Under The Same Blue Sky

Facebook has formed a new Safety Advisory Board to make the site more secure for minors, following a growing number of threats from sex offenders on what is now the world’s largest social network.

As it has ballooned to more than 350m users, Facebook has attracted a growing number of registered sex offenders.

Earlier this year several thousand likely matches were identified on Facebook, prompting the company to suspend or remove the accounts.

“They couldn’t any longer hide the face that they were running into the same situation that every other site was,” said John Cardillo, a former New York City police officer who now runs Sentinel, a company that helps social networks identify sex offenders. Facebook is not a client of Sentinel.

Last May, Facebook struck a deal with the attorney generals of 49 states that included an agreement to find and delete the profiles of all registered sex offenders.

As part of this effort, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced that more than 3,500 registered sex offenders had been identified and removed from Facebook and MySpace as part of a new effort to police online predators.

Mr Cuomo’s office said that 2,782 registered New York sex offenders were found on Facebook, while 1,796 were found on MySpace.

“Social networking websites have become the private hunting grounds for sexual predators and they often use the safety and anonymity of the internet to groom their next victims,” said John Walsh, co-founder of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and host of “America’s Most Wanted”, in a statement last week.

Facebook’s new safety advisory board will consist of representatives from five leading internet safety organisations from North America and Europe – Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute.

Facebook said it planned to meet the board regularly to review existing safety measures and design new ways to make the site more secure. The first task for the board will be to help develop a new safety resource with educational content for parents, teachers and teenagers.

“The only way to keep kids safe online is for everyone who wants to protect them to work together,” said Elliot Schrage, vice-president of public policy at Facebook. “The formation of a board to advise specifically on safety issues is a positive, innovative and collaborative step towards creating a more robust safety environment.”

But as Facebook continues to grow – adding more than 50m users a quarter – Mr Cardillo said Facebook would have to be proactive in its efforts to keep predators off the site. “The web is a microcosm of the real world,” said Mr Cardillo. “There are sex offenders in the real world and there are sex offenders on Facebook.”

Why does nature tolerate males? They produce no offspring of their own, one consequence of which is that populations of plants and animals capable of self-fertilisation, or “selfing”, grow at twice the rate of populations that depend on sexual reproduction.

Yet, there must be evolutionary advantage in sex with a partner. Scientists at Oregon university argue in Nature magazine that their research with roundworms – which can self-fertilise or reproduce sexually – shows selfing populations are more susceptible to harmful genetic mutations and slow to adapt to swiftly changing environmental conditions. “Selfing populations are more likely to become extinct,” said Levi Morran, lead author.

Yet, selfing populations thrive and survive. One explanation, based on a discovery in rice plants which Susan Wessler of the University of Georgia described as “brand new and really stunning”, is that movable genetic material called transposable elements insert themselves at various points in the chromosomes, providing a source of genetic variation in response to changing conditions.

There is much disagreement over whether it is a curse or a blessing upon campus students to have a girlfriend or boyfriend. Some people maintain that this kind of relation is meaningless, other people, however, argue that courtship is a valuable part of their college life. It is true that courtship provides some benefits, but we may fail to afford such expensive affair, especially for boys.

Doubtless to say, a girlfriend or boyfriend may boost you up on some occasions. If you were not in love, perhaps you will attend lectures shock-headed. But things won’t happen when you fall in love with someone. You are inclined to make yourself look the best to appeal to the certain person. At the same time, you will work hard to make sure that you are the one who deserves his or her love, the one he or she can spend the time with, the right one who he or she is looking for. In addition, this relationship helps you cope with the others. Since most of us are the only child in our family, we may be lacking in capability to deal with other people, especially the opposite sex, though we do not hope so. Courtship may help one develop such skill and answers the longing for having a relationship with the opposite sex.

Although I am aware of the advantages courtship on campus provides, I insist that the disadvantages far outweigh them. As far as I concern it is over costly, especially for boys. No matter where we are, we could be in China, in Japan, in American, in Vietnam, in Congo, in Russia, if we want to be a gentleman we should always offer to pay. That is, to a large extent, a burden on campus students. It really bothers me. When I was in love, I was often in a pinch in the middle of the month. If you were a girl, this may not the case. In addition, single is simple, double may cause trouble. There are occasions when we drink in staying alone and doing nothing but fancying. But if you were not single, this seems to be a luxury for you. Furthermore, the statistics show that most couples will part when they graduate. Their college lives come to an end, their relations come to an end, their connection comes to an end. What’s worse, the one with a lover is more likely to ignore the sincere friendship on campus. Would they reject accepting her or his invitation to see a movie and get together with their roommates? They may prefer to be with their sweethearts other than their mates.

In conclusion, I believe that the disadvantages of the courtship on campus are more obvious than its advantages not only because we may fail to cope with the troublesome at times but also because the cost is too high for us, especially for boys. Therefore, as a boy, I don’t think we should encourage courtship on campus.