Accolades and Updates: 3/10

Edward Ehmann, Superintendent of Schools of the Smithtown School District, made the following announcements at the March 10th Board of Education meeting at the Joseph M. Barton Administration Building.

One thousand parents filled the seats of Nesaquake Middle School’s Auditorium at the District’s third Parent University. The topic, Drugs in our Town: What’s a Parent to Do? featured an outstanding panel that explored the problem of drugs from the school, community, parent, law enforcement, medical and counseling perspectives. Those who wish further information are encouraged to visit either high school websites, which both link to a Drug Resource Blog: http://hstaskforce.blogspot.com/ or to e-mail questions and concerns to pipeline@smithtown.k12.ny.us.

Members of the community are invited to attend upcoming budget development meetings. There will be a Business Affairs Committee meeting on March 18th at 7 p.m. at the Joseph M. Barton Administration Building and a Citizens’ Advisory meeting will take place on March 11th at 7 p.m.

The Civics Club of St. James Elementary School was accepted to the O’Ambassador program to support the children in Ecuador. In addition to hosting several other programs that directly impact the children of Ecuador, the Civics Club created a “Quarters for Books” event. Gently used books as well as quarters were collected for a “book swap.” Left over books were donated to Larry Hohler, a retired Smithtown teacher. He is sending a container of books to an orphanage and school in Africa.

Tackan Elementary students with the help of Mr. Keith Sheppard, Director of Science Education at Stony Brook University, had a few lessons in science. Tackan holds special Science Days throughout the school year to promote science and discovery.
The “Peanut Butter Gang” Community Service Club at Dogwood Elementary recently visited the Smithtown Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing Care. Fifth graders assisted residents in making a picture frame craft.

Fourteen Smithtown students won in several categories at Sprachfest. Sprachfest is an annual event organized by the American Association of Teachers of German, Long Island Chapter.
Smithtown High School West seniors Ross Whalen and Molly Cook recently completed a community service project with the Suffolk County Police Department. The seniors painted a mural of the American flag at the offices of the Emergency Service Section in Ronkonkoma. The project was coordinated with HS West Art teacher Steve Halem and Emergency Service Police Officer Peter Knudsen.

SHS East students earned All County Honors this winter track season. Cara Hallahan was the Large School Champion in the high jump and Ashley Beck placed 2nd at the State Qualifier also in the high jump. Ashley will represent Suffolk County at the State Track Meet at Cornell University on March 7

High School students and the fifth grade enrichment groups from all of the elementary schools are working together on a project entitled C.L.A.S.S. (children learning about social studies). The topic is the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World combined with the wonders of Canada, the United States and Mexico. Students work in groups and choose a wonder to research. Each group has a HS student as a mentor who assists the fifth graders by showing them how to navigate a web quest. The final product for the fifth grade students will be a newspaper on the wonders.

Madoff plans guilty plea, faces 150 years in prison

By Anthony M. DeStefano
Newsday
(MCT)
MELVILLE, N.Y. _ Bernard Madoff, after being charged with 11 counts for allegedly running Wall Street's biggest Ponzi scheme, now faces up to 150 years in prison when he pleads guilty tomorrow, officials said Tuesday.
Manhattan federal prosecutors unveiled the charges, as well as the 70-year-old's prospect of dying behind bars, during a court appearance in which the disgraced investment adviser told a judge that he wanted to keep his lawyer despite potential legal conflicts.
The attorney, Ira Sorkin, said Madoff intends to plead guilty to the charges tomorrow.
In disclosing the charges, prosecutors revealed that Madoff is accused of mail fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering in connection with a $50-billion Ponzi scheme that allegedly ran for more than 25 years. He is also charged with perjury, giving false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission and stealing from an employee benefit program.
"From at least as early as the 1980s through on or about December 11, 2008, Bernard L. Madoff, the defendant, perpetrated a scheme to defraud the clients of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Services by soliciting billions of dollars of funds under false pretenses," federal prosecutors said in charging documents.
"I think 150 years is in the right direction," said investor Burt Ross of Englewood, N.J. "When will he go to jail?"
The documents didn't spell out a specific amount of investor losses. But the charges noted that as of November, Madoff's clients received statements showing total balances in their accounts of $64.8 billion, when the amount was just a fraction of that. When he was arrested, Madoff allegedly told investigators his scheme totaled $50 billion.
The charges also indicate other unnamed Madoff employees took part in the alleged scheme by generating false account statements and trading tickets to show investment activity that didn't exist.
There wasn't information on Madoff's wife, Ruth, who is on the verge of being counseled by the law firm of former federal prosecutor Peter Chavkin. Chavkin was in court Tuesday as a special counsel to advise Madoff on the conflict-of-interest issues involving Sorkin. Chavkin has cited that possibility in court.
Madoff, under house arrest after posting a $10 million bond, also diverted $250 million in client funds over a six-year period to fund the operation of his legitimate market-making activities, according to the documents.
Disclosure of the charges overshadowed the ostensible reason for the court hearing, which was the legal conflict of interest issue. On that point, Madoff, who had come to court wearing a protective vest, spoke publicly for the first time. Leaning against a table, Madoff for 12 minutes answered repeatedly with "Yes," and "Yes, I am," when asked by U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin if he understood or was aware of the nature of Sorkin's potential conflicts.
Sorkin had represented two men who were potential witnesses against Madoff, and his family members had prior investments with Madoff's company. Sorkin himself also at one point had about $60,000 in retirement money invested with Madoff, but took it out around 1993, court papers disclosed.
Prosecutor Marc Litt revealed Madoff hasn't signed an agreement with the government, indicating he would have to plead guilty to all charges and could face up to 150 years. "He is throwing himself at the mercy of the court," said a defense attorney not involved in the case, who didn't want to be named.
Chin said sentencing would take place "several months" after any guilty plea.
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© 2009, Newsday.
Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

How 2 ...delay sending Outlook e-mail messages

By Etan Horowitz
The Orlando Sentinel
(MCT)
Have you ever realized after you sent an e-mail that you said something in it you shouldn't have or there was a major typo? You could try to recall the message in Microsoft Outlook, but that rarely seems to work.
A better option might be to defer delivery of your messages by a few minutes so you give yourself a chance to fix any errors or career-ending mistakes. Kudos to thehowtogeek.com for pointing this out.
1. In Outlook, choose "Rules and Alerts" from the "Tools" menu and click on "New Rule."
2. Select "Start from a blank rule," "Check messages after sending" and then click "Next." In this screen, you can set conditions for the messages you want to delay sending. For instance, you might only want to delay sending messages to your boss. To do that, set the appropriate condition and then click "Next." To delay delivery of all your messages, just click "Next."
3. Check the box next to "defer delivery by a number of minutes" and click on the underlined words below to set the number of minutes you want to delay sending your messages. Continue clicking "Next," give your rule a name and then click "Finish."
4. Your rule is now active. The next time you hit Send, your message will be placed in your "Outbox" and will be sent when the specified number of minutes is up. If you notice a mistake, you can go into the message, modify it and hit "Send." You can also delete the message from the Outbox, which will prevent if from being sent (if you do it in time).
5. If you want to turn this rule off, or modify the messages that it applies to, just go back into "Rules and Alerts" in the Tools Menu.
(Etan Horowitz is the technology columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. He can be reached at ehorowitz@orlandosentinel.com.)
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© 2009, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
Visit the Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

iLife upgrade makes photos, videos fun

By Etan Horowitz
The Orlando Sentinel
(MCT)
One of the main reasons people buy Apple computers is because they come with fabulous software for managing your photos and creating movies.
But the curse (or blessing?) of owning Apple products is that there's always a newer version right around the corner. For most people, it generally doesn't make sense to upgrade your iPod, iPhone or Apple computer when a new one is released. But software is a different story.
In January, Apple released iLife '09, a $79 suite of applications that includes the latest versions of iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD. It also comes pre-installed on all new Macs.
If you are a heavy iPhoto and iMovie user, the upgrade is worth it. The iPhoto enhancements make organizing, viewing and sharing your photos easier and more fun, and the new iMovie has more professional editing tools. You must have the Leopard operating system to upgrade to iLife '09.
I'm going to focus on iPhoto and iMovie because those are the most widely used, according to Apple.
Face time iPhoto '09 gives you two new ways to group your photos: based on who is in the picture and where it was taken.
When you first launch it after you upgrade, the program will go through all of your photos and find the faces in each one. This takes a long time, about a second or two per photo, according to Apple. Once it's finished, you open up a photo and identify some of the faces by clicking on "Name." A picture of each person you identify is added to a corkboard in the "Faces" section of iPhoto. Double clicking on a face on the corkboard will bring up a bunch of other photos that iPhoto thinks contain that same person. By confirming which ones are actually that person, you help iPhoto's face detection software get better.
The face detection is pretty accurate, but it's not perfect. For instance, it thought that pictures of my brother or my mom were me and that two unrelated people were the same person, presumably because they both had glasses. I was impressed that the software was able to correctly identify pictures of my relatives and me when we were children. Apple says you'll get better results if you "seed" the face detection by identifying more than one photo of the same person.
Going through this somewhat tedious process gives you a fun and new way to look through your photos. If you are making a slideshow or photo book and you know you want to include certain people, instead of having to look through different collections, you can instantly pull up every photo in your collection that includes that person.
Uploading
In the past, you had to download a separate plug-in to iPhoto to upload photos directly to Facebook. Now the ability to upload to the social networking site is built right into iPhoto. When you upload your photos directly to Facebook, the album title, captions and names of the people you have identified are all automatically added in Facebook and the photos can be automatically "tagged." Changes in Facebook (such as someone tagging himself) are automatically made in iPhoto as well, which saves you some time.If you have an iPhone or a GPS enabled camera, iPhoto automatically detects where the photo was taken and labels each photo accordingly. You can see a map plotting the locations of your photos and you can organize and search by photo location. If you don't have an iPhone or GPS enabled camera, you can manually add locations to individual photos or collections of photos.
iPhoto also now lets you upload your photos directly to photo-sharing site Flickr. The places you've added to your photos will appear on your Flickr map (you have to enable this in preferences) and like Facebook, changes you make in Flickr are automatically synced so both collections are the same. You can also use places to make new travel themed photo books that display a map tracing your trip alongside your photos.
Making movies
Apple overhauled its iMovie program to help make your movies look even better. Probably the best feature is "video stabilization," which makes shaky video play back smoothly. It takes a long time to work, but it's worth it. iMovie isn't as easy to use as iPhoto, but it lessens the need for a more advanced video editing program such as Final Cut Express. Now it's easy to do things like speed up or slow down clips or take the audio from one clip and lay it over the video from another. There are lots of cool new transitions, titles and effects and themes. If you like to create digital media from your photos and videos, iLife '09 is a worthwhile investment.
(Etan Horowitz is the technology columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. He can be reached at ehorowitz@orlandosentinel.com.)
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© 2009, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
Visit the Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Newspapers make move to online only

By Eric Pryne
The Seattle Times
(MCT)
SEATTLE _ If the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stops publishing in print but stays alive in some form online _ as now seems likely _ it won't be the first daily newspaper to make the move.
Over the last 15 months, two failing Midwest papers have taken similar leaps.
On the last day of 2007, media giant E.W. Scripps shut down the shrinking Cincinnati Post and Kentucky Post, a zoned edition that served the city's Northern Kentucky suburbs.
A day later it launched KyPost.com, with a veteran Post editor as managing editor.
In Madison, Wis., the struggling afternoon Capital Times halted daily print publication last April and unveiled a beefed-up Web news operation. It also started two new weekly tabloid print publications.
The P-I seems poised to make a similar break with the past. Owner Hearst Corp. put the money-losing paper up for sale in January, saying it would close it unless a buyer emerged in 60 days. A sale is considered highly unlikely. But Hearst also said the P-I might re-emerge an online-only publication. And last week, with the 60-day deadline nearing, it quietly began offering a few P-I staffers jobs with a new Web venture.
Hearst won't say anything about its plans.
The Cincinnati and Madison online newspapers emphasize what's local. Both contain familiar newspaper content, such as obituaries and high-school sports results. The Wisconsin site even has comics.
Both sites report significant increases in traffic. The Capital Times' owners say the move to digital should result in cost savings of $3.5 million to $4 million in 2009. A Scripps vice president says KyPost.com should break even this year.
But neither is a stand-alone venture. Both have relationships with traditional media outlets _ a television station in Cincinnati, the remaining print daily in Madison _ that effectively subsidize the fledgling Web operations.
In Seattle, by contrast, seattlepi.com apparently would be flying solo.
CINCINNATI
The Cincinnati/Kentucky Post died when the joint-operating agreement that linked it to the dominant, morning Cincinnati Enquirer expired at the end of 2007. Under the JOA _ similar to one that links the P-I with The Seattle Times _ the two papers maintained competing newsrooms, but the Enquirer handled the business operations for both and the publishers split the combined profits.
The Post's weekday circulation had plummeted _ from 188,000 in 1977 to just 27,000. Scripps concluded the Post couldn't be sustained outside the JOA.
But the Kentucky Post's brand was strong in Northern Kentucky, says Adam Symson, vice president of interactive for Scripps' television group. With the paper's demise the company saw a news and advertising niche an online product might fill.
Plus a Kentucky-focused online operation could piggyback on Scripps' Cincinnati television station, WCPO. "That was fundamental to the launch of KyPost.com," Symson says.
The Web site operates out of WCPO's offices. TV station employees sell its ads and run its servers. Stories from the TV station's Northern Kentucky reporter are posted on the site, which Symson says is promoted regularly on WCPO's newscasts.
Those synergies allow Scripps to keep KyPost.com's costs low.
Managing Editor Kerry Duke doesn't dispute that the news staff is bare-bones. Besides him, there's just one other full-time journalist, a Web producer/reporter, plus two interns and about five sports freelancers. Before it closed, the Cincinnati/Kentucky Post newsroom had 50 employees.
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But Duke says he has a "very handsome freelance budget, and I've got the resources of a TV newsroom at my disposal."
KyPost.com emphasizes breaking news. During one week last month its sole reporter was blogging from a big murder trial. Most of the site's other featured stories were from wire services.
"Honestly, I don't pay much attention to KyPost.com," says Ben Kaufman, media critic with the Cincinnati alternative paper CityBeat. "They do so little original reporting."
But Symson says the site doesn't strive to do everything the Kentucky Post did: "I don't know if I would characterize what KyPost.com does as an online newspaper. I'd call it an online news and information resource."
KyPost.com is a startup business, says Duke. "As we grow revenue, we'll develop the site more."
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MADISON
The Capital Times is a more ambitious enterprise.
The size of its news staff is down more than one-third from its print days. Still, it employs about 40 journalists _ editors, columnists, beat reporters, photographers, sports writers, critics.
But editor Paul Fanlund says there's no way the online and remaining print ad revenues would support a staff that big. It's possible only because for 60 years the Times has been part of what amounts to a JOA with Madison's remaining print daily, the morning Wisconsin State Journal.
The family-owned Times gets half the combined profits while generating only a small fraction of the combined revenues.
The Journal subsidizes the Times, Fanlund acknowledges, "but they've been doing it for 30 years. And the subsidy is less substantial now (since the Times went primarily online) than it's probably ever been."
By the time the Times stopped publishing daily in print last April, its weekday circulation had dwindled to just 17,000, while the Journal's stood at 89,000.
The line between the two papers has blurred since the Times moved primarily online. Its two weekly print tabloids _ one focusing on news and opinion, the other on arts and entertainment _ are inserted in the Journal.
Each publication's Web site links to some stories from the other. Sports reporters from both collaborated on a blog from the state high-school wrestling tournament last month.
At first, Fanlund says, the online Capital Times tried to be "a CNN for Madison," emphasizing breaking news.
There's still plenty of that on the site. But Fanlund says he's pushing the online Times to become "a more substantial, magazine-type publication," with at least one good long-form read every day plus lots of opinion and commentary.
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Sue Robinson, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has followed The Capital Times' transformation, says it's too soon to say whether the move online will succeed.
The site's economic fate may continue to be linked to the Wisconsin State Journal's, and that paper's owner, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
The online Capital Times has more Q&As, more profiles, more issue stories and less meeting coverage, Robinson says. Most beat reporters blog, which creates a greater sense of informality.
But giving up daily print publication hasn't been easy for the paper's staff _ or its readers, she said in an e-mail. "The company continues to struggle with a perception in the community that it has died."
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OTHER PAPERS DE-EMPHASIZING PRINT, EMPHASIZING WEB
_East Valley Tribune: Daily paper in Phoenix suburbs cut print publication to four days a week in January while continuing to publish daily online.
_Detroit Free Press/Detroit News: Partners in a joint-operating agreement are scheduled this month to cut back home delivery of print papers to three days a week while beefing up online presence.
_Christian Science Monitor: National paper plans to stop publishing daily in April, replacing it with weekly print magazine and daily subscription-only online edition.
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© 2009, The Seattle Times.
Visit The Seattle Times Extra on the World Wide Web at http://www.seattletimes.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

'Digital living room' getting closer

By Troy Wolverton
San Jose Mercury News
(MCT)
SAN JOSE, Calif. _ The digital living room is still under construction, but consumers can now get a glimpse of what it might look like.
The electronics industry has long dreamed of giving consumers on-demand access in their living rooms to a universe of movies, music and other entertainment content and information at the touch of a button. Recent announcements from electronics companies, Hollywood studios, Internet firms and cable networks suggest that dream is becoming a reality.
"The vision is coming together," said Van Baker, an analyst with Gartner, a technology research firm.
Here are developments announced just last week:
Silicon Valley startup Roku announced it is teaming up with e-commerce giant Amazon.com to allow owners of its digital video player to rent or buy movies and TV shows from Amazon. The 40,000 on-demand videos from Amazon are in addition to the 12,000 videos from Netflix that Roku video player owners could already choose from.
Valley startup ZillionTV unveiled a service and device that it will introduce later this year. The company, which is backed by five of the six biggest Hollywood studios, plans to offer a free set-top box, to be distributed by Internet service providers, through which consumers will be able to watch about 15,000 videos on-demand.
Time Warner revealed a plan dubbed "TV Anywhere" that would allow cable and satellite TV subscribers to watch on computers or other Internet-connected devices all of the programming they get on their televisions.
With all the recent changes, "it's just become amazing to watch this space," said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, a research and consulting firm.
To be sure, few folks are living in anything close to the digital living room today. Thanks to high costs and resistance to adding another box to their living room entertainment centers, consumers have been reluctant to buy the devices offered to date. And those gadgets still fall short of delivering the unlimited content envisioned for the digital living room.
Baker thinks the true digital living room may still be five years or so from reality.
But electronics and content companies seem to be learning from past mistakes, and in doing so, helping to bring that day closer. Meanwhile, their efforts are pressuring traditional pay TV service providers _ from whom the large majority of Americans receive their video content _ to respond with more on-demand services and digital living-room type services.
The first iterations of digital living room products were often tied to consumers' computers. Either consumers had to connect a device to their computers over a local network to access movies or photographs that were stored on the PC, or they had to plug their PCs directly into their TVs. Both methods proved a hard sell.
More recently, electronics companies have been releasing devices that bypass the PC altogether in delivering digital content to the TV. Roku users, for instance, can order a video from Amazon directly from their couch. The Yahoo widgets on new TVs are designed to be accessed with a remote control, not a keyboard, without ever turning on a PC.
Rather than just having access to locally stored movies and music, devices are now being built around the "cloud media concept," noted Scherf, and can access "all kinds of content ... over the Internet."
The cloud concept has another advantage _ it can be cheaper. Because all the content is stored on the Internet, devices don't have to include a potentially pricey hard drive. Roku is offering its device for just $100. ZillionTV plans to charge customers a one-time fee for its device that's even cheaper.
Another theme of the emerging digital living room is lots of options _ not just in content but in devices.
Consumers can now get on-demand video on a range of gadgets: on their PC through Web sites such as Hulu; on their smart-phone; in the living room through their cable set-top box; on game systems such as Microsoft's Xbox 360; on multi-function media devices such as Apple TV and inexpensive video players like Roku's.
Consumers also have an increasing number of choices about how to "purchase" the media they consume. They can rent or buy videos a la carte from Amazon, Apple's iTunes and similar services and watch them on devices such the Roku player, TiVo or Sony's PlayStation 3.
With an Xbox 360, an LG Blu-ray player or the Roku device, they can watch as many digital videos as they want for a monthly subscription fee from Netflix. Or, under ZillionTV's model, they can watch shows for free _ as long as they agree to watch some targeted advertisements.
"We're seeing experimentation, which is good," said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm. "I don't think any of the solutions nail it on the head, but we're starting to get closer."
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© 2009, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).
Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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Teenagers see serious consequences of ‘sexting'

By Bianca Prieto
The Orlando Sentinel
(MCT)
ORLANDO, Fla. _ After his former girlfriend taunted him, Phillip Alpert remembered the nude photos she e-mailed to him while they were dating.
He took revenge with an electronic blast _ e-mailing the photos of the 16-year-old girl to more than 70 people, including her parents, grandparents and teachers.
Three days later, Alpert, then 18, was charged with transmitting child pornography. Today Alpert is serving five years of probation for the crime, and he is registered as a sex offender _ a label he must carry at least until he is 43.
"I didn't know how bad of a decision it was," Alpert, now 19, said recently at his MetroWest apartment. "I don't think it's fair."
Alpert is one of many people across the country who are being charged with felonies and getting sentenced as sex offenders for doing something their friends do all the time, unaware of potential criminal charges.
One national study found that as many as 20 percent of teens have sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves in what has become known as "sexting." Young teens are using high-tech phones to text, post or e-mail racy photos _ technically child porn. Most do it for fun.
But getting caught means being kicked off sports teams and facing expulsion from school. Others are going to jail.
"It's become a troubling trend," said Marisa Nightingale, senior adviser for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which conducted the study. "Since the beginning of time, teens have flirted with each other and pushed the envelope. But 10 to 15 years ago, it didn't go global in 30 seconds."
Lawrence Walters, an Orlando attorney who practices First Amendment and Internet law, has been following the sexting trend as it has been emerging across the country.
"It's a new phenomena," Walters said. "Kids shouldn't be doing this _ shouldn't be engaging in this type of behavior. But using these harsh criminal laws for child pornography is a bit of overkill."
Just last month, a 15-year-old Pennsylvania girl was charged with creating child pornography for sending images of herself via MySpace to a 27-year-old man.
Also last month, a Brevard County, Fla., teen was jailed after forwarding a cell phone picture of his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend's naked breasts to another teen. The girlfriend allowed the photo to be taken while the two were dating, police said.
Bryce Dixon, 18, told investigators he sent the photo because he thought the girl had cheated on him with his best friend. He said he knew that sending the photo would make her mad.
A judge set Dixon's bond at $140,000 for charges he faced, including transmission of child pornography. Dixon, who remains in jail, and his family declined to talk to the Orlando Sentinel. In an interview aired Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show, he said he made a stupid decision.
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Some states are trying to adjust the laws to deal with the problems of transmission of intimate photos of teens to teens, Walters said. But it hasn't been an issue debated by state lawmakers in Florida, said Republican state Rep. Pat Patterson.
Law enforcement officers have their hands tied when it comes to recommending charges to the State Attorney's Office in these types of cases, said Orange County Sheriff's Office spokesman Deputy Carlos Padilla.
"They don't have a choice because of how the statute reads. Regardless of the situation, the law dictates the charges, and they have to register as a sexual offender," Padilla said.
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The consequences of sexting are unpredictable.
An Ohio teen hanged herself in May after her ex-boyfriend forwarded nude photos of her, sharing them with other high school girls.
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Even teen celebrities have been caught in sexting scandals.
In September 2007, nude photos of Disney's "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens surfaced on the Internet. The photos were alleged to be self-portraits taken with Hudgens' own cell phone and sent to her boyfriend, co-star Zac Efron. She later apologized for the photos, according to numerous news reports.
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Nightingale, with the advocacy group, said such cases should put teens and parents on alert.
"If that guy who you used to trust all of a sudden shares it, you have no control over it," Nightingale said. "If you regret it and change your mind, there is nothing you can do about it, or very little you can do about it."
For Alpert, he never asked for the photos that got him in trouble in 2007. He met the girl at a church function in 2005 and dated her off and on for about 2½ years, he said. At one point the girl took nude photos and videos of herself and sent them to his e-mail.
He tried using them against his ex-girlfriend with the mass e-mail after she called him and said she was much happier without him.
Although Alpert was charged with transmission of child pornography, the girl was never in any legal trouble. She did not respond to requests for interviews with the Sentinel.
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Since his arrest and conviction, Alpert's life has been difficult.
Classmates at Ocoee High School teased him unmercifully, sending him into a depression that caused him to miss class and avoid his graduation last year. He lost friends because "they just don't want to be friends with a sex-offender kid," Alpert explained.
He said he was kicked out of Valencia Community College in September because he's a sex offender. Neighbors have knocked on his door after finding him in the sex-offender database and asked him what he's done.
Alpert's mother moved out of state after he graduated, but the conditions of his probation don't allow him to leave Orange County without permission. He can't live with his father in Ocoee because the house is too close to a school, Alpert said.
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Every Wednesday he attends a class for sex offenders where he is joined by people who have raped and molested children. He's not like them, Alpert said, but the law says he is.
His advice to other teens tempted by sexting: "Don't do it. It's stupid."
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Although technological advances are helping bring people together, they also are causing new problems for teens and parents. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has compiled a list of tips for parents and teens to help navigate this new virtual world and set rules and guidelines.
TIPS FOR PARENTS
_Talk to your kids about what they are doing in cyberspace.
_Know with whom your kids are communicating.
_Consider limitations on electronic communication.
_Be aware of what your teens are posting publicly.
_Set expectations and make sure you are clear about what you consider appropriate electronic behavior.
TIPS FOR TEENS
_Don't assume anything you send or post is going to remain private.
_There is no changing your mind in cyberspace _ anything you send or post will never truly go away.
_Don't give in to the pressure to do something that makes you uncomfortable.
_Consider the recipient's reaction.
_Nothing is truly anonymous.
Source: National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
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SEXTING STATISTICS
A recently released study of teen and young adults' behavior online was conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a Washington-based advocacy group founded in 1996. The online survey, taken by 1,280 people ages 13 to 26, shows about 1 in 5 teens has sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves. This was the first public survey of its kind in the nation. To read the report, go to www.thenationalcampaign.org. Some of the findings:
How many teens say they have sent/posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves?
_20 percent of teens, 13 to 19
_22 percent of teen girls
_18 percent of teen boys
_11 percent of teen girls, 13 to 16
Why are teens sending or posting sexually suggestive content?
_51 percent of teen girls say they feel pressure from a guy.
_18 percent of teen boys say they do it because of pressure from girls.
_23 percent of teen girls say friends pressured them.
_24 percent of teen boys attribute sending images or messages to peer pressure.
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© 2009, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
Visit the Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/.
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PHOTO (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): SEXTING