"A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. He is also respectful of copyrights. Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn an activity patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry has developed the curriculum."

"As director of the 13-year-old Slamdance film festival, the indier-than-thou alternative to the Sundance Film Festival that concludes here Sunday, Peter Baxter has dedicated a good portion of his career to showcasing the work of artists toiling outside the mainstream. Three years ago, in that same anti-establishment spirit, he broadened the festival's boundaries to include the Guerrilla Gamemaking Competition, a forum for independent video-game makers to do what their counterparts in film get to do every winter up the street: show their work, make deals and rub elbows.

...The game in question combines real video images of the 1999 Columbine High School killers and snippets of their conversation with intentionally low-resolution 2-D graphics meant to replicate the look of an early-1990s Nintendo-style role-playing game. To its champions the game is a landmark example of how video games can explore deeply disturbing material, and a powerful condemnation of the culture that produced the Columbine tragedy. To its detractors it's a study in appallingly bad taste, a horrid trivialization of a tragic event.

The controversy highlights the questions that experimental game makers face as they seek to evolve from a loose conglomeration of people with similar interests into a full-fledged movement. What will it take for their medium to be considered a legitimate art form? And should games even try to address painful or distasteful subject matter?"

Both popular culture and its derivative, youth culture, tend to set adolescent children against the culture of parents. Yet a new study on the role of faith in the family by two University of Texas sociologists suggests that teen religiosity can temper the subversive effects of pop culture by making teens consistently more satisfied with their families and their parents.

Mark Regnerus and Amy Burdette looked at data representing more than 13,000 adolescents and their parents who participated in the 1995 and 1996 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. In their first set of tests, they found that teen religious saliency, which they measured with rankings of how important religion is to the respondents, was correlated with teens reporting better relationships with fathers and higher levels of satisfaction with their families (p < .05 for both dependent variables). More important, teens that said religion is important to them were more likely to indicate that their relations with their mothers and fathers improved and that their satisfaction with their families increased during the course of the study (p < .001 for all three variables). So teen religiosity not only contributes to better family dynamics, but also improves those dynamics over time.

The researchers' second group of models looked at how increases in teen religiosity improve family dynamics. While only 15 percent of the adolescents reported growth in at least one of four measures of religiosity, teens whose religious saliency score increased between the two study waves were also more likely to report improved mother-child relations, improved father-child relations, and increased levels of family satisfaction during the same time. These three positive effects remained statistically significant in tests that controlled for the effects of behavioral changes like teen drug use, drinking, and delinquency, which were shown to have the reverse effect.

While church attendance by itself did not appear to improve family relations, teens who reported having, between the two study waves, a "born again" experience in the same faith tradition as their family-relative to their peers who did report such an experience-were more likely to report improved relationships with their fathers (p < .05).

In explaining their findings, the two researchers conclude: "Adolescents for whom religion is important-and certainly among those for whom religion has grown in importance between study waves-are more likely to understand, think about, and act upon the implications of their religious commitments for family life."