To Hell in a hand basket ... ?

Once again, scientific research smacks down RightWing NutJob alarmists' shrieeek and claims that our children are threatened and endangered by the evuls of an "open" society.

In recent years, high-profile cases in which teenagers were arrested for forwarding nude pictures of other minors have attracted nationwide attention. Despite sexting’s reputation as a teenage pastime, surveys now suggest that it is actually more common among young adults than children.

“It only takes one or two cases to make people think this is very prevalent behavior,” said Janis Wolak, an author of the new paper and a senior researcher at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “This has been reported as if it were something that everyone was doing, not just in the teen population, but in the young adult population. It’s really not the case.”

Over all, the new report found, 149 youths interviewed for the study, or 9.6 percent, said they had sent or received images that included full or partial nudity in the previous year. Just over 2 percent of those who engaged in sexting said they had appeared in the pictures or had taken them themselves, and 7.1 percent said they received sexual images from someone else.

In most cases, the motivations for sending or forwarding sexual texts were not malicious. Most of the youths who sent such messages said that they did so with someone they were involved in a relationship with, or that their messages were flirtatious gestures to someone they had a romantic interest in.

In fact, the best example of behaviour that can corrupt children's and adolescents' moral compass might be found in the bald-faced self-justified Nixonian dirty tricks used by the Cons.

But, but, but ... Harper's MASSIVE Hard-On Crime Bill C-10 should fix all that, according to Contempt Party members ... ^NOT.

Un grand merci to Rick's tweet.

There's an app for that

Find the tell. You'll have to go to the IPeed link.

Pink or Blue? One Line or Two? Cup or stream? What woman hasn’t spent countless hours sweating it out over an innocuous white plastic stick otherwise known as a home pregnancy test (whether trying to conceive or not). Not to mention the small fortune spent on multiple drug store trips to buy more tests (just in case the first one was wrong). Even the cheap dollar store tests add up pretty quickly after a few months of trying to conceive.

With the recent launch of iPeed, those high costs and frequent pharmacy trips are a thing of the past, as the new home pregnancy test iphone application offers 99% accuracy 2 days before your first missed period. Created by a pharmacist mom and her computer developer husband, the iPeed is hoping to revolutionize the $50 million-dollar-a-year home pregnancy test market. And at $2.99 a download for unlimited use, it may do just that.

Or go here.

h//t

No iPhone Shake-A-Babe game.

While rightwingnutters, religious zealots and assorted abortion criminalizing batshit crazies drool over this, organizations who are seriously committed to the health and safety of vulnerable babies and infants who have come into this world expressed strong concerns about an iPhone game.

Apple Inc. pulled a 99-cent iPhone game called "Baby Shaker" from its iTunes store Wednesday after its premise — quiet a crying baby with a vigorous shake — prompted outrage.

According to screen shots posted on several Web sites, "Baby Shaker" displayed black-and-white line drawings of a baby. The iTunes description included the line, "See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!" Once the iPhone owner finishes shaking the device, the on-screen baby is depicted with large red X's over its eyes. ...

Public outcry ensued, with organizations including the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation condemning Apple for approving the game's sale.

For those not familiar with Shaken Baby Syndrome it's important to stress that grave injuries occur when parents, care-givers and child minders are unaware of the extreme harm this action can produce and unable to access other strategies to calm and soothe a crying infant. In recent years a number of community-based initiatives have been successful in reducing incidents and increasing awareness of this public health issue.

Shaken Baby Syndrome is neither a laughing nor a gaming matter.