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Gossip site JuicyCampus.com faces student backlash

The law doesn't seem to have caught up with the evolving concept of online defamation yet, so internet service providers and websites are generally not responsible for the content that their users post. There are many valid reasons for that legal approach, but the website

In the era of

The good news is that a

JuicyCampus.com was started by

Homeland Security seizes electronics and information at border

The

As reported on

ALC, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization, received more than 20 complaints from Northern California residents last year who said they were grilled about their families, religious practices, volunteer activities, political beliefs, or associations when returning to the United States from travels abroad. In addition, customs agents examined travelers' books, business cards collected from friends and colleagues, handwritten notes, personal photos, laptop computer files, and cell phone directories, and sometimes made copies of this information. When individuals complained, they were told, "This is the border, and you have no rights."

"When the government searches your books,

Motivation Overload?

Last year Amy put her PhD in neuroscience to good use when she wrote the article

As I reported in our own family's

If the Adlerian hypothesis is correct, that children really want is to belong and to be significant, then how do external rewards help or hurt the child as they grow into adulthood? A dependence on external rewards for a sense of self leads to a profound feeling of emptiness, which is chronicled in the excellent book

Happy Valentine's Day!

High school students stand up for privacy, refuse to take military test

Teens may have a better understanding of privacy issues than the adults around them. Unfortunately, when you are a high school student, your personal judgment can still be challenged by an unsympathetic principal.

The Raleigh

Cedar Ridge Principal Gary Thornburg was willing to sign on to this deal to get access to what he views as a valuable career assessment tool. There is supposed to be an opt-out procedure, but three students who refused to take the test were sent to the in-school suspension room to take it--not as discipline, according to Thornburg, but because the in-school suspension teacher was available to supervise them while other students were taking the test. Sounds like a blatantly disingenuous answer to me. In my experience as a student and teacher, when you send students to in-school suspension, it is going to feel like a punishment and be perceived that way by others. Surely their well-equipped more

Parents tackle information overload

Technology helps us manage family life in many ways. It's hard to imagine being a parent without email and cell phones (though our parents managed just fine), and I've written about TiVO and iPod as transformational technologies for parents in my book,

And yet, I sit here on the brink of mental information overload, and physical gadget overload.

The sure sign that this situation has passed the tipping point is that I frequently find myself using one phone to call the other, usually to find my Blackberry as I fly out of the house. It goes both ways though, mobile to landline and vice-versa. I've pitched the idea of a "cordless phone tether" to several friends, and they've all said it was a good idea, before realizing that it was a joke about the fact that we already have corded phones.

Three other signs: First, the proliferation of gadgets and their docks/rechargers/adapters has formed an impenetrable layer in my desk drawer. It's hard to know when it is time to part with each of these accessories. Many of the adapters look nearly identical but have slightly different connectors, creating a confusing mass that is quickly approaching junk.

Online market predicts candidates' chances

This post is somewhat off topic, though the longer I write the

One undeniable result of Super Tuesday is that there will be full employment for pundits over the next nine months. For those of you political junkies who are tired of watching the same old talking heads stretch their speeches to fill yet another hour of programming, the

Intrade calls itself a political futures market, others call it Intrade is based in Ireland and says that the company "can't be sure" if the activity is legal in specific locations.

But whether or not we are allowed to make

Are your mobile devices password protected?

The New York Times recently reported a heartwarming story about a after a kindhearted stranger analyzed the photos on the camera to find the owner.

The camera was left in the backseat of a New York taxi, and contained sightseeing photos of Manhattan, as well as Florida snapshots including people wearing name tags. Leads took the hunt to Ireland, back to New York, and finally to Syndey, Australia, where the rightful owner lives. He was "over the moon" with gratitude to get his camera back.

This story has a happy ending, and perhaps most of us would be glad to get our camera back in that situation, but it also made me uneasy to realize how much personally identifiable information was stored on one camera card. I would rather have a locked camera than could not be accessed if it was found, than have a stranger be able to peer into my photos.

The situation is even more crucial when it involves smartphones. more

Could it be a child that saves the village?

Ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are just some of the forces of nature that can wreak havoc on the lives of untold thousands in a period of seconds, minutes, days, or months. As global temperatures rise and as a growing human population expands into more and more areas less and less suited for either habitation or rescue, the average person in the world (one of 6+ billion) faces an increasing likelyhood that he or she will face a real disaster that seriously disrupts possible response.

Consider the plight of Sri Lanka, which was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. According to a BBC eyewitness reporter:

There are no kind of emergency services here, there are no helicopters thumping through the sky to come to save people. It is a do-it-yourself rescue.

The final tally reported more than 40,000 dead and a staggering 2.5 million displaced. And from the report's summary: "Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars, and even a train with 1,700 passengers." Whatever infrastructure may have existed prior to the tsunami, it was completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of human need and the destructive power of the disaster. Within hours, open-source software developers created the Sahana project, and within days, their home-grown solution was doing more to help the Sri Lankan people than first-world conventional software packages did in far less extreme circumstances. And now it is doing even more, with the One Laptop Per Child hardware platform.

Which gadgets just keep on ticking?

CNET is all about the newest gadgets around, but looking around my home office, one beloved dinosaur stands out among the new devices. I still use the first laser printer I ever bought, a

It's been almost 12 years and that HP LaserJet has produced all the drafts needed for one Ph. D. thesis, two books, one screenplay, and countless thousands of other small projects. It still works great. The only problem is that I haven't dared try to hook it up to my current iMac, so I have kept around an old PowerBook circa 2002 to serve

Profs compete for students' attention

"...Nobody is in the room. The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10."
--UNC graduate student on the distracted classroom experience

I was a talented teacher, but let's face it, when you are trying to convince 16-year-olds that they really are interested in learning chemistry at 8:30 in the morning, it helps to have a captive audience.

Now teachers face new pressures: competing for their students' attention inside the classroom, and presenting material in a way that resembles the variety of mass media that teens consume on average

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