Law and Legal Advices

“Missing persons report”. That’s a document that comes across the desks of law enforcement agencies across the country, all across the world, countless times every day. Police and emergency services do their best to locate people who have disappeared, but as anybody who has ever been in the unfortunate position of having to report someone missing knows, the delays and wait for an answer are terrible.

Every day hundreds of genuine missing persons reports get filed. Some persons are recovered, some are not. The worst by far are missing children.

If you have kids of your own you can empathise with the fear felt by a parent when a child, in particular a young child is lost somewhere. It can happen anywhere, anytime – you turn your back while shopping, or on a crowded street, and when you turn back your child is nowhere to be seen. 9 times out of 10 of course, you will probably spot them again in a moment and all will be well. But what if you don’t? You will have no choice but to frantically search up and down, call out, ask passers by “hey have you seen this little kid…” while they shake their heads and keep walking. And eventually you lodge that report. “Missing person”.

There are plenty of things you can do to prevent yourself getting into a situation like this. Hold your child by the hand at all times, carry them in a backpack style carrier if they are small enough, or just refuse to take them along when you know you can’t give them 100% of your attention. With a bit of creativity you can significantly reduce the chance of losing your child.

Then, there is another way: clip a little electronic tag to your child’s wrist or clothing, and keep tabs on him or her using  nothing more than your internet enabled smart phone! This might sound bizarre, but GPS technology (you’re probably already using it in a street finder in your car) has indeed reached the point where it is cheap enough and compact enough to be used to track the movements of your child.

GPS tracking systems, for all the technology, are really pretty simple: a small battery powered GPS receiver attaches to your child, and calculates its position using the free GPS network. It then uses a local mobile telephone network to transmit its exact location to a medium of your choosing.

The devices can be set to constantly send location details and interface these with Google maps or a similar service (accessed from any computer or BlackBerry/iPhone/ other smart phone) for a genuine action movie style tracking experience, or you can receive details only when certain conditions are met. For example, you could choose to receive an alert only if a certain geographical area is left, or a certain speed is reached.

Devices like this are gaining popularity thanks to the convenience and peace of mind they can offer parents.

GPSmagazine.com recently reviewed 9 of the most popular GPS tracking products available, and recommended the Amber Alert Child tracker as “probably the best solution for parents”. Apart from being compact and discrete, the Amber Alert provides constant peace of mind.

In addition to wanting their children to be successful, concerned parents also want their children to be upstanding members of the community. Yet, most children’s sense of what it means to be a giving member of the community subsists on what they read in books and stories related to them by adults. Rarely do they get first hand look at the impact that selflessness and community concern can have on the lives of others. To remedy this situation, many parents get their children involved in community service work. But while community service is often talked about from the standpoint of giving back to the community, it can also bring individual benefits to the people who perform it. Below, we list three ways that your children can benefit from performing service projects in addition to getting a better idea of what it means to serve the community.

It Can Broaden Their Social Horizons

If you typically associate with people from your own income bracket, chances are that your children do too. For children and adults alike, the unfortunate thing about only associating with economic peers is that it can perpetuate social stereotypes about the underprivileged. For example, it’s not uncommon for the middle class to think that poor people are prone to thievery, as if being poor resulted in compromised morals. Unfortunately, the only information that most people receive about the underprivileged comes through exploitative TV shows and films and news reports that speak about a minority and not a majority of the underprivileged. Letting your children associate with the underprivileged through service work is an excellent way to combat social stereotypes that turn people into prejudiced dullards.

It Can Boost Their College Resume

If you have high school age children that plan on applying to competitive colleges and universities, it’s a good idea for their college resume to indicate as many positive things as possible. Currently, many elite colleges and universities are placing more emphasis on who students are as people than on how they perform on standardized tests. While quantitative tests measure of academic intelligence, they’re poor at indicating a student’s ability to display the level of creative thinking that’s required to succeed at the highest levels of business, medicine, law etc. So, how does community service play into this? Have you ever heard of the theory of interpersonal intelligence by Harvard psychologist, Thomas Gardener? Competitive colleges and universities certainly have, and the tendency to perform community service work can indicate this kind of intelligence, while standardized tests can’t.

It Can Lead Them Into Profitable Friendships

If there’s one thing that every concerned parent worries about throughout their child’s childhood, it’s that he or she will get “mixed up with the wrong crowd”. Needless to say, you won’t find many young people that exhibit destructive behavior performing volunteer service work. Instead of being inordinately self-focused and angry at the world-two characteristics that almost every young person tends to exhibit at one time or another-student service workers see the value of considering others’ needs and desire improve the world instead of give up on it. If you’ve noticed that your children pay close attention to how their peers behave and speak, then you’ve just realized the value of getting your kids involved in service work.

On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold in the American River, on the property of his employer John A. Sutter. Despite their efforts to keep this discovery quiet, news soon got out that there was gold in the hills of the River and by August of that year the hillside was covered with tents as men from around the globe, made their way to California to strike it rich.

This was no planned event. The Mexican War had only just been won and the Eastern Seaboard was in a state of financial depression. California Governor Richard Barnes Mason declared, “I have no hesitation now in saying, that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers than will pay the cost of the present war with Mexico a hundred times over.” It seemed that the promise of gold was too good to pass up.

To begin with, men came from the West. They were already close by, and they were hard working honest and trusting men. Soon however, settlers began to make their way across the country from the East.

The gold attracted many outlaws with little respect for the law. Robbery, murder, and conflict with Indians and bandits became common. With the inability of local law enforcement to manage this influx of crime, vigilante groups and lynching became a common form of mob justice.

The journey from the East was a hazardous one, more men died of cholera than the feared Indians on that trek across the country. The hard journey however, prepared the men for the harsh conditions of working for the gold. Although there was good money to be made, the cost of living was also high. Few of the prospectors struck it rich, the wise ones become farmers or storekeepers.

The largest influx of settlers was in 1849 and hence the settlers were often referred to as “forty-niners”. $10 million dollars worth of gold was found in 1849. This rose to a peak of $81 million in 1852. All in all, over $2 billion dollars worth of gold was taken from the earth before mining became almost dormant.

For more on the California Gold Rush, with links to recommended sites, visit California Gold Rush at “Surfing the Net with Kids.”