According to a survey conducted by Christie Barnes, author of the top 5 things parents are worried about:
1. Kidnapping
2. School snipers
3. Terrorists
4. Dangerous strangers
5. Drugs
And the top 5 ways kids actually get hurt:
1. Car accidents
2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
3. Abuse
4. Suicide
5. Drowning
NPR: 5 Worries Parents Should Drop, And 5 They Shouldn’t
(via Bruce Schneier)
There’s little doubt among legal experts that Colton Harris-Moore’s best bet to avoid a lengthy prison term is to mount a defense that highlights his troubled upbringing and plays down the bravado of his two years on the run.
That’s already started.
His defense attorney, John Henry Browne, said on national television that the “Barefoot Bandit” isn’t interested in making money from his story. Harris-Moore didn’t have fun on the run, his lawyer said. He was lonely and scared.
Now, at 19, Harris-Moore could be facing years, if not decades, behind bars. Experts believe a trial — if no plea agreement is reached — is months away, at best.
Legal experts suggest that a successful defense likely will focus more on arguing for a reduced sentence than on challenging the facts in the dozens of crimes Harris-Moore is linked to.
HeraldNet: Defense options limited for Colton Harris-Moore
Update: From the Seattle PI:
He said Harris-Moore had a message for the public.
“He’s concerned that kids will think this is fun, and he wanted us to say publicly that it was not fun. He was scared to death most of the time he was on his ‘lark’,” said Browne. “It was not enjoyable … he was living in port-a-potties at times.”
perhaps his most benign nickname is the most telling. Long before stealing boats and planes made him a marvel of elusiveness, an Internet antihero, Mr. Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle. The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing.
“We called him ‘Island Boy,’ ” recalled Linda Johnson, whose mother, Maxine Kostelyk, was among Mr. Harris-Moore’s first suspected victims. “He came back over and over again — frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream. He was a tall boy, and he was growing.” […]
An examination of his early life and troubles suggests a picture far less cinematic. According to court and public documents and dozens of interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was nobody’s hero, not even his own. On the contrary, whether he was hiding in the Kostelyks’ tree house, watching for delivery of the high-powered flashlight the police believe he ordered with a stolen credit card, or flying solo to the Bahamas in a stolen Cessna this month, isolated in the tiny cockpit for more than a thousand miles — Colton Harris-Moore, for much of his life, was alone and hungry.
That was true even as he was being celebrated by thousands of fans on Facebook.
“He says he’s not into any of that,” said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Mr. Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. “He just wants to get this behind him.”
New York Times: ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Started Life on the Run Early
(Thanks Joe!)
Great stuff on value of creativity, its neuroscience, and how it can be taught:
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.” […]
Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
Newsweek: The Creativity Crisis
See also:
In recent decades, it began to seem as though America’s proud tradition of venerating great outlaws might have been lost. We’d grown to accept — and secretly admire — corporate-thievery. Our renegades and outlaws, once admired for their boldness in the face of tyrants, were recast in popular culture as degenerates. The logic went that by breaking the law — written to protect the powerful corrupt — they acted against society itself. Now we know nothing could be further from the truth. Thank God Colton Harris-Moore, the “Teenage Jesse James,” is winning back the hearts and minds of all those people who forgot the allure of a goodhearted outlaw.
The South Dakota crime spree started after Harris-Moore apparently left the Northwest, donating $100 to a Raymond animal hospital and stealing a $450,000 yacht on his way to Oregon, then reportedly stealing more cars as he made his way toward Idaho.
A few days after Harris-Moore’s trail went cold in Boise, Idaho, on June 12, authorities in South Dakota noticed an unusual series of incidents:
• A vehicle with Washington state license plates was found abandoned in South Dakota, according to a local news station.
• A vehicle was reported stolen from the Spearfish, S.D., airport and another was stolen from the Yankton airport on Tuesday.
• One or more homes were burglarized in the same area, not far from the airport.
• In one of the burglaries, police say a man who fits the description of Harris-Moore occupied a home while the family was on vacation. The family came home and surprised him in their house, and the man fled the scene.
KATU: Is ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Harris-Moore in the Midwest?
Lots more Harris-Moore stuff at Colton Harris-Moore Fanclub
Maybe… (emphasis mine):
. RESULTS: Controlling for age, physical maturity, and mother’s education, a significant curvilinear relationship between intelligence and coital status was demonstrated; adolescents at the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex. Higher intelligence was also associated with postponement of the initiation of the full range of partnered sexual activities. An expanded model incorporating a variety of control and mediator variables was tested to identify mechanisms by which the relationship operates. CONCLUSIONS: Higher intelligence operates as a protective factor against early sexual activity during adolescence, and lower intelligence, to a point, is a risk factor. More systematic investigation of the implications of individual differences in cognitive abilities for sexual activities and of the processes that underlie those activities is warranted.
I must be missing something because it looks to me like both higher and lower IQ teens were less likely to have sex. So doesn’t that mean being average is a risk factor?
(via Barking up the wrong tree via Dangerous Meme)
(Photo credit: castledweller / CC)
See also:
Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”
Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.
Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that
is better than everybody else. Surprised? So were authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman when they started researching the issue of kids and race for their book NurtureShock. It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to appreciate diversity are entirely wrong.
Read More – Wired: How to Raise Racist Kids
(via Monstrrrous)
Interesting polling data on my generation:
Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.
They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.
Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.
Read More – Pew Research: Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.
(via Theoretick)
See also: Generational Differences.
Georgia State University Criminal Justice experts Timothy Brezina, Volkan Topalli and economist Erdal Tekin, have released a unique study that indicates that although young criminals are aware of the risks of violent injury, death or punishment, the possibility of a shorter life span encourages them to focus more on the “here and now.”
“It turns out that if you boil it all down the more you think you are going to die young the more likely it is that you are going to engage in criminality and violence,” Topalli said. “This is the opposite of what most people think, because most people think that if you think you’re going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn’t commit crimes.”
The research “Might not be a Tomorrow,” is among the first Criminal Justice studies to simultaneously include one-on-one offender interviews with an econometric analysis of nation-wide adolescent data to provide a better understanding of why young people tend to pursue high-risk behaviors associated with immediate rewards, which include crime and violence.
Science Daily: Might Not Be a Tomorrow: Youth Anticipate Early Death
“Most people think that if you think you’re going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn’t commit crimes.”
What? Does anyone actually believe that? How are these results the least bit surprising?
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