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Study Finds Value in Email Spam
Ant writes "According to a LiveScience story, a steady diet of email spam can be good for you. From the article: 'Researchers split a group of more than 2,100 Canadians into two groups. One group got e-mails that promoted healthy lifestyles, the other got none. "These were informative and motivational messages sent weekly for 12 weeks," explained study leader Ron Plotnikoff of the University of Alberta. The e-mails promoted the benefits of a good diet and physical activity. Those who were effectively spammed, as a group, saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning it improved. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Overall BMI rose for the control group, which did not get the emails.'"
And I just finished reading the Richard Feynman article on Cargo Cult Science.
Article Text below as slashdotting prevention:
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even mor
My 1997 Mindspring account gets over 100 spams per day. I go through them at about two per second just so see if someone i know, or something I have actually signed up for, is sending something and hasn't gotten my new address. I used to only read the headers and body to see where to report things, but there's too much for me to report it all now.
Okay, I acually RTGDFA. Screw this crap!
Those who were effectively smapped, as a group, saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning it improved. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Overall BMI rose for the control group, which did not get the emails.
Spam has been estimated to cost the U.S. economy several billion dollars a year in decreased productivity and anti-spam efforts. Meanwhile, the new study shows that mass email might produce small effects on a case-by-case basis, but it could be effective because of the low cost and large reach, Plotnikoff said.
"MASS EMAIL" my ass. They don't know the effing difference between solicited and unsolicited emails.
Screw this crap.
Tag lost or not installed.
What about spam that is very negative: your too small, your credit is bad, you need pills, your account is about to be canceled...
I wonder if this makes some spam a health threat.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Now what if they sent 5 or 10 a day, every day? Wonder if the test group would be paying attention to the message then.
This proves that messages that tell people about healthy lifestyles can improve people's health. Unless all of the "make big penis now" and "v1agr4 is teh bomb" and "urgent message from Uganda" and the racist crap from spam worms can somehow be considered "promoting a healthy lifestyle". Spam is the stuff we don't want. Messages promoting healthy lifestyles are what you will get if you subscribe to something that you wanted. At that point it's not unsolicited.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I can see how they did it though(note didn't RTFA)
1. Get a group of 2,100 people together
2. Tell them you are doing a 3 month survey of their BMI
3. Choose a random half of the people to send the emails to, don't tell them it's you sending them though.(kind of stupid not to guess who it's coming from though isn't it?)
4. Collect Data
I wonder if sending a bunch of porn spam to the wife, might get her to do some of the kinky stuff that gets sent in them? Hmmmmm.
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So part of the blurb could be rewritten:
I live in Japan, and you can NOT get away from the boy-band SMAP. So, it would seem an oddly appropriate typo. Perhaps we should stipulate that AUDIO spam is "SMAP". Different from simple noise pollution, this is audio viral marketing, annoying lodge-in-your-brain-and-fester ad jingles (Yamada Denki, anybody?), and heavy rotation TV and radio promotion of otherwise unplayable music.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
There do exist people in the world (myself being one of them) who have the opposite problem from "The Average American"... I cannot keep enough weight on to stay healthy... If my BMI were to go down, then I probably wouldn't have enough reserve fat to survive from one meal to the next. And before anyone says "Boy I wish I had your problem", no you don't. Trust me. Being constantly on the edge of dangerously underweight is not fun, healthy, good for one's social life, etc. etc. etc. It is a less common problem, but it is no less of a problem. In fact, I dare say that in many poor third world countries, being overweight would be looked on just as being underweight is here.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The problem is that depending on the type and amount of spam the person was already receiving, it could easily be clear that the spam was being received from the researchers. Also, knowing that the study has something to do with spam would cause many of the subjects to purposely read the spam, further making this a less realistic study.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Oh, don't get me started on unemployment benefits! I went down that path for a brief period here in Australia a few years ago. The system here, with all the paperwork and justifications is just painful. They want to know about all your bank accounts and stuff too, so if you have a cent to your name, you're not eligible. Save up enough money to pay for registration on a car so you can improve your chances of getting a job by saying "I have a car and I can use it to get to work" and they'll withold your benefits until you've spent that money on surviving.
The Australian unemployment benefits system is designed to kick you down and keep you down - once you're at rock bottom, they do eveything they can to prevent you from getting back up.
It was easier to not eat and live on the street for a while than it was to satisfy those bastards!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.