Children tracked by sat nav to stop bad behaviour

Children will be tracked by satellite on public transport and encouraged to spy on their friends and report bad behaviour, under a pilot scheme by the Welsh Assembly.

The project is being trialled across the six North Wales counties to tackle anti-social behaviour on school buses.

Pupils will use a picture swipe card to clock on and off the bus allowing parents to keep a closer check on their child via a website.
It will help deal with a number of issues including truancy, drivers reporting and identifying ill-behaved children and monitoring a child’s whereabouts in the event of them going missing or a bus breakdown.

The scheme include ‘Bus Angels’ aged 14 and above, who covertly report incidents of bad behaviour,

Peter Daniels, transport manager at Denbighshire County Council said: “The main aims are to support schools, drivers, parents and pupils on school buses to improve behaviour and enable them to understand the consequences of some of the things they do.

“I have to say in north east Wales we don’t really see trouble and misbehaviour, but in the afternoon some of the pupils can be jolly and minor anti-social behaviour can occur, or from time to time something more serious.

“It’s very much like the scheme in London where an Oystercard user boards a bus and taps in and then taps out when he or she gets off.

“Using GPS tracking, parents will know exactly where their pupils are on the bus.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5205662/Children-tracked-by-sat-nav-to-stop-bad-behaviour.html

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.

April 22, 2009, 4:00 am

Earth Day is past now, but this article is so popular we’re pinning it at the top of the home page today so everyone looking for it can find it.

Luckily, we haven’t run out of oil, but have exhausted our supply of 70s fashion.

Luckily, we haven’t run out of oil, but we have exhausted our supply of 70s fashion.

For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

Source: http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny

On April 28, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that has caused anguish in the world of special education and children’s mental health.

The case, Forest Grove v. TA, centers on the question of whether families with a disabled child have a right to seek reimbursement for private-school tuition from the state if the child did not first receive special-education services in public school. The legal question is a narrow one, but the case raises larger, more troublesome issues about student safety and the quality of educational services that families should expect when they place their children in private residential care, because the school involved in the case, Mount Bachelor Academy, near Prineville, Ore., is under state investigation for allegations of abuse reported by students and one employee.

A spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) declined to discuss the details of the ongoing investigations, which include a second inquiry based on possible licensing violations. But according to 10 students, two separate parents and a part-time employee interviewed by TIME — some of whom are involved in the inquiry — Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing — fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts — and perform lap dances for male students as therapy.

Sharon Bitz, executive director of Mount Bachelor Academy, denies the charges. In an e-mailed statement to TIME, she said the reports of abuse are “inaccurate representations of Mount Bachelor Academy’s therapeutic approach for struggling or underachieving teens. Some of the accusations are demonstrably false, while others have been exaggerated for shock effect.”

In response to the accusations of sexual humiliation, Bitz told Oregon’s Bend Bulletin newspaper in a recent interview that school officials have never instructed students to act in a way that would “sexualize them,” and that the students’ costumes came from their own dorm rooms and were chosen by the students. “We would never ask a student to give a lap dance,” Bitz told the paper.

more

Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1891082,00.html

Do Lap Dances and Humiliation Treat ADHD and Should Public Schools Pay?

In today’s Time Magazine online, I have an article about a school– Mount Bachelor Academy– which is part of a Supreme Court case to be argued on April 28. The Court will answer the question of whether parents can sue to get reimbursement for private residential schools like Mount Bachelor, if their disabled child hasnt first tried public special education. In this case, the child’s disability was ADHD.

For the article, I interviewed more than ten students, two unrelated parents and a current employee who describe bizarre, abusive, one-size-fits-all “therapies” that are neither educational or therapeutic. Most of the teens I spoke with say they had witnessed or were personally made to perform lap dances or other sexualized activity in front of dozens of peers and staff. The school’s management denies all allegations of wrong-doing.

It may be the case that parents should have access to the courts if they feel that their school’s plan for their child with a disability is wrong. The Supreme Court will make that decision.

However, I think it’s very difficult to argue that sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation and isolation from family (kids are only allowed one ten-minute, monitored phone call every other week for months on end, no calls if they are punished) is an effective treatment for ADHD, depression, addiction or any other form of teen misbehavior or mental illness.

Though the school denies that it uses degrading tactics, reports of them have come from students, former employees and parents for decades.

Mount Bachelor is part of Aspen Education– believed to be the largest chain of teen residential programs in the U.S. Aspen, as part of CRC Health, which is owned by Bain Capital, was seen by advocates as much more sedate and less given to wacky practices than clearly “out there” programs like those associated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP or WWASPS). At one WWASP school, for example, teens were kept in outdoor dog cages.

The stories of psychological abuse coming out of Mount Bachelor– a few of which are included in my Time piece– are every bit as bad as I have heard from teens and parents at chains of programs that have far worse reputations.

Under the IDEA act– the special education law for people with disabilities– kids are supposed to be treated in the least restrictive setting with evidence-based approaches. Evidence-based treatment requires that teens have maximum contact with their families, be treated with dignity and respect and be empowered and given real choices.

It does not appear that Mount Bachelor meets anyone’s definition of a “least restrictive environment” or that its treatment is based on accepted research data.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maia-szalavitz/do-lap-dances-and-humilia_b_188141.html

Pee Poo

When I first saw the Peepoo bag I thought it was a joke, but after reading about it I realized it’s quite a novel idea. Basically it’s a plastic bag to go to the bathroom in, which is why I thought it was a joke, but this simple little bag employs some sophisticated sustainable solutions and solves some pretty daunting problems.

In the developing world clean water and sanitation are very scarce. This is due to over population and lack of infrastructure and poses a serious health risk to the affected populations. In these parts of the world not only do they lack the infrastructure to attain clean water, they also lack the infrastructure needed to deal with all their waste, so they end up contaminating the little water they have. Around the world, one child dies every 15 seconds from to contaminated water. For them the saying “Don’t piss where you drink” isn’t a clever metaphor, it’s a real life challenge.

More

Source: http://greenupgrader.com/7230/improving-sanitation-with-the-peepoo-bag/