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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.'"
Is "smapping" an activity that my mother would approve of?
You know what else is good?
If you have a fat wife or fat children, you should tell them they're fat several times a day. And tell them they need to lose weight. And do it in front of company when people visit. And when they're at the dinner table, tell them they don't need seconds when they reach for something, because they're fat.
And tell your daughter she's ugly, so she'll do something about her face and maybe get some cosmetic surgery. And tell your son how stupid he is every chance you get so he'll be compelled to be an educated man.
And really, nothing gets a man to be a better husband and father than constantly reminding him what a pathetic, weak, insecure human being he is. Make sure you point out how he doesn't provide for the family the way some men do and that he has a long way to go before he could ever impress you or the children. Also, if you're an in-law, do this often to your son or daughter in-law. They will thank you for it someday, for making them a better human being.
And it's proven that little girls who play with (perfect bodied) barbies have much better self-images and are much healthier than other girls. And the images on magazines, MTV, movies and television only help to positively reinforce this good self-image throughout a young girl's growth.
This also works if you're a manager or employer. Make sure to set aside some time each day to ridicule your employees and point out their failures so that they'll do better. Tell them how lazy, stupid, non-productive and wasteful they are.
There is nothing more helpful and nothing people are more grateful for than having the obvious pointed out and being constantly reminded for it. And if you look at people today, the most successful and well-rounded and happy adults are always the ones that were told what ugly, fat, stupid, lazy failures they are their entire childhood.
Too bad this doesn't work for the penis extension thing.
Oh - and by the way, the study says "These were informative and motivational messages sent weekly for 12 weeks". How is that spam?
Bullshit. Send them a never ending supply of porn and penis enlargement spam and see how many of them are still alive at the end of the study.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
So they seem to have established that drilling a message home to people through their inbox can sometimes make a point. I really dont know how this is any different to any other repeated advertising/promotion, except that this kind (if sent without the users request) is actually illegal. Surely if someone wants to be reminded all the time about a specific thing, they could just get reminders to flash on the screen, instead of clogging their inbox with these e-mails..
Business Voyeur
Surely spam by definition is unsolicited? If you have a group of people choosing to receive it then it's no longer spam. Whatever the intention and results of this study, linking it to spam is simply wrong.
Disclaimer: The above comment was made while under the influence of too much coding and not enough sleep.
Wait, wait, wait! Based on this study, getting all of the emails for "V1AGRA" and "C1AL1S" will actually improve my libido without actually buying the drugs! Cool!
It is not so much the spam itself (though I have to question why they refer to the emails as spam when it seems that they were primarily informational emails), but the constant suggestion to live right and healthily that put the idea into the recipients' heads to do just that.
It is very similar to the rise in karate school enrollments after a popular martial arts movie like The Karate Kid is released. People take whatever they can from any message and sometimes those messages can lead to action. In this case it was towards weight loss, in others it is towards violence, in others it is towards humanity towards fellow humans.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The emails were informative. I see nowhere in the article that they promoted a product or service.
If I get an email with no commercial link, or promoting a particular product, its not spam. Spam is UCE, unwanted commercial email.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
I get it, we just need spammers who encourage us to live healthy lifestyles:
G_t outside now! Exercise! Stop using y0ur com_uter!
and shakespear donged a dozen fractal
nevermind is the people to much building
for Jill never news to many home funding
http://wexxx.shasz13.com/fsss/sm11/epl.cgi
Given that the very purpose of spam is often to sell products that are essentially empty promises, I'm going to write this study off as moot.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Those who were effectively smapped...
if
spam = sending people annoying messages
then
smap = sending messages to annoying people?
it stands to reason.
That's an opt-in mailing list.
Are we gonna start calling every computer glitch a virus now, too?
Also, I bet that if the emails had been advertising actual spam, their bodies would have gotten fatter... and saltier.
You can't take the sky from me...
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
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.
They obtain large government grants on the strength of elaborate proposals that, when passed through a suitably calibrated crap filter, say nothing, then spend the money buying iPods for their kids, and laptops and broadband for their favourite researcher's kid sister. Once the money is gone, they come up with a paper that says "When two houseflies crawl up a wall, it makes no difference to the average vertical speed of either housefly whether his counterpart is standing on his left or his right.", get published in a journal, get a free trip to speak at a conference somewhere, then they go back to square one and start writing up an application for another grant.
[sarcasm] I can't wait until I've finished my doctorate so I can hop on this gravy train [/sarcasm]
#disclaimer.not: All examples of corruption in this post are real.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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.
The article isn't about spam. It's a study of the effects of e-mail-based affirmations. It doesn't take a bunch of goofball researchers to demonstrate that daily affirmations are influential, but what does that have to do with spam? Nothing.
Spam is universally acknowledged as unsolicited, deceptive, indiscriminate, often illegal and immoral solicitations.
If they want to do a legitimate study on spam, then use spam, NOT uplifting e-mail messages.
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
Getting punched every morning helps with your constitution. Toughens you up. Let's encourage it.
At least, I think it helps. I'll do some studies.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Nagging works. We have to hide this from the world, especially females. Hell, this is fuckin' bigger than Roswell.
Table-ized A.I.
So part of the blurb could be rewritten:
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.
I'm gonna go measure my penis now...maybe it's been getting longer!
As it turns out, a re-examination of the study reveals that the subjects burned on avarage of 2,000 calories a day by pressing "delete" on all of these messages. In addition to the extra exercise, they were also consuming more time away from food since they were spending all of this time deleting emails. Finally, many subject becames so frustrated with their email that they took up other hobbies and found themselves actually going outside seeking something to do.
Basically it says that the Jedi Mind Trick may work if you are persistent in application.
No sig for you!!
Holy missed the joke there. Did you read everything he said? At the bottom he concludes and it's obviously a joke.
Well if sending messages about getting thinner gets them thinner, does that mean that the penis and breast enlargement emails will make me fully endowed in both regions?
Video Production Support
BMI is a ratio of height to weight. It is no, in any way, connected to body fat. That is what makes it pure, unadulterated bullshit. It does not take in to account age, build, or even sex. According to those who preach BMI, a man and a woman of the same height should be the same weight. According to BMI, if you are very muscular, but in such good shape you have 5% body fat, you are overweight.
That isn't just quackery, it's medically dangerous.