Standing in the way of control!

From Jezebel:

 If there was one American cultural meme we didn’t need to export, it would be the recent surge in reported cases of women sexually abusing children. While, as a feminist, I am all for equality in almost every circumstance, I don’t feel that it’s necessary to extend the hypersexualization of girls to boys, or for women to catch up to men in terms of engaging in pedophilia or statutory rape. Be that as it may, while some on this side of the Atlantic are tittering over the relative hotness of the latest rape-y schoolteacher and papers all over the world have been covering the abusive dormitory monitor at Oprah’s school for girls in South Africa, 40 percent of school-age boys in the country report being forced to have sex before the age of 18, mostly by female perpetrators. Ugh.

Unsurprisingly, rapes were more common in poorer communities than richer and committed by people known to the victims more often than not. Nearly thirty percent of victims were assaulted by their fellow students, while 20 percent were assaulted by teachers and another 20 percent were assaulted by family members. The remaining 30 percent were assaulted by non-family members who weren’t teachers.

Neil Andersson and Ari Ho-Foster, who co-authored the study, rightly point out that the sheer volume of sexual abuse is likely to multiply given that children who are abused are more likely to become abusers — and, in fact, 10% of the victims in the study admit to also being perpetrators. They also suggest that the actual rate of abuse might be much higher given the continuing stigma associated with rape. One thing they don’t delve into is how much the rate of assaults today has to do with the rate of assaults in previous generations — is this a multi-generational problem now multiplied by the sheer number of adult victims? Is the onset of widespread abuse associated with a specific period of time or has this been acceptable behavior for generations of schoolboys? It’s hard to say.

Until 2007, raping a boy was not classified as a rape but as an “indecent assault,” a legal change that the authors applaud. They additionally note that decreasing the rape of young boys could pay serious dividends in reducing the rate of HIV infection in South Africa, which then makes one consider the possibility that older people are preying on too-young children in order to satisfy sexual urges without fear of disease. How is is even possible that using a condom has less of a stigma than raping a child?

South African Epidemic Of Schoolboy Sexual Abuse [Science Daily]
Oprah School Abuse Trial Starts [BBC]

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We thought there was supposed to be some backlash against the whole metrosexual thing, but whatever: British chain Superdrug has just launched a men’s cosmetics range called “Taxi Man” , which features “guy-liner” (larger and chunkier for poorly-coordinated male hands) and “manscara.” A concealer is in the works. Says the brand’s creator, “We’ve developed essentials any guy would borrow from his other half. It’s about subtle make-up rather than wanting to create the drag queen look.” “Borrowing?” “Any guy?” Who was their focus group? Why the hell is is called “Taxi Man” which is, by the way, the gayest name ever for a purportedly ‘macho’ line? Have we not learned that when men wear makeup, people get sent to the guillotine? More to the point: is that where our BeneTint went? [News.com.au]

(Jezebel)

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Cars in a parking lot could soon keep track of each other and, like sheep, complain if one of their numbers is stolen or meets a bad end.

At least, that’s the intention of the Sensor Vehicle Anti-Theft System (SVATS) proposed by Sencun Zhu, an assistant professor at Penn State University. As he explained to LiveScience.com, each car would be given a sensor — smaller than a coin — that would wirelessly call roll with other, similarly equipped cars in the parking lot within range, and pass on the results. If any car stopped responding to the roll call without issuing a goodbye signal when it was unlocked, the car herd would decide that the non-responsive car had been stolen and alert the lot’s base station.

Parking lot monitoring could be accomplished without inter-car networking, but the use of networking allows for short-range, low-power transmitters, with longer battery life, Zhu said. The range of the sensor signal between cars will be about TK to TK feet (2 to 10 meters.

He anticipates that each car would have a master sensor drawing power from the car, and battery-powered slave sensors hidden through the vehicle. The slave sensors would take over if the master is defeated by hot-wiring. Mass-produced, the sensors should cost less than a dollar, and Zhu anticipates they could be handed out by commercial parking lots as a competitive measure.

Prevention, anyone?

The not-so-subtle drawback with all such theft-alert devices is that when the alert arrives the car has already been stolen. Experts on car theft avoidance, on the other hand, preach prevention, which, by Ben Franklin’s calculations, is 16 times better than anything you can do after the fact.

Rather than rely on technology, pundits (such as Auto-Theft.info) urge the use of something called common sense. For instance: Lock the car door. Take the keys. Park in well-lit areas with a lot of foot traffic. Keep valuables out of sight. Do not hide spare keys in the car. Do not leave registration or insurance documents in the car.

If further measures seem warranted, get a steering wheel lock of some kind. The simple, visible presence of such a device will likely deter a potential thief.

Owners of particularly vulnerable or valuable vehicles might then want to escalate to an electronic immobilizing device that would prevent thieves from bypassing the ignition and hot-wiring the car. After that, there’s theft-alert and tracking devices, like Zhu’s.

Grim fate

But deciding how much protection is merited is dicey. While expensive luxury cars would logically seem to be prime targets for thieves, the bad guys are actually more likely to grab the junker in the next parking space. That’s because their prime targets are ordinary models of a certain age whose owners are getting desperate for parts — which the thieves supply by stripping stolen cars of the same model.

In 2006, the most commonly stolen vehicles were the 1995 Honda Civic, the 1991 Honda Accord, and the 1989 Toyota Camry, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. There were no luxury cars in the top 10.

Since the cars are stolen to be stripped, the recovery rate is only 63 percent, reports the NICB

From: Livescience.com

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Richard Catto from capetownnews has discovered Woopra and writes the following:

There are now innumerable ways to collect stats for any type of web site. Bloggers tend to be fanatical about checking their stats to see what’s happening and competing with themselves to continually raise the bar.

Most stats packages take time to deliver the information. Google Analytics, for instance, takes 24 - 48 hours to update your web site’s stats.

Bloggers want that information NOW, if possible, and now there is one stats package which stands out above the rest: WOOPRA.

Woopra gives Real Time Stats. As you watch the Java based console, so you see the visitors come and go. Woopra tells you how many you have viewing your site right now, who they are, where they came from and what country they are in. You can see what pages they open, how long they keep it open, and if you like, you can even initiate a real time chat with them.

If they comment on your blog, then their Woopra session will be tagged with the name they used. You can even choose to tag visitors yourself, to more easily keep track of who they are.

Woopra installs on your blog via a WordPress plugin (or javascript for other types of blogs). To view the stats you need to download the Woopra console which is written in Java, and thus requires you to install Java on your machine.

Once that is accomplished, you need to sign up for an account on Woopra’s site and add the sites you wish to track. Sites are manually approved within a few hours.

So far it seems to be an interesting new toy. If you’re a stats fanatic, I’d recommend you give it a try.

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