Sorry, U.S. teens: a pair of 17-year-old Canadians have beaten you, using a weather balloon to send a flag-toting Lego figure into ... well, not space as some have claimed, but pretty darned high up. While the Lego man did go quite high, so did its YouTube viewing figures, high enough to be called viral.
Toronto teens Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad worked over four months of Saturdays and $400 to assemble the atmospheric package, carried by a weather balloon: four cameras, a cell phone including a GPS app, a homemade parachute and a Lego figure holding a Canadian flag.
The package rose to about 80,000 feet in altitude, which is high, but not high enough to qualify as "Lego man in space," as the viral video is labeled. Space is said to begin at about 100 km, or 62 miles, which is about 327,000 feet, or about 4x as high as the balloon reached (so yes, they didn't even get to "near space," technically, but still ...).
According to the pair's calculations, the package had risen to about 80,000 feet in one hour and five minutes, when the balloon exploded, after which time the Lego man began a 32-minute descent, slowed by the homemade parachute.
The video, which has about 1.7 million views at the time of this writing, shows Lego man, not quite reaching space, but definitely high above the Earth. You can view it below.
Dr. Michael Reid, a University of Toronto astrophysics professor noted that similar projects have been undertaken by PhD students, and to see something like this done by high school students, well, ... "It shows a tremendous degree of resourcefulness. For two 17-year-olds to accomplish this on their own is pretty impressive."
Speaking of college students, Ho said that he envisioned the project two summers ago when he saw a video of a balloon sent to near space by some MIT students. In terms of their own college careers, Ho wants to a commerce degree and become an entrepreneur, while Muhammad into looking at a number of engineering programs.
Google Plus continues to get more open bit by bit, and just today made the service available to teens age 13 and up. Previously, Google Plus was restricted to people 18 and up. Along with the wave of new teenagers, Google Plus is also getting new privacy and security features--a fairly important thing if the service is to become something parents encourage their children to use.
Google is probably doing the slow rollout on purpose. This is their third or fourth wave of opening the service up. Each time it's followed by new statistics on membership, and this time will be no different. Millions of teens are going to sign up in the near future.
Google Plus Opens To Teens
Google Plus is now open to everyone 13 and up, and I'm guessing there will be plenty of takers.
This kind of news should be music to a video marketer's ears, because teenagers are among the most avid video consumers. They're also much more prone to social activity, with most of today's teenagers having grown up with mobile devices, Facebook, and Twitter.
The influx of teenagers 13 and up to Google Plus means the demographic will change almost overnight. It should also make Google Plus a more attractive social video marketing tool for brands and businesses--particularly those that create content known to appeal to teenagers: I'm thinking about action-oriented brands like Go Pro and Red Bull, music videos and music industry brands, movie trailers, etc.
It's one thing to share your password with your wife or husband, but sharing your password when you are a teenager who barely (OK, doesn't) knows what love --- and possibly trust --- is, is a completely different matter.
That's not to say that sharing your password with a S.O. of any type can't turn out badly. One look at the divorce rate should tell you that if you do share your password, if things go wrong, you had better change it quickly.
But teenagers are hardly experienced enough to make good decisions, despite the fact that if you ask any of them, they will feel they are more wise than their parents. It doesn't help that every tween / teen show on television (think Disney channel) shows parents as complete idiots.
Nope, no promise rings. Instead, give me your password.
Tiffany Carandang, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she and her boyfriend decided several months ago to share their email and Facebook passwords.
"It’s a sign of trust. I have nothing to hide from him, and he has nothing to hide from me. I know he’d never do anything to hurt my reputation."
Right, and Tiffany needs to watch an episode of "Stalked: Someone's Watching" on the ID cable channel. Or just look around the Internet a little. Sorry, Tiffany, that's not necessarily the case. It might be for now, but probably not forever. This is a high school romance after all, and what is the percentage of those that end up happily ever after?
In a November report, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that roughtly one-third of teenagers who were Internet users had shared a password with a peer. The study found that girls were nearly twice as likely as boys to share a password. The survey was conducted via telephone interviews with a "nationally representative" sample of 799 teens aged 12 to 17 years old.
Why the desire to share passwords? It could be a form of teen rebellion. After all, their parents would say "don't do it."
Rosalind Wiseman is the author of "Queen Bees and Wannabes," which is the book that inspired the movie "Mean Girls" and which Amazon.com says "offers concrete strategies to help you [parents] empower your daughter to be socially competent and treat herself with dignity. She said the sharing of --- and pressure to share --- passwords was somewhat similar to that for sex.
“The response is the same: if we’re in a relationship, you have to give me anything."
Perhaps the only cure would be if everything required biometrics. With typed in passwords, and the ya teens think, it's probably not going to be possible to eliminate password sharing.
Patti Cole, a child psychologist whose own daughter had a bad experience with sharing passwords, said, "What worries me is we haven’t done a very good job at stopping kids from having sex. So I’m not real confident about how much we can change this behavior [of password sharing].”
Most teens looking for auto insurance know that auto insurance rates for teenagers can be very high. However, although rates are generally higher, you can always find a cheap car insurance for teens-if you just know where to look.
Auto insurance for teens is designed to protect young drivers in particular. Unlike other insurance policies that usually has a higher interest rate. inexperienced young drivers. They may have passed the test, but are new to driving.For an insurance company, this means that the probability of an accident is very high.Now, one could say that anyone regardless of age, which happens only your driving test is a responsibility. However, statistically not the case and that is what insurers look. Young drivers are twice as likely to have an accident in their first year of driving, the driver under
State Farm has just released an iOS application called Driver Feedback. The app uses your iDevice's accelerometer and GPS to "grade" your driving.
It monitors the three driving behaviors that are the riskiest, and thus need to be tracked are hard acceleration, hard braking, and hard cornering. Since we know that iPhone is very good at tracking users, it's an obvious choice, but it would be nice to see an Android version, as well.
As you might expect, it's free in the App Store. Just to be clear, State Farm said it does not collect the trip information. Additionally, the data recorded by the app will not impact your insurance rates (particularly since you don't have to be a State Farm customer to use it).
Here are the features:
Record driving using your device’s accelerometer and GPS location (GPS not available on iPod touch)
View all alerts in a list view or overlaid on a map
Compare two trips against each other
Send trip results via email and SMS
Support for multiple users
Although it's designed with the end user in mind, we can see this app being used by parents, to check on the driving behaviors of their teenagers, for example. Since results can be sent by email or SMS, you don't even need to confront your teen at the end of their trips.
>Piper Jaffray's latest bi-annual survey of high school students, now in its 21st year, was just released. This time out, the firm asked 4,500 teenagers about their interest in Apple products and digital music. The answer: teens love Apple.
If things go as the teens plan, and as we know their plans don't always meet reality, more than 50 percent of teens will own an iPhone within the next six months. That comes from the survey results which said that 17 percent already have one and 37 percent plan on buying the device in the next six months.
Meanwhile, 22 either own a tablet or have one in their house, and 20 percent of them plan to buy one in the next 6 months.
There isn't much question as to who owns digital downloads. Of those who own MP3 players, 86 percent have an iPod, up from 78 percent six months ago, with Zune holding second place at an abysmal 3 percent.
However, standalone MP3 players appear on their way out. Only 80 percent, down from 90 percent last fall, now own a standalone MP3 player. Meanwhile, the number who say they are using their handsets to listen to music is up from 50 percent last fall to 53 percent in PJ's latest survey.
The RIAA won't be happy with this statistic: of those teens who download music, 65 percent continue to use file-trading services. iTunes has an overwhelming market share among legal services, 95 percent. However, 37 percent of teens said they'd consider paying $15 a month for a music subscription.
The Boston Globe has an interesting article about a rising trend among teenagers. These teens are losing sleep because they don't want to miss any text messages. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't getting any, but apparently, they are, and they are waking them up.
Brookline 10th-grader Ashley Olafsson sleeps with her cellphone under her pillow so she doesn’t miss “emergency’’ texts — “like if a friend broke up with her boyfriend.’’ Stephanie Kimball of Waltham, 14, is also available for urgent overnight correspondence, such as, “Hey, seeing if you’re awake.’’ Dedham ninth-grader Courtney Johnson gets as many as 100 texts while in bed. “I just don’t feel like myself if I don’t have my phone near me or I’m not on it,’’ she said.
Sure, all that middle-of-the-night communication leaves them tired, but as Olafsson explained, “It’s impolite not to respond if someone is coming to you with their problems.’’
The biggest problem, according to Michael Rich, director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center on Media and Child Health, is that children who text like this do not fall asleep as well, meaning that often they don’t enter Stage 4 REM sleep, “which is crucial to moving experiences and lessons of the day from short-term into long-term memory — in other words, completing the learning process."
The obvious answer is for parents to set some limits, or to get some cojones. It seems, that they don't have them. Ashley Olaffson’s mother, Louise, in fact, said,
“They say they need their phones as alarm clocks. Or they tell me they need to charge their phones.’’
There's an obvious answer to both of those. Buy an alarm clock. For the second, do what some do: set up a charging area in the parent's bedroom.
Another mother, Leanne, said, “You can tell them all you want that there’s no reason be on the phone at 2 a.m., but after a certain point, unless you want to sit on top of them, you know it happens.’’
Once again, someone needs to be the parent, and set some limits. What do you readers think? Have you seen this sort of behavior among your own children?
In a way this isn't really news, as we already knew the trend: voice use is dropping, while SMS and email use is rising, in most age segments. It probably indicates why we can't stop some people from texting while driving; they simply don't want to call anyone.
The new Nielsen report shows that voice usage has dropped across all age groups, except those above 55. Meanwhile, all age groups, even those over 55, have seen an increase in texting.
Meanwhile, it's obvious why teenagers are getting calloused thumbs. The average U.S. teen (defined by Nielsen as between the ages of 13 and 17) sends or receives 3,229 text messages a month on average (more than 100 a day!). The second closest group, young adults aged 18 to 24, was about half that, at a meager 1,630 monthly SMS messages.
Gender has a lot to do with who texts how much. Teen girls far out-texted teen boys, although at 2,539 text messages the boys were holding up their end. However, the average teen girl sent or received 4,050 text messages a month, more than 1,500 more than the boys. Indeed, you'd better have an unlimited text messaging plan.
Meanwhile, teen voice usage is down about 14 percent. Teen females burn through about 753 voice minutes a month; boys used about 525 minutes a month.
In fact, what's the main reason that your teenager wants a phone? In 2008 it was safety. In 2010, it's sop they can text message their friends. Text messaging is considered faster and easier than voice calls. Even for old fogies, that makes sense. You can send a text message and if they don't answer it immediately, they'll answer it eventually, on their own time and terms, rather than having to answer the phone call you make to them on your terms.
Finally, the question of why tiered data plans are the wave of the future is answered: data use is spiking. Among teens and young adults it quadrupled, rising to about 60MB of use per months for teens and about 160MB of use for young adults.
EMMA Watson is delighted with her new hairdo!The Harry Potter star recently debuted a pixie cut — and she loves it!“Oh my God, it was the most liberating thing!” Emma said.“The stylist just grabbed the back of my hair and took a whole ponytail of hair out. It felt amazing. I love it.”
Watson, 20, has had the same shoulder-length ‘do for the past 10 years as she played Hermione in the hugely popular Potter film series.“I missed all that experimentation that most teenagers go through,” she says. “I’ve wanted to do this since I was about 16, so as soon as I had the chance I was like, ‘Right. This is it.’”
Facebook has teamed with the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), and will be providing a Facebook app that will serve as a sort of "panic button," allowing teenagers an easy to report cyberbullying and other such incidents. The tool will be advertised on the home pages of teenage Facebook users.
While Facebook and other social networking sites have become examples of the new age of childhood bullying, with some such incidents ending up in suicide. CEOP asked social networking sites to add the button last year, but although Bebo and MySpace did so, Facebook resisted at first, claiming its own reporting tools were sufficient.
However, after Ashleigh Hall, 17, "met" a 33-year-old sex offender posing as a teenaged boy on Facebook, only to be raped and murdered, pressure was ratcheted up. Additionally, it was reported that 44 police chiefs in the U.K. signed a petition in favor of CEOP's idea.
The app, ClickCoep, launched on Monday. The tool will be advertised on the home pages of teenage Facebook users. Install the app and you get a ClickCEOP tab in your profile, which seems to be the only level of integration with Facebook itself, as it really just get a Facebook page that links to the CEOP Report Center.
In addition, you can gain better coverage overall by using the browser add-ons which would allow such reporting from any site. We previously covered IE8's add-on.
Still, given the fact that Facebook will advertise this on teen users' home pages, it will probably be a more apparent aid to such users. However, one might wonder if it might be a good idea to put up the same sort of ad on those users who have teenage children?
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