Tag: TEENAGERS

The 'Ugly Meter' is supposed to offer iPhone users a new way to joke around with their friends, but many are worried that the new app could provide today's cyberbullies with yet another way to harass their victims. The app, which is available for $0.99 on the iTunes Store, uses facial recognition technology to analyze a person's anatomical symmetry. Once a user submits a photo of someone's ...

We all know that we can't trust everything we read on the Web, yet when many of us get sick, we still tend to seek medical advice online before consulting doctors or health care professionals. Although some online sources do offer valid, fact-based advice, others can often misinform and mislead curious web surfers, who may suffer severe health consequences as a result. Rhys Morgan, a 15-year-old ...

After hearing lengthy complaints and protests from child safety advocates, Facebook has finally decided to implement a new feature designed to help teenage users stay safe online. As Reuters reports, members between the ages of 13 and 18 will now automatically receive an invitation to add an application that allows them to easily report suspicious activity. The feature, which is the result of a ...

The debate surrounding the effect of violent video games on today's youth is a pretty contentious one: some insist that superfluous exposure to violence only encourages similar behavior in hormonally charged teenagers; others argue that a child's behavioral problems have more to do with parenting than what games he or she plays after school. According to a recent study, though, games' effects on ...

Texting your way to carpal tunnel syndrome at the age of 16 is extreme, but what about the rest of America's teenage youth? Has texting now replaced actual speech as teenage lingua franca? A recent survey conducted as part of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project finds that 75-percent of teens now own cell phones, up from just 45-percent in 2004. Researchers also find that ...

Going to the North Pole at the ripe old age of 15 is a noteworthy achievement on its own. But going there and staving off frostbite long enough to check in on Foursquare -- that's historical. OK, so it may not be enough to put teenager Parker Liautaud in the same sentence as Captain Cook or Kris Kringle, but it does make him the very first person to unlock the vaunted Last Degree badge on ...

What's more embarrassing than a burglar accidentally dialing 9-1-1 on herself? Accidentally calling the police while she's in the middle of giving a lecture on how to escape the police. As 19-year-old Stefanie Vargas and her 13-year-old male accomplice were in the middle of robbing cars in Daytona Beach, Fla., the cell phone in Vargas' pocket "accidentally" called 9-1-1, allowing dispatchers ...

In most democratic countries, teenage gossip and name-calling rarely leave the realm of a high school cafeteria. In the hyper transparent age of Facebook, though, and especially in the authoritarian Republic of Indonesia, adolescent catfights are settled by civil courts -- and can often lead to jail time. A judge in Jakarta recently sentenced a teenage girl to 75 days in prison after she was ...

At the risk of dating ourselves, we'll admit that we didn't get our first cell phones until we could already drive a car. As for text messages, those came even later than did the mobile phone. That's probably why this recent Nielsen report on kids and texting left us with our mouths agape. According to data from about 40,000 mobile phone bills, kids under 12 years old send, on average, 1,146 text ...

When we were youngsters, it took some cunning to glimpse real-life nudity (Dad's dirty magazines don't count). But as with many things, technology came along and changed everything. Now, kids are 'sexting,' or sending provocative images, to each other; much easier than sneaking off behind the gym during class with your high-school sweetheart. Teens can sext anytime and anywhere, and according to ...

According to a study released by The Allstate Foundation and National Organizations for Youth Safety, teenage girls are much more likely to engage in texting and driving than their male counterparts. The organizations surveyed 605 drivers between the ages of 16 and 20. Here's a quick bullet list of some of the study's more interesting findings: 87-percent of teens think that driving and ...

We've seen our fair share of teen cell phone mishaps. From highly publicized 'sexting' trials to our favorite story of a girl arrested for hiding a cell phone in her butt, there seems to be no limit to our kids' cellular shenanigans. It seems that all teens have cell phones now, and that, apparently, they just can't stay out of trouble with them. Back in 2007, Steve Gray, principal of Port ...

While it might have been a tad on the excessive side to call the police on a 14-year-old girl for texting during class, the teen in question certainly didn't help anything by trying to hide her phone away in her butt. In a perfect example of how your tax dollars are spent (read: wasted), and how freakin' dumb kids can be, a Wisconsin teen was arrested for disorderly conduct after sending text ...

Apparently teens taking risqué photos of themselves is turning into a full-on epidemic. Researchers from Teenage Research Unlimited have finally put some hard numbers to the anecdotes about teens getting themselves in trouble with revealing photos. According to the study, commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, 22-percent of ...

This probably doesn't come as much of a surprise, but many teen drivers don't follow laws restricting cell phone use. According to the Associated Press, researchers from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety found that the number of teens using cell phones while driving was exactly the same before and after states instituted laws banning their use for drivers under a certain age. It is ...