Fourteen-year-old Claire August has fond memories of Valentine’s Day. Last year, a seventh-grade classmate she was dating gave her a little box of candy hearts.

Nearly half of 11- to 14-year-olds have had what they consider to be “boyfriends” or “girlfriends,” research shows. That doesn’t mean they talk. Texting is just fine. Sue Shellenbarger has details on Lunch Break.

It was one of the few times during their monthlong relationship that they talked face-to-face. Like most tweens, Claire, who lives in Davis, Calif., and her crush communicated almost entirely via text message and Facebook. When her mother Anne Smith asked Claire if they had held hands, she replied, “Oh, Mom, no. It’s junior high!” They even broke up via text message.

Nearly half of 11- to 14-year-olds say they have been in a dating relationship, according to a 2008 survey of 1,043 tweens by Tru, a Chicago youth market-research firm, for Liz Claiborne. A larger share—60%—think parents should let middle-schoolers date, according to a recent online poll of 787 users by Yoursphere, a social-networking website for tweens and teens.

Read on @WallStreetJournal

Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study published Monday in Pediatrics found.

“Arrest is a pretty common experience,” says Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and principal author of the study.

The new data show a sharp increase from a previous study that stunned the American public when it was published 44 years ago by criminologist Ron Christensen. That study found 22% of youth would be arrested by age 23. The latest study finds 30.2% of young people will be arrested by age 23.

Criminologist Alfred Blumstein says the increase in arrests for young people in the latest study is unsurprising given several decades of tough crime policies.

“I was astonished 44 years ago. Most people were,” says Blumstein, a professor of operations research at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University who served with Christensen on President Lyndon Johnson’s crime task force.

Now, Blumstein says, youth may be arrested for drugs and domestic violence, which were unlikely offenses to attract police attention in the 1960s. “There’s a lot more arresting going on now,” he says.

The new study is an analysis of data collected between 1997 and 2008 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The annual surveys conducted over 11 years asked children, teens and young adults between the ages of 8 and 23 whether they had ever been arrested by police or taken into custody for illegal or delinquent offenses.

Read on @USAToday

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on new statistics concerning college student drinking. It appears that the abuse of alcohol could be on  the decline. According to the article in The Wall Street Journal: “About 37% of college students engage in binge drinking, defined as consuming five or more drinks in a row during the preceding two weeks,according to 2009 data from a long-term study  at the University of Michigan. That is down about 3% from 2008 levels, but still higher than high-school seniors and young adults who don’t attend college.” The colleges that have been able to curtail binge drinking on campus are those that are providing non-drinking,  entertaining events for students. More and more students seem to be craving an alternative to the “party scene.”

Many students that you know and love are either on college campuses right now or plan to head to college next fall. Some students may be nervous about the college cultural expectations to “go wild,” and have questions about how to resist the temptations that lie
ahead. As you engage in conversations with college-bound students, here are five things to be sure to communicate:

Read on @CPYU

Teenagers who spend hours playing video games may have a similar brain structure to gambling addicts, research suggests.
In a study of 14-year-olds, those who played frequently had a larger ‘reward centre’ in their brains than those who played less often.

Brain scans showed those who played for more than nine hours a week produced more of the ‘feel-good’ chemical dopamine.

They produced even more when they were losing, an effect seen in pathological gamblers which is thought to be what prevents them from stopping when they are on a losing streak.

Playing video games was also shown to reduce decision time – a key skill for being good at them – which is also a characteristic of gamblers.

The researchers do not know whether gaming causes the brain to change, or whether people are born with this brain structure which makes them want to spend hours playing.

But they say it is a crucial first step in understanding whether video games could be addictive.

This study, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, is the first to connect frequent video gaming with differences in both brain structure and activity.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2061983/Teenage-video-game-players-brains-like-gambling-addicts.html#ixzz1dzJacjIQ

Soon, the holiday sounds of coins clinking into red kettles may disappear, replaced by the silence of a credit card swipe.

A new survey of the social networking habits of teenagers says that the majority have online experiences that help them feel good about themselves or make them feel closer to someone else on the network. 93 percent of teen social media users now have a Facebook account.

“Still, a substantial number of teens report specific negative outcomes from experiences on social network sites,” warns Teens, Kindness, and Cruelty on Social Network Sites, produced by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Family Online Safety Institute, and Cable in the Classroom.

That’s putting it mildly. Among the study’s findings:

Over one in five social-media-using teens (22 percent) have had an online experience “that ended their friendship with someone.”

• A quarter of these teens (25 percent) “have had an experience on a social network site that resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation with someone.”
• More than one in ten (13 percent) “have felt nervous about going to school the next day” after a social networking encounter. The same percentage had an experience “that caused a problem with their parents.”
• Eight percent got into a physical altercation with someone else “because of something that happened on a social network site” and six percent got into trouble at school because of such an experience.

“A Facebook profile can be the site of a budding romance or the staging ground for conflict,” the survey observes. “In the past, mediated interactions might have taken place via paper letter or set of wires and a phone between the conversing partners. Now, all internet users have access to a broader digital audience. And in this new environment, social norms of behavior and etiquette are still being formed.”

Read on @ARSTechnica

I figured being featured on Gizmodo, and Tosh.0 blog, among others was a good motivation for me to actually make this site live… as unfinished as it were. So, if you’re new to my work, Welcome. My name is Britt Spencer. I have another site that has over the years become a stagnant portfolio of my illustration work. This site will host a broader spectrum of my work… including McDonald’s food pyramids with a ketchup fountain crest.

The fountain, a center piece in my thesis show “The Dagnabit!!!”, was pretty popular for the two hours it was operational. I had suspected that McDonald’s would be a good catering option as it matched my work much better than carrot sticks and celery. Not to mention, much of my thesis is concerned with an adulation of mass consumerism.

Check it out @TheDagNabit