Understanding the decline in unwanted online sexual solicitations for U.S. youth 2000–2010: Findings from three Youth Internet Safety Surveys

To explore the decline in online sexual solicitations between 2000 and 2010 by examining the characteristics of solicitations to better inform prevention efforts. Data are from the Youth Internet Safety Surveys (YISS); three cross-sectional, nationally representative telephone surveys of 3561 youth Internet users in the United States, ages 10 through 17 (1501 in YISS-1; 1500 in YISS-2; 1560 in YISS-3). Unwanted online sexual solicitation was defined as requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult. The decline in unwanted sexual solicitations from 19% in 2000 to 13% in 2005 to 9% in 2010 was driven by a reduction in youth who were being asked to talk about sex or for personal sexual information online. Pre-teens (ages 10–12) accounted for the majority of this decline. Multiple solicitations over the course of a year also decreased. More solicitations occurred at the hands of people youth knew in person prior to the incident – mainly friends and acquaintances, and less so at the hands of people youth met online. By 2010 most solicitations were occurring through social networking sites. Victims were disclosing solicitation incidents at greater rates in 2010 – mostly to friends. In spite of continuing anxiety about the impact of the Internet on the safety of youth, encouraging trends suggest experiences, behavior and education are moving in the direction of greater online safety and improved experiences for youth.     

Special Issue

Teacher education, the process of becoming a teacher and aiding others to become teachers, is in part a journey of imaginative development. Students come to imagine teaching, and themselves as teachers, in new ways. This essay reports on an attempt to use ideas about imagination in teaching and learning as the central theme of the first semester of a one‐year teacher education program in British Columbia, Canada. Following a discussion of the theoretical and practical challenges encountered, several possible means of extending this approach are proposed. It is argued that a program thus infused by imagination may be more likely to lead to authentic professional transformation of the kind often posited as a goal of teacher education.     

Flashcard: Alternating between Visible and Invisible Identities

This article addresses how my experiences as a black deaf female viscerally and simultaneously shape me. I use the metaphor of flashcards. Flipping over flashcards or “flashing” depicts how certain contexts incite and/or promote the visibility or invisibility of identities, particularly between the familial and educational contexts. Also, I utilize moments from my childhood to narrate alternating reflections of lived experiences (visible) and the theoretical constructs (invisible) that inform and shape these experiences.     

PART IV: PHYSIOLOGY

A comparison of power output recorded by an SRM powercrank and Kingcycle test rig.     

Building the open road: The NREN as a test-bed for the National Public Network

While the National Research and Education Network will meet the computer and communication needs of scientists, researchers, and educators, its implementation should also be used as an opportunity to extend the benefits of public networking technology to new groups of users. If built in a competitive environment, according to the principles of open interconnection, adherence to nonproprietary standards, common carriage, easy-to-use user interfaces, and respect for personal privacy, the NREN could demonstrate the great potential of public broadband networks in the future. As policy makers debate the role of the public telephone and other existing information networks in the nation's information infrastructure, the NREN can serve as a working test-bed for new technologies, applications, and governing policies that will ultimately shape the growing National Public Network.This paper was originally written in September 1991, so legislative citations are not all to the latest version of NREN legislation.The authors wish to thank Art Kleiner and Danny Weitzner for contributing to the writing of this article. A version of the article will be published in Building Information Infrastructure: Issues in the Development of the National Research and Education Network (B. Kahin, ed., McGraw-Hill), a collection of papers from a symposium sponsored by the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program and Strategic Computing and Telecommunications in the Public Sector Program of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.     

Consistency in children's reports of sexual and physical abuse

OBJECTIVE: The goal of the present study was to investigate the consistency of children's reports of sexual and physical abuse. METHOD: A group of 222 children, ages 3-16 years, participated. As part of legal investigations, the children were interviewed twice about their alleged experiences of abuse. The consistency of children's reports of sexual and physical abuse was examined in the two interviews, in relation to age, type of abuse, gender, memory, suggestibility, and cognitive capabilities. RESULTS: Older children were more consistent than younger children in their reports of sexual and physical abuse. Children were more consistent when reporting sexual abuse than physical abuse. Girls were more consistent than boys in sexual abuse reports. Consistency in sexual abuse reports was predicted by measures of memory, whereas consistency in physical abuse reports was not. Cognitive abilities did not predict consistency in sexual abuse or physical abuse reports. CONCLUSIONS: Implications for understanding children's allegations of abuse are discussed.     

Angle between choice alleys as a critical factor in spontaneous alternation

Rats were tested for spontaneous alternation in a variety of mazes differing in the angle between choice alleys. Uniformly high alternation rates were found at all angles from 330 down to 90 deg. At 45 or 0 deg, the rates approximated a chance 50%, and at angles between 45 and 90 deg the alternation rates were also intermediate. The hypothesis that the spatial distance between goal regions is the critical factor was rejected, and it was concluded that the angle between alleys is the principal factor determining alternation under these conditions. The results support the idea that alternation in the rat is basically a vestibular phenomenon.