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Rather than explain, let me give you a reference:

I hope my scouts don't read this. This is exactly what they're bargaining for, and they'll be mad that their leader has yet to deliver.

There are plenty of references that expound on the uses of cloth the size and shape of triangular bandages. Adornment? Sure ... the thing is swank. Importantly, we don't want our international visitors to think "cheap" when our scouts give one as a token of friendship. Useful? Maybe ... especially with the reinforced sides of this bad boy ... Check it out here. Now, that's an edge method that I can support (on my shoulders )!

I thought I'd drop a quick anecdote about signing off for Life Rank #6. There are a number of quiescent threads on this topic. I'm resurrecting this one in particular because it was spawned by our beloved OGE (R.I.P.). SM and I were chatting about the super-cool US contingent World Jambo neckers (the largest I've ever seen from BSA) when along comes a Star scout asking to sign off a couple of remaining requirements. This scout is more action than words. We weren't sure he'd stick around, but he did and is a genuine quality youth. He said, "I taught so many kids this stuff, do I have to do one in particular?" We asked him if they learned what he taught them, he said they did. I asked if he used the EDGE method, did he even know what it stood for? He gave me that "really-do-I-have-to?" look. I then asked the outgoing SM (who had actually consumed a troop meeting to teach EDGE) if he could tell the scout what the method was. The guy tripped over the first letter. "Uh, Engourage?" I concluded. "Seems like you know it as well as Mr. Old SM. Get your signature from him and ask Mr. New SM for your conference. Oh, and keep teaching our scouts as well as you've already been doing."

Most of these suggestions are part of Thurber's toolkit. And I do believe they lower the average level of homesickness symptoms. But averages can work in two ways: they can reflect low "background" symptoms getting lower without reducing incidence of disorder. In other words, all kids might have apprehensions about camp, but only a few kids have them to the point of misery. Any given treatment (in this case changing parent behavior) might lower every kid's apprehension a point or two. That makes a study look good. But, it's possible that the kids who would never be miserable enough to get "diagnosed" as homesick are the ones whose scores actually improve. Or that couple of points improvement in the kids who are likely to get homesick might not be enough to keep them willing to stay in camp. In other words, without a really well designed trial that actually tracks incidence of youth going home in a study of randomly assigned treatments, we don't know what works to keep kids in camp for a full week. There have been some studies that actually track cell phone use and severe homesickness in college students. But, those exposures are much longer than one week, and obviously in adults, not children. So, we have never really measured how frequently (if at all) certain parent strategies that help the average youth feel better also help the homesick-prone youth avoid being miserable at camp. That said, it is nice to be able to tell parents that there are a few things they can do to help the average child feel better about their first week away from home. And, it is nice that some of those suggestions have made their way into camp manuals.

Had a discussion with our new CC. She said the cellphones were a concern of hers. I told her it should be determined by whatever the new SM can stand. I did not go over the legalities of theft, even though we might find ourselves camping on her family's property in Ohio.

Which ones? All of them! (Mostly.) You're kind of asking for answers which I don't think I'm allowed to give. Judge not, lest you be judged. Sorry, I didn't write the rules. Here's the thing. Time and time again, I've seen scouts who've done these projects be the ones "in the room" (classroom, job, theater of war, community, or church) when the next big project rolls around. And, they are the ones who say, "We got this!" It's really not about the project. It's about the scout. Are we setting our most ambitious scouts on a trajectory where they start their first major project while we are there to guide and challenge them? This is one of the main reasons I would like scouts to hustle up and make Eagle earlier in their tenure. IMHO. that project for rank advancement should be the first of several before entering adulthood. Non-scouting example: Sunday's sermon was from a fellow whose youth director set his fellowship in pairs to walk the streets of Baltimore to talk to homeless people for an afternoon. This was when he was 13 years old. By the time he was 18, he and another college classmate decided to start a ministry to the homeless in our city. It has been going strong for 17 years, and lots of other youth (including our own) have volunteered in places where some of my fellow scouters fear to tread. So, was going down the street and chatting with a homeless person a grand project? You could ask the folks in Baltimore, if they are still alive and willing to talk about the past two decades, how much of an impact those kids had. Or, you could ask the thousands in Pittsburgh and every other town where those youth ultimately set up home. A service projects impact is a function of how much it molds the scout, not how many people are served by the actions taken in the span of a few weeks.

The statistician in the forum has doubts: If I understand Thurber's research (Thurber C, Walton E. 2007. Preventing and Treating Homesickness. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 16 (4), 843-858), it is based on a sample of convenience in a camp in New England with no controlled trial. Most of us aren't talking about treating homesickness. Most of us are talking about preventing it. And from the time we walked with our SM and our homesick buddy so he could use the payphone to call his mom, we should have learned that the phone isn't the problem. His study suggested that there were ways to blunt "homesickness intensity", and much of that involved preparing the parents. So, that's a great job for your CC. But, it's not at all clear that the incidence of homesickness (i.e,. percent of boys actually withdrawing from activity and/or asking to go home) was reduced. So far, I have not found a multi-center randomized trials of cell-phone strategy that would test if setting policy one way or another would reduce the % of scouts who need to head home on day three of camp.

So does this mean insta-palms can be conferred on any scout who had their EBoR prior to Aug 1, 2017? This was basically my suggestion at the time:

Now we know how it stays in Vegas!

I think it might just fry you! I just explained the physics of trebuchets and now have to go to church, and I'm feeling fried!

Not working the physics out in full, but if it is the typical design, 100 lbs on the beam 12" from the fulcrum is 100 foot-pounds of torque to begin with. That's a lot of potential energy on an arm that's about to rotate from over minus 100 degrees to 0 (straight up and down). By the time the arm is at minus 45 degrees, it is pulling the mass off its line and it needs far more force than the weight of the mass to do so. Meanwhile on the opposite end of the beam, a sling is being launched -- lighter weight, but longer path -- almost the opposite trajectory. The whole point of the beam is to transfer the kinetic energy of the descending mass to the ascending sling. So in an efficient engine there reaches a critical angle where the fulcrum is largely irrelevant and all of the inertia of the mass is at its maximum and in opposition to the inertia of the sling, and the energy to change the trajectory of each is along the length of the beam. It goes from dropping one object to lift the other to trying to pull these objects together. The exact amount of force along the beam at that point depends on the total length of the throwing arm, the length of the sling, the mass of the projectile, the mass of the materials, and the energy lost to friction in all the moving parts (which can be somewhat offset, as ancient tapestries indicate, by mounting the device on rollers). It is quite reasonable to assume that, in @MattR's model, 50,000 pounds of force could be a minimum. And that is why we trigger a trebuchet from a distance. You would want to do the same for a catapult, but for different reasons.

I know a few Sisters of Mercy who would make awesome ASMs! But, to the legal argument, would "turn your device in or leave camp" (even from a nun) not also meet your test for "theft by intimidation"?

@mds3d, good Unit Commissioners ... for some leaders, that's a contradiction in terms. I bet that's the cases with this SM. He is taking advantage of indecisive leadership on the COR's part. I'm betting a good UC won't even waste the coffee on this one. I have seen this in other venues. But unlike those, the fixed tenure of the youth comes to the fore. If you and your ASMs are "all that", start talking to a new CO ASAP. Let the COR know that he either makes his move next week our you all will make yours. Your DE will be tickled pink about the prospect of starting a new unit. There are a lot of downsides to actually moving. Money will be left behind. So will gear. The new CO might not understand scouting the way your current one does. Five years from now, the boys might want to all merge back together. (Happened with our troop.) But, those are minor things relative to waiting indefinitely for someone to address an urgent problem.

Previous discussion ... https://www.scouter.com/topic/26075-pioneering-catapults-banned/

An Ohio camp or scouter could argue that by bringing an unauthorized device to camp, and more importantly, refusing to secure the device or have authorized leaders secure it for them, the scout is robbing the camp/troop of its wholesome environment. That environment has value. The camp/troop markets it. So, criminal charges could be brought against the scout for theft of property by undermining market value. It cuts both ways ... the temporary securing of a device in exchange for access to camp/unit property ... that's commerce, not theft.

Welcome to the forums. Smoothly? Smooth would have been the COR walking into the troop meeting and saying "Congratulations, Mr. @BlueTrails_Vet, starting today, you are the SM. Mr. Former SM may submit an application for unit scouter reserve. Next best thing, if you ASMs are all that: find a new CO where you can be SM under a COR with some spine. If this is such a big deal to you, take action next week. Stop wasting time. It really is that simple.

And it can be done. I have a colleague whose sole objective is to develop a health literacy program for students in predominately minority schools. It's not just a list of current "best practices", but where to find get sound information and critical reviews. I suggested Son #2 consider a service project with her where he went over basic first aid from the BSHB, and challenge the class to compare it to other sources. He found the concept a little daunting. But it would have been a good fit had he taken it on. It all boils down to how much you, the unit leader, can stand. Boys using devices wrongly will require your immediate attention. Locked up, it's less on you, but they never learn to use them rightly. I am a very strong proponent of caring adults being friends with youth via social media. I believe BSA, motivated by fears of litigation, got it very very wrong. We are their role models for device use -- even if we aren't their paragons of innovation. In our absence, innovative predators will get very close to our kids.

@PeterHopkins, welcome to the forums! I've always found the Insignia Guide to be a much better read if we interpret it as encouraging scouts and scouters to pursue new achievements, rather than discouraging them from wearing a vintage insignia that they may tell an interesting story. So, if this year someone from council issues a vintage knot to recognize some youth, I certainly would not consider the youth to be out of uniform if the knot was neatly sewn over his left pocket. (The IG does define how knots are to be arrayed so as to produce a neat appearance.) In general, I hope that councils do due diligence in explaining to the youth when they are awarding a knot out of their vintage collection, and tell him what equivalent knot (if any) could be purchased from the scout-shop if he/she wanted to stay current.

$4.4K makes our boys who applied to WSJ seem cheap. Hopefully there will be plenty of hub cities to minimize other transportation costs.

Did it when I was a scout. The youth started out as waiters, then moved up until they ran the kitchen. SPL taught me everything I needed to know about flipping pancakes. Didn't do eggs. Only pancakes. SPL did have some buttermilk set aside for any requests for his specialty.

However, if once full, they are mounted to the stern of a tall ship and a scuttle is cut atop one so that a dipper can be used for dispensing, we still may still call it a scuttlebutt. Or at least that's what we call the gossip that starts when everyone gathers for their water ration!

Sketchy places come up fast. Even with an appropriately trained adult, one can easily miss cues. I didn't learn about online water gauges until I was in my 40s! God rest her and comfort her family.

The scout shop carries Primus Classics. That way, you can tell Mrs. E94-A1 that you are going to get a new council patch or pick up awards for the troop. If you accidentally come back with a stove ... well at least it wasn't a new motorcycle. As I mentioned earlier, it is possible to completely disassemble the primus for easy cleaning. You metal-workers can make different shaped pot mountings and reassemble them quite nicely. I haven't done that yet, but one of these days I'll hit the scrap metal pile and come up with some novel configuration. The only downside is that butane is not quite the four season fuel that it claims to be. Well, at least not four WPa seasons which include a fair share of very wet very cold.

... or, as I call it, a scout camp -- i.e., where youth actually learn to do stuff unto perfection.