The Protect IP/SOPA Bill Threatens the Entire Internet, Video Explains the Flaws in This Hurried Legislation

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – fightforthefuture.org/pipa

Source: fightforthefuture.org

We May Be Less Happy, but Our English Language Isn’t

Newswise — “If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page.

So one might expect the New York Times to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words — like “war,” ” funeral,” “cancer,” “murder” — than positive, happy ones — like “love,” “peace” and “hero.”

Or take Twitter. A popular image of what people tweet about may contain a lot of complaints about bad days, worse coffee, busted relationships and lousy sitcoms. Again, it might be reasonable to guess that a giant bag containing all the words from the world’s tweets — on average — would be more negative and unhappy than positive and happy.

But new research shows just the opposite.

“English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive,” said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont.

The UVM team’s study “Positivity of the English Language,” is presented in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

This new study complements another study the same Vermont scientists presented in the Dec. 7 issue of PLoS ONE, “Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network.”

That work attracted wide media attention showing that average global happiness, based on Twitter data, has been dropping for the past two years.

Combined, the two studies show that short-term average happiness has dropped — against the backdrop of the long-term fundamental positivity of the English language.

In the new study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics.

“The big surprise is that in each of these four sources it’s the same,” says Dodds. “We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words.”

Or, as they write in their study, “a positivity bias is universal,” both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature.

Why is this? “It’s not to say that everything is fine and happy,” Dodds says. “It’s just that language is social.”

In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.

“If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can’t be a…,” well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print — which makes the point.

This new work adds depth to the Twitter study that the Vermont scientists published in December that attracted attention from NPR, Time magazine and other media outlets.

“After that mild downer story, we can say, ‘But wait — there’s still happiness in the bank,” Dodds notes. “On average, there’s always a net happiness to language.”

Both studies drew on a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk. On this website, the UVM researchers paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the “happiness” — the emotional temperature — of the 10,222 most common words gathered from the four sources. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, “laughter” at 8.50, “food” 7.44, “truck” 5.48, “greed” 3.06 and “terrorist” 1.30.

The Vermont team — including Dodds, Isabel Kloumann, Chris Danforth, Kameron Harris, and Catherine Bliss — then took these scores and applied them to the huge pools of words they collected. Unlike some other studies — with smaller samples or that elicited strong emotional words from volunteers — the new UVM study, based solely on frequency of use, found that “positive words strongly outnumber negative words overall.”

This seems to lend support to the so-called Pollyanna Principle, put forth in 1969, that argues for a universal human tendency to use positive words more often, easily and in more ways than negative words.

Of course, most people would rank some words, like “the,” with the same score: a neutral 5. Other words, like “pregnancy,” have a wide spread, with some people ranking it high and others low. At the top of this list of words that elicited strongly divergent feelings: “profanities, alcohol and tobacco, religion, both capitalism and socialism, sex, marriage, fast foods, climate, and cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, the iPhone, and zombies,” the researchers write.

“A lot of these words — the neutral words or ones that have big standard deviations — get washed out when we use them as a measure,” Dodds notes. Instead, the trends he and his team have observed are driven by the bulk of English words tending to be happy.

If we think of words as atoms and sentences as molecules that combine to form a whole text, “we’re looking at atoms,” says Dodds. “A lot of news is bad,” he says, and short-term happiness may rise and and fall like the cycles of the economy, “but the atoms of the story — of language — are, overall, on the positive side.”

Released: 1/12/2012

Source: University of Vermont

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/we-may-be-less-happy-but-our-language-isn-t

Looking Ahead to the New Year…..Top Tech of 2012

Newswise — Retinal Prostheses: Implantable chips will apply a grid of photosensors to the optic nerve, giving blind people a form of vision.

LED Lighting: Super-efficient, affordable bulbs based on the Philips L Prize winner and other designs will replace incandescents and, in many cases, compact fluorescent lamps.

Windows 8: Microsoft has so far been sidelined by the industry-wide move to mobile platforms, such as smart phones and tablets. This new operating system is the Redmond, Wash., company’s last, best hope to turn things around.

Chinese Supercomputers: For the first time China is building world-class supercomputers based on home-grown processor chips, and experts say this could be the beginning of that country’s push into the highest-tech regions of high tech.

3-D Printing: This idea, which began as a tool for designers and evolved into a toy for hobbyists, is now maturing into a new, one-off kind of fabrication, one that will find its way into routine manufacturing as well as the production of spare parts.

Plug-ins Proliferate: This will be the year in which plug-in gas-electric hybrid cars go from curiosity to mainstay, as the number of manufacturers offering models rises and the market for their wares matures.

EV Charging Stations: A fast-charging infrastructure, partly based on super-powerful direct current, will begin to service pure-electric vehicles, thus allaying drivers’ “range anxiety.”

3-D Chips: A long-anticipated foray into the third dimension will turn flat chips into thick cubes, increasing the density of elements in integrated circuits in an entirely new way and thus giving Moore’s Law a new lease on life.

Extreme UV Lithography: This is the year of decision for an expensive chip-fabrication technology that uses hard-to-handle extreme ultraviolet light to draw finer-than-ever features on silicon chips. Whether EUV lithography succeeds or fails, the result will be of critical importance to the industry.

Private Spacecraft: Millionaires are doing what government cannot–they are creating companies that will take people and cargo into space at a fraction of the cost of NASA launches.

Exoskeletons for Paraplegics: People who have suffered from spinal-cord injuries will for the first time strap themselves into robotic exoskeletons. Initially, these machines will help rehabilitate patients; later, the exoskeletons will take them where their own legs cannot.

4G Networks: Smart phones and other mobile platforms will carry real-time video and do other network duties with a zip never before seen, thanks to this new and very capacious wireless standard.

Grid-level Batteries: As the electric power distribution system–the grid–comes to depend on variable sources of energy, such as the wind and the sun, it will increasingly smooth out the power by using enormous battery stations.

Another Earth: New telescopes and instrumentation will guide astronomers to hundreds of planets orbiting foreign stars and will reveal candidate planets of a size, composition, and temperature suitable for life as we know it.

Released: 12/22/2011

Source: IEEE Spectrum Magazine

Related Link:

http://newswise.com/articles/top-tech-of-2012

New Website Lets Us Examine Our Automatic or Unconscious Associations About Mental Illness

Newswise — Nearly half of all people in the United States will experience a mental illness at some point during their lives, yet talking about mental illness remains taboo for many. A new website, Project Implicit Mental Health, allows visitors to examine and gain insight into their associations about mental health topics that may exist outside their conscious awareness or conscious control.

Visitors can discover their automatic associations relating to anxiety, depression, alcohol, eating disorders and persons with mental illness, using tasks such as the Implicit Association Test. The website is a collaboration among researchers at the University of Virginia, Harvard University and University of Washington.

The website provides users with opportunities to try one or more measures of automatic associations relevant to mental health. The site then gives feedback on what each measure reveals. The site is free, has no advertising, and each measure can be completed in less than 10 minutes. The measures do not diagnose a mental health difficulty and the site does not offer therapy, but does offer links to many resources for seeking mental health help. Project psychologists use data from the tests, which does not identify participants, for research into mental illness associations.

Automatic associations are evaluations that occur rapidly and are very difficult to consciously control. These associations can differ from our slower, more intentional evaluations either because we do not have access to the automatic associations in memory, so cannot consciously reflect on them, or because we may not be comfortable sharing these associations, which can sometimes feel embarrassing or socially unacceptable.

Substantial research evidence already links change in automatic associations to how much somebody will improve in treatment for anxiety disorders, and automatic associations can even help identify individuals at risk for alcohol problems and suicidal behavior.

Researchers use the Implicit Association Test to assess mental associations that may be different than what people know or say about themselves. Research suggests that people sometimes have implicit belief systems that contradict their declared beliefs. These implicit beliefs can affect actions, such as how they view people with mental illnesses, including themselves.

“People may not always be able to tell us about their mental health difficulties, either because they lack insight into the problem or do not feel comfortable reporting such sensitive information,” said Bethany Teachman, principal investigator of the Project Implicit Mental Health site and an associate professor of psychology in U.Va.’s College of Arts & Sciences. “With this site we may improve our ability to identify and help people who are suffering by including automatic measures of mental illness to complement what people are willing and able to report.”

The site uses the latest psychological science to raise awareness about the role of automatic associations in mental health issues. Many forms of mental illness are characterized by ways of responding that seem to happen very rapidly and can feel uncontrollable. Thus, learning about automatic associations (which capture fast and relatively uncontrollable ways of processing information) may help researchers better understand why mental illnesses develop, what maintains them, and how to best reduce the suffering associated with mental illness.

“We want to share some of the new tools that the science of clinical psychology has to offer, and we are hopeful that this website will help raise awareness about, and reduce, the stigma associated with mental illness and its treatment,” said Matthew Nock, a co-director of Project Implicit Mental Health and professor of psychology at Harvard University. “Learning about one’s own automatic associations may help reduce the tendency for people to hold negative attitudes toward mentally ill individuals – such as exaggerated beliefs that mentally ill people are dangerous or untreatable.”

Project Implicit Mental Health is the newest site for Project Implicit, an international collaboration of researchers investigating thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Visitors to the Project Implicit websites have now completed more than 13 million tests of automatic associations since it was launched in 1998.

“Mental health is the cutting edge for research with automatic measures,” said Brian Nosek, director of Project Implicit and a U.Va. associate professor of psychology. “Many mental health challenges occur despite the person’s intentions and efforts to think, feel or behave otherwise. Automatic measures offer an opportunity to investigate how unintended thought processes contribute to dysfunctional behavior.”

Released: 12/14/2011

Source: University of Virginia

Related Link:

http://newswise.com/articles/website-lets-us-examine-our-automatic-or-unconscious-associations-about-mental-illness

New Study Finds Online Chat Boosts Lying and Email Has the Most Lies

Newswise — AMHERST, Mass. – A new study by University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers finds that communication using computers for instant messaging and e-mail increases lying compared to face-to-face conversations, and that e-mail messages are most likely to contain lies. The findings, by Robert S. Feldman, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Mattityahu Zimbler, a graduate student, are published in the October issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

The research paper, titled “Liar, Liar, Hard Drive on Fire: How Media Context Affects Lying Behavior,” looked at 110 same-sex pairs of college students who engaged in 15 minute conversations either face-to-face, using e-mail, or using instant messaging. The results were then analyzed for inaccuracies.

What Feldman and Zimbler found was that while there is some degree of deception present in all three forms of communication, it was increased in both instant messaging and e-mail, with e-mail messages the most likely to contain lies. Underlying this was the concept of deindividualization, where as people grow psychologically and physically further from the person they are in communication with, there is a higher likelihood of lying, they say.

In addition to the distance one person is from the other, e-mail communication has the added component of being asynchronous, not as connected in real time as instant messaging or face-to-face conversation. Feldman and Zimbler conclude, “It seems likely that the asynchronicity of e-mail makes the users feel even more disconnected from the respondent in that a reply to their queries is not expected immediately, but rather is delayed until some future point in time.”

“Ultimately, the findings show how easy it is to lie when online, and that we are more likely to be the recipient of deceptive statements in online communication than when interacting with others face-to-face,” says Feldman.

“In exploring the practical implications of this research, the results indicate that the Internet allows people to feel more free, psychologically speaking, to use deception, at least when meeting new people,” Feldman and Zimbler say. “Given the public attention to incidents of Internet predation, this research suggests that the deindividualization created by communicating from behind a computer screen may facilitate the process of portraying a disingenuous self.”

Feldman, who has been the dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UMass Amherst since 2009, is an expert on lying and author of the book “The Liar in Your Life,” published in 2009.

He is a frequent commentator in the media on issues related to lying. Feldman joined the faculty of the UMass Amherst psychology department in 1977 after teaching for three years at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College and Wesleyan University and was a Fulbright lecturer and research scholar at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea in 1977.

Released: 11/15/2011 1:00 PM EST
Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/online-chat-boosts-lying-and-e-mail-has-the-most-lies

Move Over Youngsters, Grandma’s on Facebook!

Newswise — BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Funny sounding words like Google and Twitter were foreign to 82 year-old Peggy Batcheler. The retired nurse had never been on the Internet, didn’t know how to get there and she didn’t have the foggiest notion that “going online” might be a remedy for growing isolation.

For years, she had been able to move along through life without the World Wide Web just fine. That is, until her fashion catalogs and church bulletin went solely online. Then, she was left in the dark.

University of Alabama at Birmingham sociology Professor Shelia Cotten, Ph.D., and a team of graduate students have turned on the light for Batcheler and her 80- and 90-year-old peers. They are introducing them to the Internet and its connections on Facebook, Google and Twitter to study the effect on quality of life.

After a few weeks in class, Batcheler is surfing the web like a teenager, and the results have been stunning. The elderly users are happier, Cotten says, because they’ve reconnected with their lost social circles, feeling good about learning something new and, in some cases, recapturing their old hobbies.

Funded by a five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging, Cotten’s team has been hosting eight-week computer-training courses for residents in independent and assisted-living facilities since 2009 in five locations; they plan to extend into 10 more.

Seniors who move into these homes often become depressed because they lose regular contact with their established social networks, Cotten says. But, communicating via email and social networking sites appears to be a good remedy. In findings to be published in Computers in Human Behavior, Cotten says Internet use reduces depression by 20 to 28 percent among older, retired adults.

Going online allows them to correspond with family and friends more often, see pictures of grandkids and watch videos of family vacations.

“They no longer feel that life is passing them by and that they are left there to die,” Cotten says.

Less than 20 percent of the study participants had used computers beforehand, Cotten says. But after a couple of weeks in class, they surf the Internet just like their grandkids.

On a recent Monday at Fair Haven Retirement Home in Birmingham, smiling white-haired seniors — some wearing oxygen masks, bifocals and hand braces — sat in front of large computer monitors with keyboards that have oversized keys and huge, bright yellow mice they jokingly called “rats.”

“We teach them everything — from turning on the computer to moving a mouse,” Cotten says. “You have to start with the basics and not take for granted that they know anything about computers, although some do have computer experience.”

In the first week of class, the students sit away from the computer, leery to even touch it, she says.

“They think they are going to break the computer.”

Then, after about a week, the seniors become at ease and lean into the computer monitors handling the keyboard and mice with finesse, she says.

They often go to Google StreetView to check out their old neighborhood or childhood home, surf over to YouTube and watch clips from old classic movies and spy on Facebook to see what their grandkids are doing.

“Every day is an adventure,” says 80-year-old Helen Frye, who had never been on the Internet before but now emails her grandkids in New York.

Older adults are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups online, research shows, for three reasons: their children and grandchildren are pulling them online to engage; an increase in courses offered for seniors; and the ease of use of technology.

Batcheler and classmates googled a burning question and found the response in .09 seconds, she says.

“Someone wanted to know if, when you get up in the middle of the night, you could heat up your milk in the waxed carton?”

The answer?

“No,” Batcheler said. “It’s best to put it in a microwave-safe container.”

Released: 10/27/2011

Source: University of Alabama at Birmingham

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://newswise.com/articles/move-over-youngsters-grandma-s-on-facebook

Our Favorite Free Software, MWSnap… Outstanding Screen Capture Program!

MWSnap, Screen Capture 8PAK.COM Studios

In this, our fourth installment of our Editors’ favorite free or low cost software programs, we most heartily recommend the outstanding screen capture program MWSnap.

MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen.

The Current version is capable of capturing the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu, a control, or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. MWSnap handles 5 most popular graphics formats and contains several graphical tools: a zoom, a ruler, a color picker and a window spy. It can be also used as a fast picture viewer or converter.

MWSnap does not require installation and does not need any special dlls, drivers or system files which can mess up your system.

Features of MWSnap Include:

• 5 snapping modes.
• Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.
• System-wide hotkeys.
• Clipboard copy/paste.
• Printing.
• Auto-saving, auto-printing.
• Auto-start with Windows.
• Minimizing to system tray.
• An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs.
• A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.
• A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.
• A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.
• Fast picture viewer.
• Adding frames and mouse pointer images.
• Multilevel configurable undo and redo.
• Multilingual versions.
• Configurable user interface.
• And more…

The program is freeware but the author does accept donations.

You may download MWSnap at the following link:

http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

No Technical Know-How Needed: Endless Forms Web Site Helps Users ‘Breed’ 3-D Printable Objects

Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – Forget draft tables and complicated computer-aided design programs: You dream it. Endless Forms helps you design it.

Cornell University engineers are allowing anyone to point, click, collaborate and create online in the evolution of printable, three-dimensional objects. They aim to transform the design of art, architecture and artificial intelligence.

Their new, interactive website EndlessForms.com, allows users to design their own things – from lamps and butterflies to furniture and faces – without any technical knowledge and using the same principles that guide evolutionary biology.

The Web site was developed by Jeff Clune, Cornell postdoctoral fellow; Jason Yosinski, Cornell graduate student in engineering; and Eugene Doan, Cornell undergraduate student in the Creative Machines lab of Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and computing and information science.

EndlessForms.com users can develop objects just as gardeners raise roses – a “generation” of objects is displayed, and a user chooses objects they like, which are “bred” to produce the next generation. Over time, objects evolve and users can publish these objects. Others can further evolve, share and rate them, creating a collaborative exploration of designs that, according to Lipson, represents an entirely new way of thinking about design. Users can then have their objects made by 3-D printing companies in a wide range of materials, such as silver, steel, ceramic or sandstone.

The concept eliminates the need for skilled engineers to draw in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) programs, which can be complicated and non-intuitive. These new design tools free people to focus creativity, instead of being mired in technical details, Lipson said.

Now that 3-D printing is taking off, the goal is to unshackle the design process, flooding the industry with objects that are truly one of a kind. Lipson likens the 3-D printing industry to iPods with no music – the printers exist, but the availability of content is bottlenecked by the old methods like CAD that few people know how to use and that stifle creativity.

The Web site demonstrates in real time the power of evolution to produce complex designs, providing a rare glimpse of the process in action. Users can also view the ancestral lineage of each object stretching back to the first, simple, randomly-generated object, and thus can see how evolution builds complexity via a series of small changes.

Cornell Creative Machines lab: http://creativemachines.cornell.edu.

Released: 8/17/2011
Source: Cornell University

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/no-technical-know-how-needed-endless-forms-web-site-helps-users-breed-3-d-printable-objects

Back to School: Using Social and Digital Media for Academic Success

Photo Credit: Ryerson University Digital Media Zone social media expert and CEO of startup company SoapBox Brennan McEachran offers back to school tips on social media for academic use.

Newswise — Just because the carefree days of summer come to an end doesn’t mean you need to give up your favourite social media platforms. True, getting caught in embarrassing Facebook pictures or inappropriate Twitter feeds might inhibit your academic success, but using these platforms can actually help you. These tips will help you use social and digital media to your advantage:

• Social media can be quite overwhelming; the trick is to focus on a couple key platforms and really target your use. Don’t like too many groups, just pick what’s important to you, this way you won’t get overloaded with news and updates.
• Twitter is great because it can help you keep in touch with the administrative staff of your university/college. Through their feeds they can keep you up to date on campus news and events, and even on “did you know” type items like school policies. You can also use Twitter to pose a question to other students at your school to start conversations and make change in your university/college.
• Find out the rules and regulations around the use of social media in your school. There are limitations as to how much information you can divulge without going against privacy policies. Many platforms are great tools to create study groups or be in touch with class members. But, remember: don’t share notes or essays through these methods. Plagiarism is against school policy, no matter the vehicle.
• Take advantage of the wealth of information social and digital media can provide. Using search engines like Quora or Google can optimize your primary research and can make a difference between a B or an A.
• Digital media tools are also a great way to help you get ahead. Tools like an iPad or Evernote can help you during those times where your professor goes over things so quickly that you can’t quite catch what they wrote or said. (Evernote is a suite of software for your smartphone that enables you to take notes and archive anything you’ve missed through voice recording and photos of hand-written notes.)
• Focus Booster is a great app that can help you organize your study time and break time. Based on a countdown, you set the timer to suit your needs: i.e., 20 minutes of study time and a five minute break, etc. Knowing a break is coming can help you stay on task. For Mac users, using the Self-Control App can help get your attention away from browsing time-wasting websites. This self-set site blocker can optimize your work time by restricting your access to distractions.
• Use Google calendar. This tool can be easily synced to your phone, where you can transfer important times and dates as well as your class schedule. You have no excuse not to attend class when you have this trusty app in your back pocket! Also, Google docs can help you get through group projects without disputes. Each team member can upload their work on Google docs, and other members can edit and create other work without having to physically meet during crunch time.

Soapbox is an online platform for community based change that allows each person to get their idea into the hands of key decision makers. Each user can submit and vote on any idea in order to bubble up the collective voice of the users. For more information, visit http://www.hitsend.ca.

Hitsend is one of 24 companies currently incubating at Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone. For more digitally-themed back to school expert tips, visit the Back to School page at www.ryerson.ca/dmz.

Released: 7/28/2011
Source: Ryerson University

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://newswise.com/articles/back-to-school-social-and-digital-media-for-academic-success

Dealing with the Cyberworld’s Dark Side; Psychologists Examine Disturbing Trends, Offer Tips on Coping

Newswise — WASHINGTON – People who are cyberstalked or harassed online experience higher levels of stress and trauma than people who are stalked or harassed in person, according to a presentation at the American Psychological Association’s 119th Annual Convention.

“Increasingly, stalkers use modern technology to monitor and torment their victims, and one in four victims report some form of cyberstalking, such as threatening emails or instant messaging,” said Elizabeth Carll, PhD, in a talk entitled, “Electronic Harassment and Cyberstalking: Intervention, Prevention and Public Policy.”

Emotional responses to the stress and trauma experienced by victims may include high levels of ongoing stress, anxiety, fear, nightmares, shock and disbelief, helplessness, hyper-vigilance, changes in eating, and sleeping difficulties, Carll said.

“It is my observation that the symptoms related to cyberstalking and e-harassment may be more intense than in-person harassment, as the impact is more devastating due to the 24/7 nature of online communication, inability to escape to a safe place, and global access of the information,” Carll said.

U.S. Department of Justice statistics reveal that some 850,000 adults, the majority female, are targets of cyberstalking each year, according to Carll. Citing various other sources, she gave examples of the pervasiveness, including:
• 40 percent of women have experienced dating violence via social media, which can include harassing text messages and disturbing information about them posted on social media sites.
• 20 percent of online stalkers use social networking to stalk their victims.
• 34 percent of female college students and 14 percent of male students have broken into a romantic partner’s email.

“The same technologies used to harass can also be used to intervene and prevent harassment,” she said, adding that some states are considering mandating the use of GPS tracking devices on offenders to allow victims to keep tabs on them.

“Imagine a cell phone application that can tell you if someone threatening you is nearby,” Carll said. “That could be life-saving.”

Law enforcement, legal assistance and other social service providers need training to use direct and electronic methods to intervene and prevent electronic harassment, and victims need training in the safe use of technology, she said.

In another session Friday, researchers released results of a study that found 36 percent of students had been cyberbullied at least once in the past year.

Researchers examined data collected in 2009 from 1,112 students, ages 12 to 19, 405 female, from schools in Seoul and the Keonggi area of South Korea. Of these, 225 were in elementary school, 678 in middle school and 209 in high school. The students completed a questionnaire about their cyberbullying experiences, self-esteem and how they regulate their emotions.

“The results revealed that cyberbullying makes students socially anxious, lonely, frustrated, sad and helpless,” said presenter YeoJu Chung, PhD, of South Korea’s Kyungil University.

The research explored how adolescents emotionally deal with cyberbullying. Students who said they ruminated, or obsessed, about the negative event were more likely to suffer serious stress from cyberbullying. In addition, people who blamed themselves for the situation were more likely to ruminate. Students who refocused on positive thoughts were able to cope and recover more quickly, according to the study.

Students reported that they were more negatively affected by cyberbullying when it was anonymous and in “one-sided sites such as blogs and cyber boards.” The research also showed that students who are victims of cyberbullying will often subsequently bully others online.

“Lots of adolescents have trouble recovering from negative effects of cyberbullying,” said Chung. “We can help them use emotion regulation skills to recover, rather than become bullies themselves.”

Released: 7/28/2011   Source: American Psychological Association (APA)

Via Newswise

Related Link:

http://newswise.com/articles/dealing-with-the-cyberworld-s-dark-side