I understand flowers, I understand dinner, and even a small gift, but isn’t a $349 iPod Touch raising the bar just a little too far?

It’s also not going to do a lot for your romantic life to see your partner buried in an iPod touch downloading and playing apps.

Is this is another sign that the Apple team need to get a few more women involved in their branding and advertising processes?

But then – what would I know – I’ve nobody to give one of these to this year anyway.

Be afraid, however of unwashed bedspreads, blankets and pillows.

These can harbour nasties and are washed far less frequently. Ever had a cough or flu in a hotel? Wondered what happened to the bedspread after you left? I try not to, and I do know people that use towels to insulate themselves from the less clean bedding. Some are very frequent travellers.

So instead of the toilet strip, how about a checklist at the door – giving the dates when each item in the room was washed (those pillows seem to sit there forever), or better yet the number of guests that have used the item before you? Also why not ask guests to tell you (or quietly record) when they are a bit ill, so you can wash the full range of bedding?

Neither of these are palatable options of course as they cue the guests to start thinking uncomforting thoughts.

I’m not sure what the right answer is. At the moment it’s a trade off between health and cost – and one that even the best hotels call in favour of cost.

Meanwhile there’s a lot to be said for camping. And towels.

There are a few potential topics to cover – including why NZ is a good place to be right now, what businesses can do to manage through the recession and the Social Innovation camp next steps. We’ll see what happens on the day.

For new and newer readers I’ve just put up a page of posts that I like from the last couple of years.

Posts I like.

Here are some good recent ones

Blame directors for failure, CEOs for success

2 shots were fired Self restraint is good

Let’s stop MPs drinking and lawmaking Seriously

Two McKinsey pieces on education – do read them

Well done Green cabs – now how about that website Great comments

Brass Monkey 2009 – a photolog The annual winter bike rally

Tying down the bikes in the Ferry

Glassy smooth crossing. A good sign – we could have forgone tying those bikes as well..

South of Blenheim – it was cold.

We live in a beautiful place

Posing cattle

Bliss

Kaikoura inland road

Hamner Springs – we stopped for the hot pools

En Route to Geraldine

Challenging mist nearing Fairlie.

Evidence that I was actually up at dawn. As were we all. We stayed in a house on a farm and the dawn say white mountains along with the usual rural scenes.

From an old small bulldozer?

Almost ready to set out to the Haka and Dansies

A chance encounter on the Hakataramea Pass

Top of the Hakataramea Pass

What it is all about

Lake Benmore – an excursion from the Hakataramea Pass

End of the Road at Lake Benmore

Emerging from Benmore

Off to the rest of the Hakataramea Pass

Traffic was a nightmare.

That’s Mod and Henry in the distance – on the closed road

Watch out ahead

Gravel, corners, mountains. What more is there?

Looking back over a bridge

The entire day was offroad, and with views like this

Top of the Danseys pass. No white stuff on the road though.

Top of the Danseys posing

The Danseys pub

The reward

Another Dansey’s bike. Plenty of road bikes went over the Danseys, but the Haka pass has some water hazards that keep most bikes out.

Official Class of 2009 photo

Monkey Saturday – and Nash poses in perfect weather. Again.

However he was soon riding into a sea of fog

Tour of the monkey area started at the Vulcan Hotel.

We were surrounded by fog

and suffered though some Monkey hardships

Random stretched bicycle later that day

The lake at the rally site

A wooden bike at the monkey

The wooden bike seemed to have less than total efficiency

Sunset at the rally

Ready for the fire. It was freezing cold – and could have been lit earlier.

Finally – flames and heat

An agglomeration of bikers after an epic run over the Hasst. It was the right route as everywhere else saw ice and snow.

Indeed it was a perfect day on the West Coast – while it snowed in Christchurch. And Wellington. and everywhere else.

The dam could break – with 1 to 2% probability per year. Encouraging.

Another one way bridge

Flat rocks at Punakaiki – the end of another wonderful day.

It’s off to the ferry – and yes that’s dawn over there.

An icy run through the Buller gorge. Actually the roads were perfect, though the air temperature hit minus 4.5 degrees Celsius.

Mod tries to evade the camera in perfect conditions -  as we near Blenheim.

On the Ferry home – a rough but fun crossing

What a welcome home to Wellington.

This weekend some of the more fanatical of New Zealand’s motoring aficionados will begin their annual pilgrimage to Central Otago’s stunning Maniototo plain. Like Saul on the Road to Damascus, Oturehua is a site of many an epiphany for those motorcycle enthusiasts who ride the icy roads of cold clarity to the infamous Brass Monkey Rally. This year is the 29th running of the Brass Monkey, a gathering of maladjusted motorcyclists from all over the country.
It’s held just down the road from Ophir, which holds the record for the coldest still air temperature ever recorded in New Zealand: a brain-numbing 23 below zero, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, hence the name. This is my 15th Brass Monkey, but there are plenty of attendees who have attended all of them, sleeping out under the Southern Skies. The question most often asked is, “Why?” Everyone has their own answer, but for me it’s the opportunity to reconnect with my regular Monkey crew along with the religious atmosphere of midwinter Oturehua. You feel like a royal in exile.

It’s fair to say that not everyone who attends the Brass Monkey is in the middle of the bell curve, but that has to be a good thing. It’s the looneys and the mavericks that have contributed so much to the world of motoring, from John Britten to Boyd Coddington and the mad doctor, Dr Roger Freeth.
This month in MOD’s Motors, I step outside the mass produced world of mainstream vehicles to look at some of the truly mad and eccentric vehicles we have on the site. Vehicles that have no rational explanation but 100% emotional connection.
Plus the normal assortment of anarchy from the faithful, a superb Reader’s Ride and a competition for those who know their balls from their monkeys. Time to fire it up..

If you don’t subscribe the Mod’s Motors – then I strongly suggest you do so, if not for the writing or the vehicles then at for the best example that I know of a monthly newsletter. Happily I understand that Mod will continue to write these missives after he departs from Trade Me in a month or two.

Meanwhile I’ll try to blog or at least twitter some of the journey. Follow it here or @lancewiggs on Twitter.

There is a great summary of everyone over on Shadowfoot’s blog.

Unfortunately (for me and for the audience) I was also asked to give a 5 minute talk, and as I was placed last I had to follow in some big footprints. I was filled with confidence after there was a cheer as I was introduced, before I realised that it was because I was introduced as “the last speaker before the drinks”.

I’m re-writing what I spoke about at Webstock from an early version of my notes. Sadly I don’t have the annotated notes from the event, so I am missing some of the extra pieces that I had gleaned from previous speakers.

Choosing your own topic is a peculiar type of torture – so I asked organiser all round good person Natasha for advice, and she informed me, and I quote verbatim, that she was expecting:

“a ballet recital followed by your rendition of Broadway show tunes followed by your 5 min talk on why Tash is awesome”

I’d left my tutu behind, so instead I chose instead to to add a bit of context to the last time I was up in front of a similar audience – when I affirmed with two sturdy comrades in arms at Foo Camp that “The Future of New Zealand is Fucked”. It was a convincing display by our team, but sadly the audience voted with their hearts – indicating that they preferred to believe the opposition.

So I decided to join the crowd, and spoke this time about “Why are we here?”.

Not “why are we here?” in the Dalai Lama, Catholic Church or Douglas Adams sense, but “Why are we here in New Zealand, in Wellington and at the Webstock event (or even reading this blog)”

I believe that we have a choice in all of these matters (except you Mum – you have to read my blog, even if you don’t actually do so)

By definition, anyone that has the get up and go to attend Westock, to read blogs and twitter about what is going on, also has the get up and go to do so – to leave New Zealand and head for the gold paved roads of the UK, USA, Europe and Kathmandu.

Indeed many of us do, including myself. I’ve been offshore several times now, the first time lasting about 10 years, and the last few times a year or two each.

So why do we come back, why do we stay?

After all in New Zealand, and in Wellington in particular there are three compelling reasons not to be here:

The weather sucks. It really does. As I draft this on Saturday morning the rain is lashing against the house, Cook Strait is closed to the Ferrys and the latest flight from Sydney was diverted to Auckland. Meanwhile in Perth it’s sunny and warm, in Europe summer is nigh and we are consigned to short days, rain and cold.

We are miles away from anywhere - we were the last decent place to be permanently colonized by humans (discarding Pitcairn Island and Antarctica), 4 hours away from Australia and 10 hours way from anywhere interesting (11 from Wellington).

And we have a crappy Internet connection to the rest of the world, a connection seemingly controlled by rent maximising companies (shame on you Telecom) rather than stakeholders determined to open up access to the rest of the world.

It means I’m cold, days and too many dollars away from the great friends I have around the world and my broadband sucks.

And yet, and yet – I am still here – we all are. Why is that?

Again, I believe there are three answers: The weather really sucks, we are miles away from anywhere and we are connected to the rest of the world through a crappy internet line.

In New Zealand, and in Wellington more than anywhere, we expect the unexpected. This Saturday morning the weather forecast was all doom and gales, but some friends and I grabbed and hour of relative stillness to go for a quick bike ride. Meanwhile the day before the Webstock bash, the weather was shake your house from the foundations wash the green off the leaves horrible, and yet canny Wellingtonians knew to put suntan lotion on, for lo and behold it was crisply perfect that afternoon.

It means that when Vaughan Rowsell decided to go for a bike ride back in January, he didn’t wait until next summer, but took off for an April to June journey- knowing it was going to be cold, wet and miserable at times. He’s (almost there) succeeded. It’s the same urge that will guide hundreds of motorcyclists (myself included) to ride to the Brass Monkey this weekend, which is in freezing central Otago and deliberately held at around about the time of the year when the first big dumps of snow come through.

All this adds up to a people that are ready for anything, that accept no excuses and just get stuff done, regardless of what else is going on.

You can see it when we Kiwis land work in London, study in the USA, crew boats in the Med and work in charitable organisations in Africa. Kiwis arrive and depart with a deserved reputation for being able to handle anything and everything with no fuss.

Our society helps create these people with an excellent education system, a great social welfare system that means we are kept healthy, off the streets and trained, and political parties and a system that generally allows logic and fairness to guide decisions rather than a hackneyed partisanship system. Generally.

A word on education. Not only do we have places like Wellington’s Massey Design School, which is a truly great place, but more importantly we have a very high average level of education, and a very high 10th percentile level of education. That is – the least educated amongst us are far better off than their equivalents in other countries.

I’m not trusting comparative statistics for this – I’m trusting the excellent service levels across all sorts of organisations, from airlines to banks, rental car companies to restaurants and lunch bars that we receive relative to other countries. While the systems may sometimes (often) be less than stellar, invariably the people are polite, smart and able to deal with a variety of situations.

And finally that lousy wet weather means that we live in a beautiful place, one that encourages us to get out and enjoy it, and that attracts others from around the world to do the same.

So we are resourceful and smart, a fair people, have a decent corruption free society and we can do anything.

And yet we live miles away from anywhere

Not for us the intense deal making and energy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where anything is possible and nothing is too expensive.

However that vast distance also means that we avoid the Wall Street of today, the excesses that crushed an economy and the deal making and loans to business and individuals that abruptly halted.

And while we do leave New Zealand by the thousands to take advantage of London and New York, we gain valuable experience overseas and then we bring it back – either on loan when kiwi stars appear at conferences and on boards, or more permanently when we return home.

We come back because it is home, but also because it is easy to live and do business here. It’s trivially easy to start a business, to open bank accounts and to pay tax here.

We have thriving local competition, even amongst start-ups. We have DonateNZ and Givealittle, Thinksmall, MadefromNZ and Bizchat, Fishpond and Mightyape, Phil & Teds and Mountain Design Buggies, and the Jobs Summit, Foo Camp and Entrepreneurs Summit.

We all want to give it a go, and that competition means that the winners (be they a single winner or, often, a merged entity) combine to be a great, and hopefully, export led company.

To be sure we also have our problems, stuck here at the end of the world, but we are pretty good at identifying them, and we are pretty good at marshaling attention and energy on them until they are fixed. The number of pre-emptive summits for the economic crisis, the reports and government moves on the lousy broadband, the likes of Cactus Kate railing against the NZX governance and the rise of the NZ Institute all give hope.

But it is that crappy internet that is the final advantage we have. Not the lousiness of it, but the fact that it is there. (And yes – please please improve it with urgency)

Decent internet reduces costs, reduces pain and reduces cycle time. It means that we can build businesses in the cloud (basing them offshore to avoid the thin pipe) and address the world.

It lowers the trade barriers between us and our customers and suppliers, and it makes the world our market.

Our Government is helping as well.

We have signed Free Trade Agreements with China, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Chile, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines and Vietnam. That’s an astonishing 1.9 billion people – or 25% of the world’s population.

We are also in negotiations with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman and South Korea. That moves it to a free trade addressable market of 2 billion people – a market of about 480 people per New Zealander, or 4 million people per reader of this blog today. Who cares about the anti-free trade USA subsidies when we have this market?

That’s plenty enough to share.

Finally, why were people at the Webstock event, and why are you (still) reading this?

When I returned to New Zealand in 2003, I’d realised that my ideal job was to
help find and found start-ups, to help growing businesses grow faster and to help their owners and employees perform better. It’s fun.

I met the then existing VC and private equity firms, but they seemed to be on the slow train, and many were mired in government hand-out bureaucracy. The tiny average investment size, the small size of the funds and the slow velocity of transactions all counted against the industry and their funded companies. I wanted better.

I was lucky enough to land at Trade Me, just before they hit the mainstream, and the energy was there. Now, six years later, and after stints overseas and here in New Zealand, I realise that times have changed across the board.

Trade Me, Xero, Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor, amongst many others, have all demonstrated that you can be good guys and start, run and make money from (the jury is waiting a verdict on Xero) excellent and cool companies.

Meanwhile the internet generation is hitting their stride. The 22 year olds of today have always been online, and they intrinsically get the space.

There are older returnees that are bringing energy, experience and cash back to our shores, and, most of all, there is a sense of opportunity.

The opportunities and energy is real. After landing back here in March, after selling up in Fremantle, it took only two weeks before I had over 20 opportunities of one description or another, and I am now part of two new companies.

Almost at the same time I received a call from Equip Design – who consult as part of the Better By Design program. I’m now on the team, and have visited the first of a series of clients that will build off a rich NZ history of successful transformation into design-led export-driven companies. I’ve toured Formway Design (unbelievable) and looked at from afar at the success of Obo, Phil and Teds and other successful graduates of the program.

We are good at this stuff – product design, anything internet based, branding, lean and flexible manufacturing – indeed the entire product development process.

Our local economy is strong, our addressable economies of the world are in varying degrees of trouble, but our export volumes are trivial to them, and our products are often clever and cheaper solutions to problems that they are just starting to look at.

So we have the people, the experience, economy and education. People are giving start-ups a go, and we have a huge market to address.

There are plenty of roadblocks on the way, but we Kiwis can do anything, regardless of the weather outside.

Let’s make it happen.

The punchline was that one in two students had posted sensitive information about themselves online in the past year.

TVNZ went with Half of NZ teens post sensitive info online while NZHerald went with Nearly half of Kiwi teens post sensitive info online – both remarkably similar to the original press release.

Some went further though – and the three best articles that I read were from:

1. The venerable ODT – with Teens lax over online security a very well written article that included a local angle and even a call to a local academic.
2. The Dominion Post with Internet’s effects may be taught – an interesting angle, and with only passing reference to the survey. Well done to the Dom Post and Greer McDonald.
3. TV3, with some new news Policing unit to monitor internet for criminal activity which probably means bald 50 year old men masquerading as 15 year old girls are going to start flirting with me online.

The articles all stemmed from preliminary findings published by PhD student, and research manager at Netsafe – John Fenaughty.

Colour me skeptical. Indeed I am frighteningly skeptical about any headlines that say “the youth of today are….” as I remember all too well that the youth of my day were actually pretty on to it.

I suspect (and from what I see, know) that the youth of today are much better at figuring out what they can and cannot put online than their older peers. In particular I see that horribly inept early Bebo pages and youthful utterances are increasingly becoming the norm, and employers and voters of the future will accept it as such.

But I was also concerned that the survey itself was a bit of a half baked scaremongering exercise. So I decided to dig into it a little. The Netsafe website was useless – but I did find the press release after a fellow twitterer shared the link.

So I called (there was no email address) John Fenaughty and left a message. He got back to me very quickly on email, and I posed him 12 questions – cunningly displaying them as 10:

1: How was the final respondent group selected, including response rates etc? How did you avoid bias across the multiple dimensions?
2: What were the exact dates of data collection?
3: What were the actual survey questions used to derive these answers? especially the “wouldn’t want to find” part.
4: How were the questions asked? – e.g interviews, filled out by students etc.
5: What was the age (or school class) distribution of the responding students?
6: What percentage of students didn’t use the internet? were they included in the survey?
7: How was the “one out of two” figure derived? – can you provide a break down (crosstab) that shows the combination of sensitive information provided?
6: What is the breakdown of age (or school class) versus provision of the four sensitive informations identified in the press release?
7: What other questions were in the survey?
8: will you be making all of the coded source data available?
9: How do you define cyber bullying?
10: What convictions for cyber bullying have there been in NZ?

Quietly readying myself for a nice evisceration of the study, I noted that his reply wasn’t instant – and perhaps wasn’t ever going to come. I mulled on the state of research these days, but eventually I did get a reply almost a day later.*

It was rigorous. In fact it was an excellent reply, and I am posting it in full beneath the fold.

John sent me back complete answers to all of my questions, and satisfied my greater concerns about the study. Simply put – he is doing the best he can within the constraints he has been dealt.

I noted to myself that this is just the sort of evidence that you would want to see from a PhD student, especially as a PHD needs to be defended in front of a committee. Having sat on one of those committees before (we had to say no in the end) it is a grueling exercise for the student, but with the quality of this response John is demonstrating that he will be ready.

If you read the reply, ask yourself whether any research that you conduct or read about can be answered just as well. Are your questions tested? Are all ethical grounds covered off? Are the samples truly statistical and non-biased? and so on.

So well done John – Not only have I deleted most of the blog post I’d drafted, but you’ve even managed to turn it into a “how to respond to questioning bloggers” lesson.

(From John Fenaughty)
Hi Lance.

Thanks for your email and your questions. The data that we released for Privacy Awareness Week was a preliminary look into the data set that I’m going to be doing more work on in the following year. A full report (in addition to the PhD thesis) will be produced covering off all of the specifics by this time next year. In order to “get the data” out there, we are releasing some findings early. I’ll get onto responding to some of your questions below – as you’ll see I’d like to invite you to come in, or call for a chat about some other things too.

1.) The participants in the research were high school students from five schools in NZ. Schools were selected that ranged across a number of dimensions. These dimensions were selected to survey a wide variety of young people in NZ about their experiences online and on mobile. Dimensions included national location, decile rating (a measure of the school community’s social economic status), single sex vs co-ed, and metropolitan vs semi-rural. Schools ranged in decile rating from decile 4 to decile 10. Schools ranged from non-metro to metro to give a spread in terms of urban versus non-urban activity. Locations included South Island semi-rural, Wellington, Central North Island, and Auckland.

The research, being conducted at the University of Auckland, went through UoA ethics review process. This requires schools to consent to research participation. From then, participants under 16 years of age required parental consent to participate in the research, as per UoA requirements. The final response group then includes those students who, if permitted, chose to complete the voluntary activity. Response rates varied across the schools and the samples. The overall response rate was just over 60% across the entire sample, with a range from just over 50% to 90% response rates depending on the school.

Regarding avoiding bias over multiple dimensions – this would be something that would better off being covered by a conversation (the standard issues of social science come into play here around self-selection bias and convenience sampling vs social desirability bias and the pragmatics of conducting research involving school students in NZ).

2.) Data collection over multiple sites was conducted from the third week in August 2007 until the third week in March 2008. Depending on the school schedules data collection was staggered over different schools during this period. Specific data collection periods at each school varied depending on the size of the school and the school resources – on the whole though most data collection was complete within a school week.

3.) The survey is the second part of data collection for the PhD. The first phase involved a series of 8 focus groups around the country at an equally wide variety of schools. The focus groups were the first point of departure for the research and were used, in part, to guide topic and questionnaire development for the survey. After the focus groups, questions were developed which were then subjected to the UoA ethics review process. After receiving ethics approval for the questionnaire, the first set of questions were piloted with 10 teenagers to ascertain that the questions were asking what was desired and were understood by a range of ages (and across young men and women). Following that phase of the research design, small changes to wording were made and the questionnaire was ready to be put to use. The use of the “someone who didn’t like you” was used in this particular quesiton as this helped make the hypothetical audience of public viewers more concrete for some of the younger teenagers [rather than just someone who didn’t know you]. This is in line with theories of adolescent development which demonstrate that younger teenagers may still be operating at a more “concrete” level than the more formal abstract thought that becomes available as teenagers age.

A key focus for this research was also to leave questions open for students to answer as they wanted to, rather than predetermining what we thought was sensitive information.  We did this by including the “anything that you wouldn’t want someone who didn’t like you to find” response. You’ll also see that we employed a similar approach with the cyberbullying item.

The specific question around sensitive information was:

In the past year, have you ever posted any of the following things on a public website or mobile phone chatroom where someone you didn’t already know face to face, OR someone who didn’t like you, could find it?
(like posting it on ‘open’ blog sites, an ‘open’ page on Bebo, YouTube, web forums, chat rooms, etc)?

(Please tick ALL the answers that apply)
- Your mobile phone number
- Your instant messenger ID or email address
- The address of your home
- Your first and last name, OR your first name and a recognizable picture of yourself, AND anything (like pictures, stories, or comments) that you wouldn’t want someone who didn’t like you, to find
- Or… I haven’t posted any of these on a public (or ‘open’) webpage.

4.) The questions for the survey phase of the research were asked in an anonymous survey filled in by students themselves during school time.

5.) It’d be good if we could have a conversation about how much specifics we can share with you and the media, perhaps you might be able to come in (if you’re in Auckland) or we can talk about this on the phone. Researchers face a balance between sharing research findings and managing the original material copyright requirements for academic journal publishing [which require that detailed research results not be published prior to that publication]. If you’d like to come in and meet me and the team that would be great and we can talk to this also. We keep findings released to the public and the media at approximates to enable us to contribute both to the ‘grey’ research literature as the findings are useful and then later to the academic research later increasingly desperately seeks peer reviewed data [the majority of internet data at the moment is ‘grey’ research literature].

With that in mind, the data included:

12 year olds (a handful)
13 year olds (aprox 200)
14 year olds (aprox 350)
15 year olds (aprox 350)
16 year olds (aprox 350)
17 year olds (aprox 300)
18 year olds (aprox 100)
19 year olds (a handful)

6.) As mentioned in point 5 we are not able to provide this specific information at this point. However once the final research report is released we will be in a position to publish the specific data on these points. In vague terms, descriptive analysis reveals many commonalities on each of the types of sensitive information published in public places online across the age groups:

There were similarities (results fell within one standard deviation of the average response rate for that item) between age groups for each of the following:

Posting a mobile phone number: Same amounts for 13, 14, 16, 17 and 18 year olds. 15 year olds were, on average, one standard deviation more likely than the other participants to report posting a mobile phone number.

Posting an email address or instant messenger ID: Same amounts for 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds. 13 year olds were, on average, one standard deviation less likely to report posting an email address or instant messenger ID. 18 year olds were, on average, 2 standard deviations more likely to report posting this information publically than the other age groups.

Posting the address of your home: Same amounts for 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds. 18 year olds were, on average, one standard deviation more likely to report posting their home address than the other age groups.

Posting sensitive info you wouldn’t want others who didn’t like you to find: Same amounts for 13, 14, 15, 17, 18 year olds. 16 year olds were, on average, one standard deviation more likely than the other participants to report posting such information.

On the whole the findings reveal very similar reporting rates for the information across the age groups. In the 24 domains of data sharing (data by age group) there were only 4 domains where results differed by more than one standard deviation, and only one where results differed by two standard deviations. The most significant finding seems to be that disproportionately more 18 year olds post their email address or instant messenger ID online, than the other age groups. Of key interest is the result demonstrating that some participants from within each age grouping report sharing each of these types of information publically.

7.) The survey asked students a range of questions, including:

Their activity in online/onmobile (amount of communicating, researching, gaming, filesharing, trading, publishing, friendships, romance, media consumption, etc.).

Measures of adult help seeking behaviour (how readily and easily they report asking adults for help), social self-efficacy (how well they get along with peers and classmates), and family support (how supportive they report their families to be in helping them with problems and giving them love and support).

Experiences of challenge online/onmobile in the last year, including: bullying, meeting face to face with people first met online/onmobile, consumption of adults only sexual material, exposure to unwanted sexual material, exposure to aggressive sexual solicitation, exposure to other content online/onmobile that made them uncomfortable or upset, downloading [not streaming] music or movies for free via file sharing applications, being scammed, and gambling.

How they felt about the most serious time they experienced each challenge.

What action they took to manage the challenge if it was upsetting.

How well they felt that particular challenge had been ‘sorted out’.

6+7 v2) Re the second set of 6s and 7s:

Only a couple of percent of participants reported not using the internet in our sample. They were included in the one out of two finding (obviously contributing to the not posting sensitive info online side of the equation).

Re. How was the one out of two figure derived?
This figure was derived from a participant reporting that they had posted at least one item of the four forms of sensitive information online. The figure weirdly came out nearly almost perfectly as 50%. Going deeper, just under a third of the entire sample reported having posted more than one of these pieces of sensitive information online in the past year. As noted above, the entire sample includes those students reported not using the internet.
8.) In addition to what I’ve mentioned in point 5, we have not anticipated making the data publically available. Publically available data requires additional ethical UoA Human Subjects Ethics Commitee approvals and processes. After completion of publications, researchers wishing to conduct analyses that have not already been conducted would be welcome to contact the research team with their analysis requests.

9.) In the focus groups we examined the language around cyberbullying. There is a lot of variety in how young people understand cyberbullying. We decided to make the initial cyberbullying question relatively open ended to collect this range of responses before offering more specific examples in the following question. Additionally, the focus groups revealed that many young people trade what may, to outsiders, be perceived as bullying comments online. Asking then if someone had received text messages that included swear words or threats can over represent bullying by subsuming now normal teenage online banter as cyberbullying. There were two cyberbullying strands – one for bullying online and one for bullying onmobile. Both were relatively similar, they just assessed each modality of cyberbullying separately as focus group participants had mentioned that bullying on mobile was more significant than bullying online. The mobile bullying question was:

In the past year has someone ever tried to use a mobile phone to bully or be mean and hurtful to you?

If they responded yes to that the next question asked:

Thinking of the most serious time in the past year that someone tried to bully, or be mean, or hurtful to you, on a mobile phone,

What did they do?
(Please tick ALL the answers that apply)

They used a mobile phone to:

Please tick if this happened
…say or text mean, hurtful, or nasty things to you
…to spread rumors about you (even if they were untrue)
…not let you talk, text, or be friends with them (like they ignored you)
…send you scary or disgusting pictures and videos
…send mean or embarrassing pictures or videos of you to other people
…threaten to hurt you physically (like txting to say they were going to get you)
…threaten to tell other people embarrassing things about you
…threaten to damage and hurt someone or something that you cared about
…do something else mean or hurtful on a mobile phone
And…they did OTHER mean and hurtful things NOT USING a mobile phone

10.) Jani at NetSafe has prepared some stuff for you about the legal issues with cyberbullying. [I didn't receive this - LW] Hopefully they shed some light on the legalities? Personally I’m not aware of a conviction, although I’ve heard about things floating round in relation to abuse of protection orders and last year an 18 year old woman was charged for hacking into a younger teen’s bebo site with the implication that this was a cyberbullying scenario – though I’m not sure – the case was in Hastings. Jani highlighted that harrassment online can involve the legal system when it intersects with the following acts of law:

Films, Videos, Publications and their Classifications Act 1993
Protection orders – Domestic Violence Act 1992 part 2
Restraining Orders- Harassment Act 1997
Telecommunications Act 2001
Hacking and Denial of service attack – The Crimes Act 1961 Section 250
Crimes involving computers – The Crimes Act 1961 Part 10

Judge David Harvey is a NetSafe member and wrote the following which may be of interest:

http://www.netsafe.org.nz/Doc_Library/netsafepapers_davidharvey_cyberstalking.pdf

Main points: the Harassment Act 1997, the Domestic Violence Act 1995 and the Telecommunications Act 2001

OK – so that’s pretty much all that there. Re the bias question and the specific data questions it’d be great to chat about that in person or on the phone. <snip>

* I should note that the span of about 20 hours for replying to my questions was very quick considering the nature of the questions, the fact that John was undoubtedly fielding plenty of other questions and the qualiy of the answer.

Since I don’t agree with it – I decided to have a crack at my own version. This is my take on “Blogging Engagement”  – written from my perspective as both a blogger but more importantly as a reader of blogs  (or columnists or news websites or authors).

What do you think?

Even after the provocation of seeing one of their number shot and lie dead in the street for the duration of the siege, police fired only two shots throughout the entire event. Well done.

So if you happen to have your own stash of guns and explosives in your fortressed home, then remember this simple thing. No matter how much you provoke the police, or how much they provoke you, they will not shoot you.

This isn’t America, it isn’t the movies – it is New Zealand, and I am happy to live here.

So I fervently hope we do not over-react to this outlier incident by arming police – with either guns or tasers. Neither would have helped, but more importantly if our criminals know they won’t get shot then they are far less likely to shoot first.

And that is safer for everybody.