Facebook, Failing

F is for Fail and in this case, is also for Facebook as well. It has become so easy for college students to get caught up in hours of online procrastination thanks to Facebook. You may have an assignment due in an hour and get caught up scrolling through various Facebook accounts or photos of someone you haven't seen since elementary school. Academic research has concluded that on many such students, Facebook is having a detrimental effect of university results. Researchers from the US have found that students prone to accumulating friends, uploading photographs, chatting and "poking" other on Facebook may spend as little as one hour per week to their studies and academic work.

"Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon," said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. Her study, conducted with a colleague at OSU, questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general Internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook. They found that 68% of students who used Facebook had a significantly lower GPA then those who did not have an account with Facebook or use the site at all.
It is all to easy to waste precious study hour time and click aside to check Facebook messages. Rather than addressing this issue, some Australian university students have instead started setting up Facebook support groups to discuss how the site adversely affects their university grades. Which is quite ironic, in the sense that, rather than not using the social utility site or shutting their computers off they are simply creating anti-Facebook groups, using the actual website. The Sydney University-based group called "I want to sue Facebook if I fail university" has almost 1000 members who cite the social networking site as the primary cause for an increasingly amount of people failing universities. Thanks to the latest tech-savy invention of Facebook applications for Blackberries and iPhones there is even more tendency to simply stay on the website for hours at the palm of your hand.

Australia Back round: Geographic Perspective

This is to give everyone more insight on Australia as a whole and its general make-up. First and foremost, Australia is divided into 6 states: New south Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, including 2 territories; the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory.


It is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the world's smallest continent and numerous islands in the Southern, Indian and Pacific Oceans. The continent of Australia has been inhabited for over 40,000 years by Indigenous Australians. The current population of over 20 million is concentrated mainly in the large coastal cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. The capital of Australia is Canberra.

Teeny Bikini at the Center of Piracy Claims

Supermodel Miranda Kerr is in the midst of piracy claims. The swimsuit company Seafolly has launched Federal court action against a company it alleges stole the bikini pattern for its Zambezi range. Modelled by Kerr in its 2007 catalogue, Seafolly says the Zambezi pattern is a tribal-style design it has owned since 2006. The claim was filed last week by Seafolly alleging Sydney company Australian Downtown Marketing (ADM) sold copies of the bikini which were marketed under the Mooloola brand. It is the third time in four years that Seafolly has launched legal action against alleged knockoffs. Seafolly said it bought the Zambezi design from Sydney textile designer Longina Phillips in 2006. After purchasing it, Seafolly then simplified the design and printed it into fabric for use in the Zambezi range which included, bikinis, singlets, dresses and a kaftan. City beach, who owns the Mooloola brand, told Seafolly it had ordered stocks of the swimsuits, but they were "returned to its Chinese manufacturer as they were considered defective." What does Seafolly want out of the lawsuit? Seafolly wants a declaration that ADM has infringed its copyright, an order stopping them from doing it again, and all supplies of the fabric used to make the Mooloola suits and the profits from selling the togs.