MySpace announced on Tuesday that it has deleted 90,000 accounts owned by registered sex offenders. It’s good news for families, for MySpace, and for the state attorney general of Connecticut, who demanded last month that the News Corp.-owned social network turn over a roster of names.

It’s especially good news for Sentinel, the security company that MySpace used to track down the accounts. And now Sentinel appears to be trying to take advantage of its success with MySpace into a PR campaign partly aimed at getting Facebook into signing a contract as well.

John Cardillo, the CEO of Sentinel, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he said thousands of those who were banned from MySpace can now be found on Facebook–not yet one of Sentinel’s clients.

“As the first and only social-networking site to use state-of-the-art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections,” a statement from MySpace read. “As part of our long-standing partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations.”

Unfairly accused? With the headline of the TechCrunch post referring to sex offenders on Facebook as “refugees,” and Cardillo calling the Palo Alto-based social network a “safe haven” for them, you’d think that there was some kind of mass creation of Facebook profiles on the part of sex offenders who had seen their MySpace profiles axed. There is, however, no evidence of that. Millions of people have profiles on both social networks, so it’s safe to assume that sex offenders probably do as well.

Facebook’s representatives weren’t thrilled by the “safe haven” allegation, to say the least.

Read More…

MySpace, Facebook, spar over family safety | Webware – CNET.

CAMDEN — Jeffrey Jones spent the first 10 years of his life in Camden, raised by his mother, a tutor, and his father, who held several jobs at a time to make ends meet.

Even as a boy, Jones said he was keenly aware of the poverty that ravaged the city. And when his family moved to Mickleton several years ago, Jones immediately realized there was a huge disparity in the opportunities available to Camden’s children and those in his new school.

He particularly noticed what he called the technological shortcomings of the city’s schools, and that thought stayed with Jones until he enrolled at Rutgers-Camden.

In September, Jones, 20, started a student group that initially focused on mentoring sick children in Cooper University Hospital’s pediatric ward. Its focus quickly shifted to education.

In December, Miracles became Miracles Global Inc., a nonprofit organization that’s independent of the university. Jones is the president of the organization, which has grown to include 25 members and a group on the social networking Web site Facebook.

The group’s aim is to collect money or computers that will be given to Camden schools and eventually, Jones hopes, to other ailing districts in the state and throughout the country, Jones said.

“We’re living in a globalized economy, a globalized world, and inner-city kids are being disconnected,” he said. “They’re at such an informational disadvantage.”

“We don’t need top-of-the-line equipment,” he said. “We pretty much just need to be able to word process and access the Internet. Those are the skills that we’re trying to focus on.”

Jones wants Miracles Global to reach students who otherwise would have limited to no access to computers and other technology.

“Hopefully we can bring these technologies into the classroom and eliminate some of the pressure these kids face,” he said. “They’re at a disadvantage and just can’t compete with other students in the region.”

“We’re all human beings and our environment shapes a lot of what we become,” Jones said. “I lived in Camden for 10 years, but there are a lot of others who lived in the city who didn’t turn out as well as I did.”

“That’s not because they’re any less of a man or a woman,” he added. “If they had been given access to the same tools, they could’ve been as great as anyone.”

FOLLOW on Twitter @MiraclesGlobal

Computers sought for city’s kids | CourierPostOnline.com | Courier-Post.

A troubled, gun-wielding 23-year-old student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute goes on a campus rampage, killing 32 people and eventually himself. An MIT student commits suicide by ingesting cyanide, and another dies in a fire after an overdose.

Such highly publicized occurrences underscore the sense of personal angst on today’s college campuses. But contrary to popular belief, the stress young people experience has nothing to do with meeting the demands of higher education.

It comes simply with being a newly minted adult.

Whether in college or not, almost half of this country’s 19-to-25-year-olds meet standard criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder, although some of the disorders, such as phobias, are relatively mild, according to a government-funded survey of more than 5,000 young adults, published in December in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The study, done at Columbia University and called the National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions, found more alcohol use disorders among college students, while their noncollege peers were more likely to have a drug use disorder.

But, beyond that, misery is largely an equal-opportunity affliction: Across the social spectrum, young people in America are depressed. They’re anxious. They regularly break one another’s hearts. And, all too often, they don’t get the help they need as they face life’s questions:

“Who will I be? Will I make friends? The romantic relationships, planning for the future . . . there is all kinds of stuff going on at the same time, including raging hormones,” says Ronald Kessler, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School.

Some evidence suggests that college students may even be less miserable than their nonstudent-age-mates.

Suicide – the third leading cause of death for teenagers and young adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is one-third lower among the college than noncollege set, says Dr. Paul Barreira, a psychiatrist who is director of Behavioral Health and Academic Counseling at Harvard University Health Services.

The reason is not well understood. One possible explanation, according to Barreira, is that most residential colleges don’t allow firearms. Firearms are still the most likely way young people kill themselves.

Mood disorders such as depression and anxiety affect slightly fewer college students than noncollege peers, researchers say.

And the biggest cause of despair? Even among college students, it’s not academics, but love that hurts most.

Emotional problems were more than twice as common among students who had recently had a major loss – typically a romantic breakup – than among those who had not, says Dr. Mark Olfson, the Columbia University psychiatrist who led the National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions study.

The universality of youthful angst may come as a surprise in light of tragic college occurrences. But to the specialists, it makes perfect sense.Continued…

The long reach of youthful angst – The Boston Globe.

In Bad Times, Free Resources Are a Hot Commodity

Hannah Lee, 4, grabs a book during a visit to the Germantown library with her dad, Samson Lee, and sleeping 1-year-old sister, Jenna. (By Nikki Kahn — The Washington Post)

Nearly every study table is full with patrons sipping lattes and surfing the Web. Teens are curled up in easy chairs. In a worried knot by the doorway, job seekers gather around a sign-up station for the Internet, waiting for their turn.

Before the Germantown library opened in 2007, there was hardly any “downtown” to speak of in the Montgomery County community, where houses and strip malls grew before anything else. Now it’s an important civic anchor, a main street where none existed, and the busiest library in the county.

In the past few months, it has become even busier. The library, like most in the Washington area, has had a rising tide of users as patrons look for free computer access, DVD loans and activities for children during the recession. Circulation in the last six months of the year rose as much as 23 percent in libraries around the region, records show.

The influx comes just as county managers are preparing budgets for the coming fiscal year in a time of huge shortfalls. Libraries, like other services, face drastic cuts that could mean reducing staff and hours or even shuttering branches.

“It’s a cruel irony that use is going up and budget cuts are occurring simultaneously,” said Jim Rettig, president of the American Library Association and a librarian at the University of Richmond. “What I think doesn’t get enough recognition is the role libraries play in the economic vitality and development of a community.”

Cultural soothsayers once thought libraries would become obsolete in the Internet age. Not so. They have modernized, digitized, virtualized.

Patrons can bring their own beverages; Arlington County hopes to add a cafe in one of its branches. They can access databases, read Chinese newspapers or the latest graphic teen novel. Users have more and more access from home; they can text in reference questions to a Fairfax County librarian, for example, or listen to podcasts. Fairfax card holders can read an e-book online. Librarians are trying to tailor services to community needs, hoping to add more babysitting certification classes in Silver Spring or résumé-writing workshops in Prince George’s County.

More than 68 percent of American adults now have a library card, the highest number since the ALA began tracking the numbers in 1990.

“One thing I hear quite frequently is ‘Gee, it’s cheaper to come here than Borders,’ ” said Nancy Savas, the library manager at Germantown. “It makes me laugh, because we’ve always been here.”

Business Brisk at Area Libraries – washingtonpost.com.