Teachers for Supply

Parents are being urged to be vigilant with their iPhones and iPad, following warnings by parenting groups about “immoral” in-app advertisements that may see children unwittingly spending hundreds of pounds.

The adverts are another controversy for developers, who’ve previously been criticised for including expensive in-app purchases within popular children’s apps.

The latest warning followed the launch of an iPhone app that can have ended in children signing as much as a £208 a year subscription service.

The Talking Friends Cartoons app, available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices, relies at the Talking Friends apps from developer Outfit7, including Talking Pussycat and Talking Lila the Fairy. It allows users to be informed more about their favourite characters, download wallpapers for his or her phones in addition to watch short cartoons co-produced with Disney.

The app itself is free, but on the bottom of each screen is an banner that, when the app was first launched, carried an advert directing users to a quiz to win a 64GB iPad, promoted by a corporation called Yamoja.

To participate in the contest, users needed to sign in to a subscription service costing £4 every week, for which they received four weekly texts containing content reminiscent of “funtones, wallpapers, games, celeb news & more”.

App commentator Stuart Dredge, who wrote in regards to the adverts on his Apps Playground blog, said: “What an advert that tries to sign you as much as a £4-a-week mobile content subscription was doing inside this app is genuinely beyond me.”

The advert was pulled from the app, but another new launch, this time from National Geographic, includes an costly in-app extra.

Dino Land app – released in mid-February 2013 – has attracted controversy for permitting users to shop for extra virtual “bones” in amounts as much as £69.99. The bones, used to hurry up gameplay, are particularly enticing to impatient children who would like to complete the sport quicker.

Dino Land follows a succession of apps geared toward children that feature expensive in-app purchases, including Playmobil Pirates, Coin Dozer and Racing Penguin. Parenting websites are reporting increasing instances of fogeys being charged £500 or more after their children have made in-app purchases while playing games – and advise parents to be sure their devices block the purchases.

Justine Roberts, Mumsnet co-founder and CEO, said: “App-developers build in greater controls from the beginning – it’s shocking that several click-throughs from an advert may end up in a £200 cost for unknowing parents, and it shows just how important it’s to maintain a watch to your child’s device settings.”

Siobhan Freegard, founding father of parenting site Netmums, added: “Few people mind a number of targeted ads that are relevant to the app service, as they realise it is the price to pay for the ‘free’ app. But bombarding children using free apps with expensive services and products they’ll unwittingly register to some of clicks is immoral.”

Developers regularly offer apps free of charge, making their money from advertising or from users making “in-app purchases” (IAPs). These buy paid-for perks that regularly improve a game or offer the likelihood to play without adverts, but are controversial in apps geared toward children and may cost parents money if the acquisition itself isn’t password protected.

When developers create a game they sometimes contract out the advertising within it to a expert, which may serve adverts from hundreds of other organisations.

The adverts within the Talking Friends Cartoons app are served by Google, which permits app developers and publishers to have control over the advertising content on their apps.

Samo Login, CEO of Outfit7, said his company pulled the adverts from the app once it was alerted. He explained: “Now we have a strict policy in place regarding what advertisements are displayed within our apps and take this issue very seriously. Unfortunately, thanks to a technical glitch within one in all our ad networks, this advert was displayed against our advertising policy.”

Outfit7 attracted controversy when it emerged in October 2012 that its Talking Ginger app featured adverts from payday loans company Wonga. Wonga later pulled its adverts from the app.

The Talking Friends series of apps was downloaded greater than 600 million times, with 120 million people a month and 10 million people an afternoon actively using them.

Taking coals to Newcastle – idiom; prov: to do something supposedly unnecessary; orig: Newcastle – an English town from which coal was shipped to other parts of England

You might say it’s an unlikely story – a host of american citizens introducing rugby to British schools. But then, you most likely haven’t met its author.

Mark Griffin founded Play Rugby USA, a ground-breaking non-profit that uses rugby as an instructional tool to assist disadvantaged children in Big apple, La and beyond, in 2005. Such have been its success that Griffin has now install a British offshoot, R4UK to further his pursuit of “a neater world through rugby” by working with girls and boys in inner-city London. Asked how he came to make the sort of move, Griffin raises an eyebrow.

“i presumed surely something very similar to our thing would exist in London,” he says, “however it didn’t. But each of the risk factors for the youngsters there are the exact same as they’re here. It’s the exact same programme.”

It took an opportunity meeting on the 2010 Churchill Cup, with Terry Burwell, a former competitions director of the Rugby Football Union who had spotted a niche in his home market, for Play Rugby USA to take the wholly unlikely step of exporting its educational mission to the united kingdom. In spite of everything, in line with tradition if not incontrovertible historical fact, rugby was invented in Britain, on the school that offers the sport its name.

America being a little less open to British tradition than other parts of the globe that were once shaded pink, Play Rugby USA, obvious to assert, is the made from conditions a global far from the manicured playing fields of Rugby School. But rugby is nonetheless at the rise within the States and Griffin can cite a survey by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association to back-up his statement that “rugby is the fastest growing team sport in America”. His success is behind an outsized portion of that growth.

Play Rugby USA takes rugby, predominantly in its seven-a-side form and using tag rules as opposed to tackles, into schools in areas equivalent to Queens and the Bronx in Ny and Bell Gardens in L. a.. Coaches, youth development mentors and accredited teachers then use the sport at the field and inside the classroom, to educate the virtues of teamwork, co-operation, dedication and perspiration. Activities are run in class hours and after, keeping kids off the streets and providing valuable opportunities for supervised exercise.

Despite some impressive achievements – including staging the yearly Ny Rugby Cup and sending scholarship-winning pupils to New Zealand to experience the world’s strongest rugby culture – Griffin still sees Play Rugby USA as a piece in progress. His account of its growth, however, shows why he felt confident enough to export it.

“We started in 2005 but didn’t start putting processes in place until 2006,” he adds, “and we’ve gone from 10 schools then to 267 now.

A better world through rugby is our vision, and we always focus on ‘rugby for good’. It is not just rugby. It’s essentially using rugby to assist kids improve wellness, to aid them be triumphant, which starts in education, after which it’s about empowering them to develop themselves and take charge in their own destiny. Rugby’s good for that, not only when they’re playing but within the classroom in addition.

I think the values we seek to impart are inherent within the game – integrity, honesty and camaraderie.

‘All those values are there’

Griffin’s next words – expressed along with his customary assurance – hint on the source of his enthusiasm for his sport.

“It is all taken with no consideration within the UK,” he says, “it’s handed to you on a plate to play rugby. All those values are there but you do not explicitly take into consideration them. Over here, it’s a part of the emblem of rugby, the way it identifies itself and the way it’s different from other sports. i feel it’s about respect especially, and likewise solidarity.”

Griffin – a perfect-fit 37-year-old who played US Super League rugby, at hooker for Old Blue, for 13 years – is British. After playing at Durham University and semi-professionally for Birmingham & Solihull, he moved to Ny to work for Barclays and ended up qualifying to symbolize the united states. He won nine caps for the Eagles, including two appearances against England’s second string; off the sphere he worked for 2 years as director of national highschool and junior rugby for the yankee governing body. Alongside the united states Rugby chief executive, Nigel Melville – another Englishman – Griffin played a key role in introducing the sport to ever greater numbers of yankee children.

Michael Lee/Play Rugby USA

“Rookie Rugby is ready tag rugby for elementary and middle-school kids,” Griffin says, of the yank-branded variety of the sport he and Melville created. “We do not have many facilities so we need to play tag, however it does enable a lot of girls to take part. Greater than 40% of our participants at Play Rugby USA are girls, and that i would think america has more girls playing rugby than most other nations.”

Now figuring out of a buzzing Manhattan office – and employing 12 staff full-time and as many as 50 part-time – Griffin approaches his work with this kind of muscular missionary zeal that might had been familiar to the 19th-century proselytisers who first spread rugby around the world. Though America had taken the unlucky decision to depart the fold 100 years before rugby appeared at the scene, it seem Griffin is on a one-man mission to bring it back:

When we started, there have been no kids playing rugby in Manhattan, none, and it was a perception people had that rugby was this crazy, dangerous game, something you heard about in college more at the social scale. So we almost needed to brand it as a tutorial thing, that’s what it has now become often known as in Big apple.

The challenges that include that perception of rugby, you get around them with some people and others are only stubborn. But , it is a big country, so if i’ve got a college saying no five times, I’ll just visit five others who say yes and I’ll have five teams playing rugby there.

Those challenges include the notion that rugby is just crazy, “football without pads”, but Griffin senses that out of doors factors – rugby’s readmission to the Olympics in 2016; football’s difficulties over head injuries increasing the appeal of a more safety conscious contact sport – at the moment are conspiring to assist him. While President Obama said he wouldn’t need a son of his to play football, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton (whose husband played rugby at Oxford) has endorsed Play Rugby USA. So, among other luminaries, has Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of latest York. As an advantage, the success of the project is beginning to influence the yank senior game.

“We’ve a number of youngsters who’ve come through Play Rugby USA and gone into clubs etc,” Griffin says. “In high schools we play sevens and at under-13 and under-15 we play equal numbers – seven, 10, 12 – whatever they’ve available. In an effort to become under-17s in a year or so after which maybe under-19s. We’ve then created an academy for the highest 30 girls and the head 30 boys by invitation only, they usually compete against high-school teams in summer sevens leagues.

“Beyond that, they could visit clubs, or after all they could visit college –
most of the youngsters would like to play at school and we will be able to and do help them with that. Most of our youngsters will play in college after which get back. Portion of our programme is to encourage them to visit college and to continue playing.”

And therein, as far as Griffin’s hopes for R4UK are concerned, lies the rub. Griffin’s British project – a part of a hoped-for “global rugby collaborative” of developmental and academic organisations – launched in summer 2012 in Lambeth, not a London borough from which any British university, never mind knowledgeable club or national team, would expect to attract too many players. R4UK aims to exploit rugby to offer children from disadvantaged areas a boost in every little thing in their lives.

Griffin says: “We had 60 sessions in six schools within the 10 weeks as much as Christmas. The after-school piece of the programme would be manage in February and it’ll expand in the summertime term. It’s about making a model to appear to copy in other boroughs and other cities, pending the funding.

“That is the key. The continued, never-ending challenge for us as a charity is finding the funding.”

As good causes go, Mark Griffin’s is especially worth supporting – on each side of the Atlantic.

Michael Lee/Play Rugby USA

The Knight Foundation, a Washington-based non-profit that exists to advertise quality journalism, has expressed regret for paying a disgraced journalist $20,000 to talk at a lunch event.

In a blogpost published late on Wednesday night, the institution said it were “inappropriate” to pay Jonah Lehrer, who fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan for a book and recycled previous work in blogposts for the hot Yorker.

In a speech on the Knight Foundation’s 2013 Media Learning Seminar, Lehrer issued a public apology and tried to elucidate his fall from lauded young journalist to poster boy for media plagiarism.

The next day, the Poynter Journalism Institute revealed the price in a report of the speech on its website, prompting a wave of criticism.

At first, the Knight Foundation stood by the price. Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO, told the Washington Post that the associated fee was commonplace and that it sometimes paid more.

But it later backed down. “On reflection, as a foundation that has long stood for quality journalism, paying a speaker’s fee was inappropriate,” Knight said within the Wednesday blog post. “Controversial speakers must have platforms, but Knight Foundation don’t have put itself right into a position tantamount to rewarding those that have violated the elemental tenets of journalism. We regret our mistake.”

The foundation also reiterated its statement that “the price was commonplace for a well-known author to handle a wide conference” but said that it’ll not were paid to Lehrer.

“We continue to support journalism excellence within the digital age. And we don’t want our foundation partners to think that journalism controversies are too hot for them to deal with. Instead, we wish to send the message that after things get it wrong the appropriate action is to confess the mistake and come again to work.”

Lehrer was revealed in June last year to have recycled material from his previous work in blogposts for the hot Yorker. The subsequent month, writer Michael Moynihan found that Lehrer had made up Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works.

When Forbes journalist Jeff Bercovici asked Lehrer what he would do with the cash, Lehrer said: “I read your article. i’ve nothing to assert to you.”

Bercovici’s article about Lehrer’s apology: “Jonah Lehrer Thinks He Can Humblebrag His Long ago Into Journalism,” echoed many recaps of the speech, which have been mainly critical.

“Lehrer was humbled, and yet nearly every bullet in his speech managed to fireplace in both directions,” Daniel Engber wrote in Slate. “It was a wild display of self-negation, of humble arrogance and arrogant humility.”

As Lehrer delivered the apology on the Knight Foundation seminar, live tweets assessing the speech were displayed on a screen behind him. They were mostly of a critical nature.

Lehrer said in his speech that he desired to focus on what he learned from his public downfall and to carry himself in charge of his mistakes. Lehrer said:

My failures were my fault alone. But I’ve come to believe that, if i’ll regain some semblance of self-respect, then i want the assistance of others. i would like my critics to inform me what I’ve gotten wrong, if only in order that i’m able to show myself i can listen. That’s the test that matters – not the absence of error, but a willingness to address it.

He also shared anecdotes about scientists he’d encountered while engaged on pieces and concluded with a Bob Dylan quote; “one he actually said.”

Almost 4 million adults never read books for pleasure, per new research, with loss of time one of the crucial-cited reasons for not reading.

Men are much more likely than women to bypass picking up a book, with 11% of fellows and 5% of ladies surveyed saying they never read for pleasure. 1 / 4 of the UK’s adult population – greater than 12 million people – had picked up a book to read for enjoyment below twice previously six months.

The YouGov survey was completed on a sample of two,059 adults in January. Shortness of time for reading was an issue for 29% of respondents, 40% preferred to do something else and 26% said they “didn’t enjoy reading a great deal”.

“Reading can bring much for your life, from supplying you with something to speak about with friends to helping you relax or taking you to a different world, so it’s sad to think that one in four individuals are in any such reading rut that they hardly pick up a book,” said Cathy Rentzenbrink from Quick Reads, which has launched a group of £1 “bite-size books” by authors including Andy McNab and Kathy Lette to encourage more people to read. “This isn’t polling those who are illiterate – it is a representative sample. And on top of that, the recognised statistic is that one in six adults of working age within the UK struggle with literacy. While you’re a reader, it’s quite difficult to get your head round the incontrovertible fact that someone won’t find reading easy, so that you can get to adulthood and never read o.k..”

The UK figures, however, compare favourably with recent statistics from the united states, where Pew Internet found 25% of american citizens over the age of 16 had not read a book within the last year.

“Possibly things have improved,” said Rentzenbrink. “E-reading is opening up channels to those that would possibly not have considered themselves as a book reader. i am hoping things are becoming better.”