By focusing on a range of issues — sexual predation, teenage suicide, bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual trafficking — Dr. Boyd has shown, often to the dismay of those in the tech community who believe that the Internet is the ultimate equalizer, that issues of race, class and gender persist in the virtual world just as in the real world. The children in families characterized by alcohol and drug abuse, financial stress, divorce and sexual abuse reveal their struggles online just as they do off.
“She was the first to say that the teenagers at risk off line are the same ones who are at risk online,” said Alice Marwick, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft who works closely with Dr. Boyd. “It’s not that the Internet is doing something bad to these kids, it’s that these bad things are in kids’ lives and the Internet is just a component of that.”
Most broadly, with troubled teenagers and model youth alike, adolescent online behavior is a reflection of what teenagers’ social lives have always been: friendship, gossip, flirting, transgressing and keeping it all — good and bad — from parents.
Katie Day on 29 Jul 11a good example of prime numbers in nature -- and why they are important, e.g., for a kind of cicada which has a 13-year cycle... "Because 13 and 17 are both indivisible this gives the cicadas an evolutionary advantage as primes are helpful in avoiding other animals with periodic behaviour. Suppose for example that a predator appears every six years in the forest. Then a cicada with an eight or nine-year life cycle will coincide with the predator much more often than a cicada with a seven-year prime life cycle. These insects are tapping into the code of mathematics for their survival. The cicadas unwittingly discovered the primes using evolutionary tactics but humans have understood that these numbers not just the key to survival but are the very building blocks of the code of mathematics."
