Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

What's Hot? 9/28/12

Google Hot Internet Searches - 9/28/12
    1.    google
    2.    pnc
    3.    here comes honey boo boo
    4.    grey's anatomy
    5.    jimmy hoffa
    6.    ed hochuli
    7.    andy williams
    8.    avalanna
    9.    lady gaga
    10.    opie
Source: Google


Top 10 U.S. Websites - 9/28/12
    1.    Google
    2.    Facebook
    3.    YouTube
    4.    Yahoo!
    5.    Amazon
    6.    eBay
    7.    Craigslist
    8.    Wikipedia
    9.    Twitter
    10.    Windows Live
Source: Alexa


iTunes Top 10 Singles - 9/28/12
    1.    Begin Again - Taylor Swift
    2.    Gangnam Style - PSY
    3.    Die Young - Ke$ha
    4.    Diamonds - Rihanna
    5.    One More Night - Maroon 5
    6.    We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - Taylor Swift
    7.    Some Nights - Fun
    8.    Finally Found You - Enrique Iglesias
    9.    Too Close - Alex Clare
    10.    Whistle - Flo Rida
Source: Apple iTunes


Top 10 TV Shows in Prime Time - Week Ending 9/28/12
    1.    NBC Sunday Night Football
    2.    Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick
    3.    The Voice
    4.    The Voice - Tuesday
    5.    Revolution
    6.    Primetime Emmy Awards
    7.    Football Night America PT 3
    8.    X-Factor - Wednesday
    9.    X-Factor - Thursday
    10.    Go On
 Source: Nielsen Co


Top 5 Most Viewed Videos on YouTube - This Week - 9/28/12
    1.    iPhone5 vs Samsung Galaxy Drop Test - AndroidAuthority
    2.    One Direction: Live While We're Young - Kylie McCan
    3.    The Simpsons: Homer Votes 2012 - ANIMATIONonFOX
    4.    Green Day Billie Joe Freaks Out - xClandestinex
    5.    Calvin Harris: Sweet Nothing - calvinharrisVEVO
Source: YouTube


Top 5 Movies - Week Ending 9/28/12
    1.    End of Watch
    2.    Trouble with the Curve
    3.    House at the End of the Street
    4.    Finding Nemo 3D
    5.    Resident Evil: Retribution
Source: Variety

May Parents Believe That Letting Kids Taste Alcohol Discourages Later Use

One in four mothers believe that letting young children taste alcohol may discourage them from drinking in adolescence and 40 percent believe that not allowing children to taste alcohol will only make it more appealing, according to a new study by RTI International and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, explored whether parents purposefully introduce children to alcohol at a young age and, if so, why. It also examined parenting practices that impact children's opportunity to try alcohol.

"The idea that early exposure to alcohol can discourage a child's interest in drinking has a strong foothold among some parents of elementary school aged children," said Christine Jackson, Ph.D., a social ecologist at RTI International and the study's lead author.

At least a quarter of the mothers said allowing their children to taste alcohol would discourage their curiosity in it because they would not like the flavor and because it will remove the "forbidden fruit" appeal of it. Forty percent of the mothers interviewed felt that not allowing children to have alcohol would only increase their desire to have it.

Twenty-two percent of the mothers believed that children who taste alcohol at home with their parents would be better at resisting alcohol-related peer pressure, and 26 percent thought it would make them less likely to experiment with risky drinking in middle school.

The researchers found a strong association between parents who were in favor of allowing their children to taste alcohol and children's reported alcohol use.

"These findings indicate that many parents mistakenly expect that the way children drink at home, under parental supervision, will be replicated when children are with peers," Jackson said. "More research is needed to understand how parents acquire these ideas and to understand the relationship between early sipping and alcohol use in adolescence."

Source: ScienceDaily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120919142010.htm

Active Video Games Have Exercise-Like Effects in Kids

Adolescents who play active video games increase their heart rate, use more oxygen and expend more energy, according to a small new study.

Low levels of physical activity are associated with obesity in children. Compared to video games that youngsters can play while sitting on the couch, active video games encourage movement and could help children increase their physical activity levels, according to researchers Stephen Smallwood and colleagues at the University of Chester, in England.

The games, "Dance Central" and "Kinect Sports: Boxing," increased the children's energy expenditure by 150 percent and 263 percent, respectively, above resting values. Energy expenditure while playing the active games was 103 percent and 194 percent higher, respectively, than playing traditional video games.

The active games also led to significant increases in heart rate and oxygen uptake, in the study published online Sept. 24 in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/09/24/active-video-games-have-exercise-like-effects-in-kids-study

U.S. Consumers Watched 38 Billion Web Videos in August

The most recent comScore data reports that an all-time high of 188 million U.S. consumers watched an estimated 38 billion Web videos in August.

Americans viewed 9.5 billion video ads last month, with each of the top four video ad properties delivering more than 1 billion ads each. Overall, video ads reached 54% of the total U.S. population an average of 58 times during the month.

Also worth noting, comScore found that the duration of the average online content video was 6.7 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.

Video ads also accounted for 20% of all videos viewed last month, and 1.4% of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Source: MediaPost
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/183467/august-us-consumers-watched-nearly-38-billion-w.html?edition=51449

Teens Who Drive Dangerously Learn from Mom and Dad

Teens who engage in distracted and dangerous driving most likely learned their bad driving skills from their parents, according to a new study.

The majority of more than 1,700 teens surveyed admitted to making poor decisions while behind the wheel.

Nine out of 10 said they talked on their cell phone while driving and 94 percent admitted to speeding. A majority of teen respondents said their parents practiced 'do as I say, not as I do' rules when it came to driving.

"These findings highlight the need for parents to realize how their teens perceive their actions," said Dave Melton, a driving safety expert.

Meanwhile, when kids notice their parents driving poorly, they seldom say anything. Only 21 percent of teens in the study said they would ask their parents to stop driving while under the influence of alcohol.

"Your kids are always observing the decisions you make behind the wheel, and in fact have likely been doing so since they were big enough to see over the dashboard," Melton said in a summary of the survey. "You may think you only occasionally read a text at a stop light or take the odd thirty-second phone call, but kids are seeing that in a different way. Answering your phone once while driving, even if only for a few seconds, legitimizes the action for your children and they will, in turn, see that as acceptable behavior,"

Source: CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/21/us/teen-drivers/index.html

Reducing Sugar Drinks at Home Curbs Teen Weight Gain

A new study has found that teens who drink lots of sugary drinks can lose weight if they swap the sodas for non-caloric beverages such as water or diet drinks.

The research was led by Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at the Harvard-affiliated Boston Children's Hospital. It's published in the Sept. 21 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

His new study involved 224 overweight and obese ninth and tenth-graders (124 boys, 100 girls) who were habitual sugar-sweetened beverage drinkers, meaning they had either a 12-ounce sugary drink or 100 percent fruit juice every day.

They split students into two groups, one of which received a delivery every two weeks of non-caloric beverages such as water, flavored-water and diet drinks for one full year. The other group that served as controls received no non-caloric drinks but were mailed a $50 gift card to a supermarket at four and eight months (with no instructions on what to use it on) to ensure they wouldn't drop out of the study.

Ludwig said the researchers wanted to see if solely changing the teen's household environment to carry fewer sugary drinks would have an effect on his or her weight without a behavioral intervention explicitly promoting weight loss.

It turns out that simply swapping the drinks out of the home helped. After statistically ruling out other demographics so the only difference between groups would be sugary drink intake, teens who had the non-caloric deliveries gained an average of four fewer pounds over the course of a year than soda drinkers in the control group.

"No other single food product has been shown to change body weight by this amount over a year simply through its reduction," Ludwig said.

Source: CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57518076-10391704/swapping-sugary-drinks-out-of-teens-homes-curbs-weight-gain-study-finds/

What's Hot? 9/21/12

Google Hot Internet Searches - 9/21/12
    1.    fiona apple
    2.    chase
    3.    chase .com
    4.    talk like a pirate day
    5.    demi lovato
    6.    big brother
    7.    lindsay lohan
    8.    shakira
    9.    mega millions
    10.    lady gaga
Source: Google


Top 10 U.S. Websites - 9/21/12
    1.    Google
    2.    Facebook
    3.    YouTube
    4.    Yahoo!
    5.    Amazon
    6.    eBay
    7.    Craigslist
    8.    Wikipedia
    9.    Twitter
    10.    Windows Live
Source: Alexa

iTunes Top 10 Singles - 9/21/12
    1.    Gangnam Style - PSY
    2.    One More Night - Maroon 5
    3.    We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - Taylor Swift
    4.    Some Nights - Fun
    5.    Too Close - Alex Clare
    6.    Whistle - Flo Rida
    7.    Blow Me - Pink
    8.    Try - Pink
    9.    Your Body - Christina Aguilera
    10.    Clique - Kanye West & Jay-Z
Source: Apple iTunes

Top 10 TV Shows in Prime Time - Week Ending 9/21/12
    1.    NBC Sunday Night Football
    2.    Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick
    3.    Football NT America PT 3
    4.    The Voice
    5.    The Voice - Tuesday
    6.    Go On
    7.    The Voice 9/12 Special
    8.    X-Factor - Wednesday
    9.    Football NT America PT 2
    10.    X-Factor - Thursday
 Source: Nielsen Co

Top 5 Most Viewed Videos on YouTube - This Week - 9/21/12
    1.    Lexa Berman The X-Factor USA 2012 - SylvieBeaulieu2012
    2.    LFL: Canada Game 3 - LingerieFootball
    3.    Swedish House Mafia: Don't You Worry Child - SHMVEVO
    4.    G-Dragon: Crayon - BIGBANG
    5.    Meet Carly Rose Sonenclar: The X-Factor USA 2012 - TheXFactorUSA
Source: YouTube

Top 5 Movies - Week Ending 9/21/12
    1.    Resident Evil: Retribution
    2.    Finding Nemo 3D
    3.    The Possession
    4.    Lawless
    5.    The Expendables 2
Source: Variety

An Estimated 5.6 Million Underage Kids on Facebook

Facebook has an ugly little secret, a number disclosed nowhere in its voluminous filings to become a public company and now only vaguely addressed by corporate officials.

An estimated 5.6 million Facebook clients - about 3.5 percent of its U.S. users - are children who the company says are banned from the site.

Facebook declines to acknowledge that many of its efforts to block children are not working.

Yet, Facebook has made some progress in identifying preteens and excluding them from the site. A June Consumer Reports study showed that Facebook eliminates as many as 800,000 users under age 13 in a year through its tiered screening process, which the company declines to describe. The study still estimates 5.6 million children are on Facebook, a figure that experts say includes many who create accounts with help from their parents.

Children who aren't savvy enough to game Facebook's system often get parental help, according to a 2011 study headed by Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. She found that 55 percent of parents of 12-year-olds said that their child was on Facebook and that 76 percent of those had helped the child gain access.

The Consumer Reports data comes from a January 2012 survey of 2,002 adults with home Internet. Participants were chosen by TNS, a research firm. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

A Reuters test of Facebook's signup process shows that a child could bypass the site's screening features with relative ease. The site effectively blocked a fictitious sign-up from an underage prospective user. But after an hour's wait, the site accepted a sign-up using the same name, email, password and birthday but citing a different birth year.

Facebook declined to discuss the data or describe its efforts to ban children. Spokesman Frederic Wolens said in an email that Facebook is "committed to improving protections for all young people online".

Source: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/19/us-facebook-children-idUSBRE88I1G620120919

Sexting Again Linked to Risky Sex Among Teens

One out of every seven Los Angeles high schoolers with a cell phone has sent a sexually-explicit text message or photo, according to results of a 2011 survey that also found "sexters" more likely to engage in risky sex behaviors.

In the new study, the LA teens who had sent racy texts were seven times more likely to be sexually active than those who said they'd never sexted.

The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, are based on 1,839 students in Los Angeles high schools, most of whom were Latino. Three-quarters of them owned a cell phone that they used regularly.

A study of Houston, Texas, high schoolers out earlier this summer found one in four teens had sent a naked photo of themselves through text message or email, and those kids were also much more likely to be having risky sex.

Jeff Temple, a psychologist and women's health researcher from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who worked on the Houston study, found that girls in particular who'd sent naked photos were more likely to engage in risky sex, to have had multiple recent sex partners or to use alcohol and drugs before sex. "Sexting appears to be a reflection or an indication of actual sexual behavior," Temple said. "What they're doing in their offline lives is what they're doing in their online lives."

Eric Rice, a social network researcher from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led the new study, agreed that this was the most important finding to take away from both studies. "That may be a no-brainer to some parents, but it may be alarming to others," he said.

Source: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/17/us-sexting-again-linked-to-risky-sex-amo-idUSBRE88G0G220120917

 

Studies Find More Students Cheating

Recent studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others.

Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited.

“I don’t think there’s any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that’s abetted by the adults around them,” said Donald L. McCabe, a professor at the Rutgers University Business School, and a leading researcher on cheating. “There have always been struggling students who cheat to survive,” he said. “But more and more, there are students at the top who cheat to thrive.”

Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or hard it is.

A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others.

The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role.

“Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating,” said Mr. Wasieleski, an associate professor of management.

Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that over the 20 years he has studied professional and academic integrity, “the ethical muscles have atrophied,” in part because of a culture that exalts success, however it is attained.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/education/studies-show-more-students-cheat-even-high-achievers.html