For the last two years, I have been hearing about employers checking potential employees’ social networking pages to see if they can dig up any dirt to decide whether to give them the job. Now, Facebook and Myspace is being used in the court of law. Unrepentant on Facebook? Expect jail time (CNN.com) details how people have gotten harsher sentences because photos are introduced as evidence.

Some examples from the article:
Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.” One image shows a smiling Lipton at the Halloween party, clutching cans of the energy drink Red Bull with his arm draped around a young woman in a sorority T-shirt. Above it, Sullivan rhetorically wrote, “Remorseful? Sullivan used those pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison. ” Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini said the prosecutor’s slide show influenced his decision to sentence Lipton.

Perlin (prosecutor) said he was willing to recommend probation for Lara Buys for a drunken driving crash that killed her passenger last year, until he thought to check her MySpace page while preparing for sentencing. The page featured photos of Buys, taken after the crash but before sentencing, holding a glass of wine as well as joking comments about drinking. Perlin used the photos to argue for a jail sentence instead of probation, and Buys, then 22, got two years in prison.

Santa Barbara defense lawyer Steve Balash said the day he met client Jessica Binkerd, a recent college graduate charged in a fatal drunken driving crash, he asked whether she had a MySpace page. When she said yes, he told her to take it down because he figured it might have pictures that cast her in a bad light. But she didn’t remove the page. And right before Binkerd was sentenced in January 2007, the attorney said, he was “blindsided” by a presentencing report from prosecutors that featured photos posted on MySpace after the crash. One showed Binkerd holding a beer bottle. Others had her wearing a shirt advertising tequila and a belt bearing plastic shot glasses. Binkerd wasn’t doing anything illegal, but Balash said the photos hurt her anyway. She was given more than five years in prison, though the sentence was later shortened for unrelated reasons.

A CNN.com article entitled, “Online student-teacher friendships can be tricky,” caught my eye. Just in the last few months, I have electronically befriended my past college professors, my son’s boss, people I do business with and my coworkers. My Facebook page began as a way to share photos with friends and since Facebook has become public, I have a whole new set of “friends.”

Some teachers believe sites like MySpace help them connect with their students about homework, tutoring and other school matters. But others fear the social-networking sites are breeding inappropriate relationships between teachers and students. Missouri state legislator Jane Cunningham is sponsoring a bill that would ban elementary school teachers from having social-networking friendships with their students. Other school boards, teacher unions and parent-teacher associations across the country are drafting policies and issuing advisements about which online or text-messaging relationships are acceptable. Opponents argue that teachers that seek inappropriate relationships with students will just find another way to reach them.

Personally, I would not want my teacher to be able to view my Facebook or Myspace page but I think passing laws banning these online friendships and text messaging is hard to enforce.

I spoke with someone at the North Charleston Recreation Department earlier this week and learned that their coaches are participating in Darkness to Light’s Stewards of Children program. According to D2L’s website: “Stewards of Children is a sexual abuse prevention training program that educates adults to prevent, recognize, and react responsibly to child sexual abuse, and motivates them to courageous action. The Stewards of Children program is designed for organizations that serve children and youth, and any/all adults interested in protecting children.”

I am glad to hear that D2L is reaching outside of the box to educate coaches about child sexual abuse. The coach I spoke to pointed out that often times they overhear things on the field that kids won’t tell their teachers or parents about, so this seems like a very beneficial program.

I recently came across an article on CNN.com about the changing demographics of the US. Census Bereau projections look at 2000 results and assumptions about future childbearing, mortality rates and migration The nation’s undocumented workers (estimated at 12 million or more) are included in the projections.

Some interesting projections:

• Minorities (those of any race other than non-Hispanic, single-race whites) currently constitute about a third of the U.S. population, according to Census figures.
• But by 2042, they are projected to become the majority, making up more than half the population.
• By 2050, 54% of the population will be minorities.
• The group predicted to post the most dramatic gain is the Hispanic population. Its share of the total U.S. population is expected to double from 15 to 30%.
• In addition, the number of U.S. residents identifying themselves as being of two or more races is projected to more than triple.
• Whites will comprise 46% of the U.S. population by 2050, down from the current level of 66%
• By 2050, the 65-and-older age group will increase to 88.5 million, more than doubling its current number of 38.7 million. Meanwhile, the number of those age 85 and older is expected to more than triple by 2050.
• The United States is projected to reach the 400 million population milestone in 2039, according to bureau projections. By 2050, the population is expected to be 439 million.
• By 2050, 62% of the nation’s children will be minorities, up from 44% today.