat the impotent little system.
Great article on perceived vs actual risks to children:
The risk of abduction remains tiny. In Britain, there are now half as many children killed every year in road accidents as there were in 1922—despite a more than 25-fold increase in traffic.
Today the figure is under 9%. Escorting children is now the norm—often in the back of a 4×4.
We are rearing our children in captivity—their habitat shrinking almost daily.
In 1970 the average nine-year-old girl would have been free to wander 840 metres from her front door. By 1997 it was 280 metres.
Now the limit appears to have come down to the front doorstep.
[…]
The picket fence marks the limit of their play area. They wouldn’t dare venture beyond it.
“You might get kidnapped or taken by a stranger,” says Jojo.
“In the park you might get raped,” agrees Holly.
Don’t they yearn to go off to the woods, to climb trees and get muddy?
No, they tell me. The woods are scary. Climbing trees is dangerous. Muddy clothes get you in trouble.
One wonders what they think of Just William, Swallows And Amazons or The Famous Five—fictional tales of strange children from another time, an age of adventures where parents apparently allowed their offspring to be out all day and didn’t worry about a bit of mud.
There is increasing concern that today’s “cotton-wool kids” are having their development hampered.
They are likely to be risk-averse, stifled by fears which are more phobic than real.
EDITED TO ADD (6/9): More commentary.
These are not the sorts of matters the police should be getting involved in. The police aren’t trained to handle children this age, and children this age don’t benefit by being fingerprinted and thrown in jail.
EDITED TO ADD (4/18): Another example:
Unfortunately, the school forgot that the clocks had switched to Daylight Saving Time that morning. The time stamps left on the hotline were adjusted by an hour after Day Light Savings causing Webb’s call to logged as the same time the bomb threat was placed. Webb, who’s never even had a detention in his life, had actually made his call an hour before the bomb threat was placed.
Despite the fact that the recording of the call featured a voice that sounded nothing like Webb’s, the police arrested Webb and he spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before the school eventually realised their mistake.
Another example of how we get the risks wrong:
Although statistics show that rates of child abduction and sexual abuse have marched steadily downward since the early 1990s, fear of these crimes is at an all-time high. Even the panic-inducing Megan’s Law Web site says stranger abduction is rare and that 90 percent of child sexual-abuse cases are committed by someone known to the child. Yet we still suffer a crucial disconnect between perception of crime and its statistical reality. A child is almost as likely to be struck by lightning as kidnapped by a stranger, but it’s not fear of lightning strikes that parents cite as the reason for keeping children indoors watching television instead of out on the sidewalk skipping rope.
And when a child is parked on the living room floor, he or she may be safe, but is safety the sole objective of parenting? The ultimate goal is independence, and independence is best fostered by handing it out a little at a time, not by withholding it in a trembling fist that remains clenched until it’s time to move into the dorms.
Meanwhile, as rates of child abduction and abuse move down, rates of Type II diabetes, hypertension and other obesity-related ailments in children move up. That means not all the candy is coming from strangers. Which scenario should provoke more panic: the possibility that your child might become one of the approximately 100 children who are kidnapped by strangers each year, or one of the country’s 58 million overweight adults?
In an article on auto-asphyxiation, there’s commentary on teens and risk:
But the new debate also coincides with a reassessment of how teenagers think about risk. Conventional wisdom said adolescents often flirted with the edges of danger because they felt invulnerable.
Newer studies have dismissed that notion. They say that most teenagers are quite cool-headed in assessing risk and reward—and that is what sometimes gets them in trouble. Adults, by contrast, are more likely to rely on experience or gut feelings than rational calculation.
Asked whether it would ever make sense to play Russian roulette for a million dollars, for example, most adults immediately say no, said Valerie F. Reyna, a professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University.
But when Professor Reyna asks teenagers the same question in intervention sessions to teach smarter risk-taking behavior, they often stop to calculate or debate, she said—what exactly would the odds be of getting the chamber with the bullet?
“I use the example to try to get them to see that thinking rationally like that doesn’t always lead to rational choices,” she said.
Of course, reality is always more complicated. We can invent fictional scenarios where it makes sense to play that game of Russian roulette. Imagine you have terminal cancer, and that million dollars would make a huge difference to your survivors. You might very well take the risk.
In the UK, parents are buying body armor for children.
One type of risk we consistently overestimate is risks involving our children.
It’s simply amazing:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office claims that file-sharing sites could be setting up children for copyright infringement lawsuits and compromising national security.
“A decade ago, the idea that copyright infringement could become a threat to national security would have seemed implausible,” Patent and Trademark Director Jon Dudas said in a report released this week. “Now, it’s a sad reality.”
The report, which the patent office recently forwarded to the U.S. Department of Justice, states that peer-to-peer networks could manipulate sites so children violate copyright laws more frequently than adults. That could make children the target in most copyright lawsuits and, in turn, make those protecting their material appear antagonistic, according to the report.
File-sharing software also could be to blame for government workers who expose sensitive data and jeopardize national security after downloading free music on the job, the report states.
What happened? Did someone in the entertainment industry bribe the PTO to write this?
Report here.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.