NYTimes: Kids in Crisis (Behind Bars)

An article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoph discusses the "horrors that unfold in American prisons — especially juvenile correctional facilities — on a far larger scale than at Guantánamo."

What can we do about this?

For one thing, we can keep an eye on them. There is no reason that juvenile detention facilities should be under the strictest surveillance, including video.

Parents should be allowed to know what is happening to their children - especially with whom they are sleeping at night- even when the children are in detention facilities. Do parents give up their rights when their children go to jail? Does DSS give up its role?

From The New York Times:

OP-ED COLUMNIST: Kids in Crisis (Behind Bars)

A good starting point to rehabilitate young offenders is to stop the
criminal abuse many of them endure in correctional facilities.

http://s.nyt.com/u/tLW

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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NYTimes: Passwords Not Secure

From The New York Times:

If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe

People favor simple passwords, despite Internet security scares like
the recent attacks on Google's e-mail service.

http://s.nyt.com/u/rKj

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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Parents-You better get online

From The New York Times:

If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online

Researchers once thought children's use of smart phones and other
electronic devices could not go up. They were wrong.

http://s.nyt.com/u/rsY

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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NYTimes: Blacks in Retreat

From the New York Times: 

[W]ithout a dramatic new intervention by the federal government, the poverty rate for African-American children could eventually approach a heart-stopping 50 percent, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Already more than a third of black children are living in poverty.

From The New York Times:

OP-ED COLUMNIST: Blacks in Retreat

Martin Luther King Jr.'s fight for economic justice seems to have been ignored today as black Americans are bearing a disproportionate burden of joblessness.

http://s.nyt.com/u/ruQ

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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Xbox Takes On Cable, Streaming TV Shows and Movies

X-box as a new medium for connecting people to their entertainment:  

"It's 20 million connected living rooms," said Marc Whitten, the general manager of Xbox Live.

From The New York Times:

Xbox Takes On Cable, Streaming TV Shows and Movies

If talks with Disney work out, the game console could stream ESPN content, making it that much easier to watch TV without cable.

http://s.nyt.com/u/rP7

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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Donate to Haiti From iPhone

Unofficial Donate to Haiti App - This works from iPhone: link

Official Donate to Haiti App - This does not work from the iPhone: link

Why not?

What happens when the sea takes your land?

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/16/plum_island_woman_wants_to_rebuild_on_beach?mode=PF


Bid to rebuild Plum Island home faces opposition
By Taryn Plumb
Globe Correspondent / January 16, 2010
NEWBURY - A few tentative nudges from the curled arm of a bulldozer, and that was it. The white two-story beach cottage keeled forward and crumbled with a puff of dust like an exhausted gasp.
That was in November 2008, when 80-year-old grandmother Geri Buzzotta lost 45 years worth of memories, photographs, and valuables, her longtime Newbury house a casualty of the churning Atlantic that is voraciously gnawing away at Plum Island.

Now, remarkably, Buzzotta is hoping to rebuild on that very same tiny lot overlooking the tempestuous ocean.

But she faces opposition - a group of her neighbors, along with the state Department of Environmental Protection, are debating the proposed project out of concern for Plum Island’s eroding dunes.

Why I Develop iPhone Apps: Donate to Haiti On My iPhone)

Donate to Haiti On My iPhone

The victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake need our help. 

Use your iPhone to donate money to the Red Cross or learn more about how you can help.

iDoTouch.com is not affiliated with the Red Cross or the Center for International Disaster Information. Image from Red Cross on Flickr. This is not an official app of either of those organizations.

What's new

Screenshots

http://appshopper.com/news/donate-to-haiti

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Safety Net Project

Should cell phone carriers be held liable in tort or otherwise when abusers use cell phone location information to track their victims?   

Safety Net: the National Safe and Strategic Technology Project educates victims, their advocates and the general public on ways to use technology strategically to help find safety and escape domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking and abuse. Safety Net also trains law enforcement, social services and coordinated community response teams on how to identify and hold perpetrators accountable for misusing technology. Local, state and national policies are reflecting the success of the Safety Net Project's efforts, which include helping courts to keep survivors' addresses and photos off the Internet and increasing the security of databases that house vital and confidential information about victims. Read more about Safety Net...

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Latest News From Safety Net:

http://nnedv.org/projects/safetynet.html

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Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

Sure, we're all plugged in and online 24/7. But fewer American kids are growing up to be bona fide computer geeks. And that poses a serious security risk for the country, according to the Defense Department.

The Pentagon's far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), with an emphasis on computing. According to the Computer Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006.

Darpa's worried that America's "ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development."

The agency doesn't offer specifics on what kinds of activities might boost computing's appeal to teens, but they want programs to include career days, mentoring, lab tours and counseling.

Of course, Darpa's launched student-oriented publicity stunts before. But events like last year's red balloon hunt were directed at pre-existing geeks — the balloon-finders were a team of MIT aces.

Now, Darpa's now hoping someone, somewhere, can come up with a way to make future philosophy majors change course. And they want to get 'em while they're young: Darpa insists that programs be "targeted to middle and high school students, and include methods "to maintain a positive, long-term presence in a student's education."

A long-term presence that includes evenings and weekends. Rather than incorporate computer-based activities into academics, Darpa wants the programs to be extracurricular, "perhaps as an after school activity, weekend, or summer event." Tween girls and minorities take note, because Darpa's especially got it out for you:

Finally, the decline in degrees in CS [computer science] is particularly pronounced for women and minorities…. Proposals that have plans that specifically increase the number of women or minorities in their activities are encouraged.

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NYTimes: The Tel Aviv Cluster

From The New York Times:

OP-ED COLUMNIST: The Tel Aviv Cluster

Israel's success in the field of technology is the fruition of the
Zionist dream, but it's likely that the country's economic leap
will widen the gap between it and its neighbors.

http://s.nyt.com/u/rCN

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://itunes.com/apps/nytimes

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Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield - WSJ.com

• TECHNOLOGY
• JANUARY 12, 2010

Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield

Nation Forges Ahead in Deploying Unmanned Military Vehicles by Air, Sea and Land

By CHARLES LEVINSON

TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126325146524725387.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories#printMode

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Opening The Facebook App To Your Facebook Fan Page

Opening The Facebook App To Your Facebook Fan Page

from Mobile Orchard by Robert Strojan

3 people liked this

Guest author Robert Strojan (@blackoutrobb) is the founder and lead iPhone app developer at Blackout Labs. He is also a speaker at the 360|iDev Conference in April.

In September I wrote a post on iPhoneDevTools.com about opening the Facebook iPhone app from within another app or from the web with the Facebook app’s custom URLs. I got a lot of questions about how to open the Facebook app directly to a fan page or application page allowing an app’s users to add themselves as Facebook fans.

The most widely used method of opening a Facebook fan page is to open it in Safari or an in-app browser. The issue with this method is that iPhone users likely use the Facebook iPhone app and, consequently, won’t be logged-in in the browser. The extra hurdle of logging in is a significant factor in app-to-Facebook-fan conversion rates. It would be nice to open the Facebook app directly to a fan page allowing the user to add themselves as a fan in a single tap. Here’s how:

The Facebook app is accessible via the custom URL protocol ‘fb://’. There are several domains you can add next to access different parts of the Facebook app. One is ‘profile’. A specific profile can be opened by adding the unique ID of the fan page as a path to the domain. Here’s how I open my recently created Blackout Labs fan page:

I got my Blackout Labs Fan page unique ID by looking at the address bar of my Fan Page:

Some pages won’t have an ID in the address bar. For those, click on your Fan Page profile pic and on the profile pic page you’ll see the parameter ‘id=’ in the address bar which indicates your fan page’s ID.

Now I can open the Blackout Labs fan page directly in the Facebook app with URL fb://profile/210227459693. If you’re currently browsing on the iPhone, tap that link to open the Facebook app directly to my fan page. Here’s what you’ll see:

The Objective-C code is simple: Open the URL with an instance of ’sharedApplication’. An if-statement ensures that the fan page will open in Safari if the user doesn’t have the Facebook app installed.

NSURL *fanPageURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"fb://profile/210227459693"];  if (![[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: fanPageURL]) {         //fanPageURL failed to open.  Open the website in Safari instead         NSURL *webURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.facebook.com/pages/Blackout-Labs/210227459693"];         [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: webURL]; } 

The method also works for Facebook apps. If you’ve created an iPhone app that utilizes Facebook connect, then you already have a fan page setup for your app. You can use the same method above to open your Facebook Connect application’s fan page.

Now I wish I could end it there. I’m not affiliated with Facebook and unfortunately, this information hasn’t yet been officially released by Facebook; possibly because the URLs are not yet stable enough for use. I’ve actually encountered a couple bugs in the process of using the URL including the “Become a Fan” button not appearing consistently and my fan page details not showing up every time the app is opened via a custom URL. Furthermore, the URLs aren’t guaranteed to be supported in future versions of the Facebook iPhone app. In other words, make sure you test your implementation with your Facebook fan or app page, and weigh the risks of possible bugs and future incompatibility with the potential of increased fan conversion rates.

Thanks to Robert for contributing this piece! Want to contribute something? Send your topic and a writing sample to dan at mobileorchard.com