RFID, GPS and Electronic Surveillance

New Program in Bryan Makes Truant Students Carry a GPS Device

January 18, 2010

KBTX (Bryan, Texas) - Bryan High students who skip school will soon be tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It's called the Attendance Improvement Management Program or AIM, and it has been used across Texas and the United States.

Students who find themselves in Brazos County Justice of the Peace Tommy Munoz's truancy court will be enrolled.

In fact, Tuesday morning the first group of Bryan truants will be given hand-held GPS tracking monitors and will receive one-on-one coaching to get them back to school.

"There are lots of programs that council and mentor students to stay in school," says AIM's CEO Travis Knox. "The AIM program is different since it provides students with accountability in addition to coaching."

Students on the program are tracked with a hand-held GPS device between the time they leave for school in the morning and the time they check in for curfew at night. After curfew, students receive individualized coaching.

"While tracking students is an important part of what we do, our coaching sessions are the most important part of the equation," says Knox. "Our coaches help students set short-term, attainable goals, starting with staying in school."

You may recall, JP Munoz announced his plans last year to implement the truancy program.

Nationwide, AIM has reported impressive results. Last Spring, students were maintaining a 97% attendance rate.

Fox News Report on GPS Monitoring in Texas
Houston Chronicle Report on GPS Monitoring in San Antonio
Dallas Morning News Report on Student GPS Monitoring

Social Networking: Your Key to Easy Credit?

We use social chatter as a way to bring risk down. It's a wealth of information about a person. -- Rob Garcia, The Lending Club

It's rotten, it's really not something they should be doing. They may be gaining information from people who are naive and not understanding how their profiles are set. It verges on privacy violation. -- Linda Sherry, Consumer Action

January 17, 2010

creditcards.com - You probably don't analyze the chatter or quality of your social media connections, but creditors may be doing just that. In their quest to identify creditworthy customers, some are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal in the virtual stratosphere. Before calling the privacy police, though, understand how it's really being used.

According to Nielsen Online, 67 percent of the global online population uses Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or a similar social media network to stay in touch with friends, grow their business or just have fun. If you're among them and your settings are turned to "public," who you're talking to and what you're discussing is available to those wanting to sell their wares -- and that includes banks and other credit issuers.

"It's a marketing trend as opposed to a credit score trend," says Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development of Rapleaf, a San Francisco, Calif., company specializing in social media monitoring.

Rapleaf hunts and gathers social networking transmissions, turning the conversations you have in your network into consumer profiles called social graphs. These graphs provide companies with insight into behavior patterns: what you like and dislike, want and don't want, do well and do poorly.

Pretty much everything you and your network reveal may be compiled, including status updates, "tweets," joining online clubs, linking a Web site or posting a comment on a blog or news Web site.

"In the past, marketing products to people was primarily done via demographics -- age, sex, location, education, etc.," says Jewitt. "That data isn't always so accurate, though."

Demographics have given way to multi-dimensional behavioral targeting that allows creditors to draw conclusions about what type of credit customer you may be. The idea is "like follows like" -- so if your online friends express curiosity about something, so too may you, whether you say so or not.

According to Michael Gorman, vice president of Acxiom, a company that builds and maintains databases creditors use to market products, joining social networks can work to your advantage.

"A big part of what credit card companies do is make decisions about what to offer different people -- who to send a balance transfer offer to or offer credit protection."

Jesse Torres, president and CEO of Pan American Bank in Los Angeles, agrees that Rapleaf and other online information aggregators fill a need within the banking community.

"They're able to scour the social media universe. They are constantly listening and reporting back."

By knowing what people are saying, financial institutions can make the most of their marketing dollars, says Torres, and provide consumers with what they want ...

If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

January 20, 2010

The New York Times - “At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall asleep,” Francisco Sepulveda, 14, said of his smart phone.

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

The study’s findings shocked its authors, who had concluded in 2005 that use could not possibly grow further, and confirmed the fears of many parents whose children are constantly tethered to media devices. It found, moreover, that heavy media use is associated with several negatives, including behavior problems and lower grades.

The third in a series, the study found that young people’s media consumption grew far more in the last five years than from 1999 to 2004, as sophisticated mobile technology like iPods and smart phones brought media access into teenagers’ pockets and beds.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Contrary to popular wisdom, the heaviest media users reported spending a similar amount of time exercising as the light media users. Nonetheless, other studies have established a link between screen time and obesity.

While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users — those who consumed at least 16 hours a day — had mostly C’s or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less. The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

The study could not say whether the media use causes problems, or, rather, whether troubled youths turn to heavy media use.

“This is a stunner,” said Donald F. Roberts, a Stanford communications professor emeritus who is one of the authors of the study. “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

The report is based on a survey of more than 2,000 students in grades 3 to 12 that was conducted from October 2008 to May 2009.

On average, young people spend about two hours a day consuming media on a mobile device, the study found. They spend almost another hour on “old” content like television or music delivered through newer pathways like the Web site Hulu or iTunes. Youths now spend more time listening to or watching media on their cellphones, or playing games, than talking on them.

“I use it as my alarm clock, because it has an annoying ringtone that doesn’t stop until you turn it off,” Francisco Sepulveda said of his phone. “At night, I can text or watch something on YouTube until I fall asleep. It lets me talk on the phone and watch a video at the same time, or listen to music while I send text messages.”

Francisco’s mother, Janet Sepulveda, bought his phone, a Sidekick LX, a year ago when the computer was not working, to ensure that he had Internet access for school. But schoolwork has not been the issue.

“I’d say he uses it about 2 percent for homework and 98 percent for other stuff,” she said. “At the beginning, I would take the phone at 10 p.m. and tell him he couldn’t use it anymore. Now he knows that if he’s not complying with what I want, I can suspend his service for a week or two. That’s happened” ...