Posts matching tags 'children'
2008/5/1
It has emerged that children in Britain are posing as paedophiles online to intimidate each other.
Officers have warned parents and children to be vigilant after as many as nine youngsters in Padstow, Cornwall, were targeted through the networking sites Bebo and MSN. Police initially believed a local man was trying to groom the children by befriending them online and arranging to meet them. But a member of the public has come forward and told them that youngsters are trying to settle playground disputes by posing as a paedophile to frighten their rivals.
A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police said: "Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile. The investigations are continuing and at this moment we are looking into every line of inquiry and are not ruling out any possibility. However, the language used on the social networking sites such as Bebo and MSN is at times childish. It could be youngsters playing a sick game to try and intimidate friends they have fallen out with. This will be treated seriously and we will be contacting the families of the children involved and we will try and help them by involving social services."Granted, a lot of this is the inevitable modern variant of kids trying to scare each other with imaginary serial killers/monsters/urban myths, updated for the age of paedoterror, though it wouldn't surprise me if, in these jumpy times, some 12-year-old ended up on the sex offenders' register after pulling such a stunt.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2008/4/17
This is not the Onion: The latest children's book to be making a ripple is "My Beautiful Mommy", written by Florida plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer, and intended to help children come to terms with their mothers' plastic surgery:
"My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.
Then there are the body image issues raised by cosmetic surgery—especially for daughters. Berger worries that kids will think their own body parts must need "fixing" too. The surgery on a nose, for example, may "convey to the child that the child's nose, which always seemed OK, might be perceived by Mommy or by somebody as unacceptable," she says.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2008/4/9
They're now selling toy airport screening machines for children. the Scan-It Operation Checkpoint Toy X-Ray Machine, a colourful box with a conveyor belt and a built-in metal detector, is designed to "help children understand and be comfortable and confident in the need and process of higher security protocols" in the post-9/11 age.
If there is a need for toys to instill into our children from an early age the awareness that we, as a society, are in a permanent low-level state of siege and need to accept increasing amounts of security control in our lives for our mutual safety, perhaps we can soon expect other similarly educational toys. How about a Biometric ID Card Play Set, with several Flash-based cards and a reader with working digital camera/fingerprint scanner, hich stores and checks the users' details? Or a Junior CCTV Surveillance kit, which lets youngsters play at silently keeping the city secure from ever-present threats? Or perhaps the Guantanamo Interrogation Play Set, with 9V battery-powered electric shock machine and waterboard? The possibilities are endless.
2005/6/27
LiveJournal user icon of the day:
(Note: for the full effect, make sure you have animated images enabled.)
(via 
rhodri) ¶ [7 comments]
2004/3/1
A new form of child slave trafficking has been found in Britain, with human traffickers importing children to help adults claim benefits or asylum. The children are said to be rotated between families as need be. It is not clear what happens when the children are no longer needed, though "organ harvesting" was mentioned.
2004/2/6
Bizarre musical juxtapositions of today: Li'l Gn'R, the "first ever Guns n' Roses kids tribute band", and Jewdriver, an all-Jewish band playing tribute to neo-Nazi "white power" band Skrewdriver (and apparently fronted by one "Aryan Sharon"). (Unfortunately, though, the Jewdriver site isn't Mozilla-friendly, and all the links are covered up by a gig flyer in an IFRAME.) (via Rocknerd and cnwb, respectively)
2003/12/11
Canadian researchers have claimed that nursery rhymes put childrens' health at risk by not conveying the consequences of characters (such as Humpty Dumpty or Jack and Jill) suffering major injuries without receiving proper treatment:
The team from Dalhousie University ridiculed the idea that all the king's horses and all the king's men should even try to put Humpty Dumpty together again. "What sort of EMS (emergency medical service) training and equipment did these first responders have?"
The paper proposes a medically correct nursery rhyme:
Little Johnny rode his bike,
No helmet on his head.
He took a fall and split his skull,
His mother feared him dead. She rushed him to the ER,
Where they checked his neuro signs.
They noted a blown pupil
And inserted IV lines. They called the neurosurgeon,
Who came in and drilled a burr.
Now Johnny's fine; he rides his bike,
But he's helmeted, for sure.
2003/11/19
A preschool teacher is taking on bad music, one kid at a time. "Rupert", of New York state, has been playing his charges everything from Belle & Sebastian to P-Funk, from outsider music to " The New Politicians (Pornographers to you and I)", thus innoculating them against the manufactured "tween" pop other kids list among their favourites. I wonder whether this will end up sowing the seeds of a backlash against the homogeneous swill that fills commercial-radio playlists and major-label rosters.
2003/10/17
A video gaming magazine rounds up some 10-to-13-year-olds, gets them to review vintage games, like Pong and Donkey Kong and Tetris. (via MeFi)
Tim: Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?
EGM: Sorry, they don't explode.
Becky: This is boring. Maybe if it had characters and stuff and different levels, it would be OK. If things blew up or something or--
Sheldon: If there were bombs.
Tim (on Space Invaders): This is nothing compared to Grand Theft Auto III, because you can't steal a taxi cab, pick up somebody, then drive into the ocean with him.
2003/9/23
When you expose 9-to-11-year-olds to Radiohead and ask them to draw what the music suggests to them, you may get something like this. Some are surprisingly existential, others are somewhat prosaic, and one of them is of a 1,000-foot ice cream cone, reaffirming the adage that when children recount a story they often put correct it, adding the crucial missing element of ice cream.
For the first few songs, the kids hardly move, scarcely even changing facial expressions. One girl plants her head on her desk face-first. The "hold your head in your hands and look completely confused" look is extremely popular.
Jeffrey, 9 Easily the most disturbing of several you're-going-to-hell panoramas. The booth in the center reads "Free Suicides." Someone buy this kid a Coldplay CD.
(via Rocknerd)
2003/6/2
The street finds its own uses for social technologies, it seems: tourists in Brazil are targeted by swarm crime, where, upon emerging from their hotels, they are stripped of valuables by hordes of young children who suddenly appear and disappear just as suddenly. The children operate in fluid teams, coordinated with stolen (and thus untraceable) mobile phones by a teenaged recruiter/intermediary working for the organiser, who provides the phones and takes most of the proceeds.
If a law enforcement officer sees the crime and catches a child, the child can only talk about Neil. The mobile phone is not traceable. If the police catch Neil, he can only provide a mobile phone number. The adult allows Neill to collect the money ad jewelry, pay the kids, and then meet to pass over the loot to the adult. The adult is effectively "cut out" of the actual crime. Although some of the intermediaries like Neil or the children performing the crime may keep the money and jewelry for themselves, the adult repeats the process.
New problems for law enforcement officers to address: [a] fluidity of the crime and perpetrators, [b] spontaneous nature of the crimes, and [c] dealing with the children who commit the crime in the criminal justice system.
(via Die Puny Humans)
2002/7/9
Denial's not just a river in Egypt A morbid new trend sweeping the USA: parents commissioning digitally retouched images of stillborn babies to make them look alive, or indeed sufficiently ungruesome to show off:
Her work is grueling -- she spends two to four hours on each picture -- but she has yet to turn down a photograph, no matter how grisly. Some of the photographs she gets are of 20-week fetuses with transparent skin. Others are of babies that have been dead in the womb for so long that their facial features have dissolved, requiring her to redraw them.
The next logical step would be to use photograph-aging software to interpolate the photographs into the life that never existed; advanced software would use the original photograph, as well as those of parents and siblings, to generate "photographs" of the phantom child at various ages, "growing up" in realtime in a frame on the mantlepiece. I can see a sci-fi/gothic-horror short story in this...
2002/5/17
Research has shown that six-month-olds are better at recognising individual monkeys than adults. Proof that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and that children are more like monkeys than adults, or just that specialisation for human face recognition develops later?
2002/4/19
There's something disturbing about a world where companies sell padded bras for 9-year-olds. (via Reenhead)
2001/10/26
One-time big-name pop star Michael Jackson is releasing his first album in many years; and attempting to put his freak-show image and child-abuse allegations behind him, has attempted to make it as straight and boring as possible, with any eccentricities swept under the carpet of slick, commercial-strength R&B production. According to The Guardian, however, the result has been not only tedious, but also unintentionally disturbing:
Then there is The Lost Children, a hideous, syrupy sub-Broadway showtune featuring Jackson and an infants' choir. It ends with a fearful child's voice saying "It's so quiet in the forest... it's getting dark, I think we'd better go home now." It's creepy, has deeply unpleasant connotations and is appallingly misjudged.
2001/8/28
Researchers in India recently did an experiment: they set up a computer, connected to the Internet, in a window where illiterate street kids could operate it, and watched what happened.
Mr Mitra found that within days the children were able to browse the internet, cut and paste copy, drag and drop items and create folders. One of the things they particularly liked was drawing, discovering how to use the MSpaint programme to create paintings. The children then moved on to downloading games and playing then. They did not stop there. By the second month they had discovered MP3 music files and they were downloading songs.
2001/4/27
Cute: In an attempt to help cult indie band Guided By Voices break into larger markets, some journalists tested their music with a focus group from one of the largest music-buying demographics: 10 and 11-year-olds:
Zoe C.: "They look dirty in all the pictures."
Zoe S.: "They need more style: rings, earrings, and colorful clothes."
Tony: "Colorful clothes, baggy pants maybe, and matching outfits."
Cody: "They need a name that catches your attention. How about the Shining Stars? Now that's catchy!"
Lena: "The songs are mysterious, but definitely too weird."
Cody: "I could make this up just as good by making up three words."