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Google Trends vs. Community Standards On Obscenity
circletimessquare writes "Google Trends is being used in a novel way in a pornography trial in Florida. Under a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, 'contemporary community standards' may be used as a yardstick for judging material as unprotected obscenity. This is a very subjective judgment, and so Lawrence Walters, a defense lawyer for Clinton Raymond McCowen, is using Google Trends to show that, in the privacy of their own homes, more people in Pensacola (the only city in the court's jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service's data) are interested in 'orgy' than "apple pie'."
That is awesome.
There is a war going on for your mind.
As American Pie demonstrated, it just doesn't work as well as they claim.
Yeah, but did he try "warm apple pie". I bet he'd get very different results! :-D
My blog
Can anyone put up a picture of the U.S. (and world) that highlights areas that find apple pies more interesting that orgies?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
O.k., I can understand "Apple Pie" spiking every fall, presumably people looking up recipes. But wtf is up with the enormous spike in searches for "orgy" in Sept. 2006? It's as if everyone in Pensacola had a mass orgy meme sweep through the community. Must have been a mess month.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Group sex and orgies apparently. (From the courtcase)
"We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values," Mr. Walters said. "What is more American than apple pie?" But according to the search service, he said, "people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie."
Chris Hansen, a staff lawyer for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the tactic clever and novel, but said it underscored the power of the Internet to reveal personal preferences -- something that raises concerns about the collection of personal information.
"That's why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data," he said.
Subscribe to Google Blackmail now: Because We Know You Know We Know.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Taking Pensacola's data as a baseline will offer skewed results. Pensacola has a large Navy population, so would have higher porn related searches then the rest of the communities in the area from the Navy personnel stationed there alone.
I wonder if the great orgy spike of 2006 had anything to do with
the subsequent surfing decline and what was the net overall effect on Apple Pie-ism?
For even more fun with statistics, I recommend
How to Lie with Statistics.
Even the chapter titles are funny:
The Sample with the Built-in Bias
The Well-Chosen Average
The Little Figures That Are Not There
Much Ado about Practically Nothing
The Gee-Whiz Graph
The One-Dimensional Picture
The Semi-attached Figure
Post Hoc Rides Again
How to Statisticulate
How to Talk Back to a Statistic
music lover since 1969
Mr. Walters might like to know that Walters is more popular than apple pie but less popular than orgy.
As a navy semen, I reject your pornosition that sex is always on our minds.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
How exactly is google trends going to clear him of racketeering and prostitution? Just curious.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Hypocrisy isn't just the south - it's people. I have yet to meet a person that did not have some sort of hypocrisy going on in their own life - myself included. This is the reason for the entire Biblical passage, "Take the log out of your own eye before you remove the speck from your neighbors." If people spent time fixing themselves and not worrying about other people's problems, the world would be a much more beautiful place.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - people are extremely motivated by their own self-interest and will do whatever it takes to protect that self-interest, even if it means lying to themselves about their actual flaws. Only when people can admit their flaws are they ever going to have a chance of actually fixing things in their lives.
I'm really tired of the "influential-prissy" inflicting their moral code on us by defining regular adult erotica outside the mainstream. I'm sorry, we the people LIKE erotica. It's in our nature and it's natural. If the prissy side doesn't want to partake, then they are free to refrain, but they shouldn't be able to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot do based on their narrow prejudices. Furthermore, I'm tired of these vague and nebulous laws which specify "community standards," as if we all got a say in the matter (which, evidently, we don't).
This is suppose to be the land of the FREE, not necessarily just the PRUDES.
Grump!
The pattern for "Apple Pie" is clearly seasonal, but where did the peak for "Orgy" around October 2006 come from?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
- Most people sitting in church services don't really believe most of that shit in the Bible and are just there for the social and networking aspects of church activities.
Or they are there to feel better about themselves after an online porn all-nighter.it's not like there once was a time in human history when love was free and sex was easy. there have always been social limits on sex for as long as we have been social apes. sure, we don't have to fight and scrounge for food anymore, but this has only been true for the last century. which, not coincidentally, the last century has seen a relaxation of sexual mores. the other hundreds of thousands of years of human history has been a desperate fight for resources for you and your children against the neighbors and their kids.
prudish social conservatism is not some newfangled judeochristian invention, it is simply human nature. the gut human reaction at seeing someone more successful than you procreatively or materially is anger, and this anger is evolutionarily advantageous: to work hard at limiting your fellow man's success and enjoyment in life, so that you may have some success yourself.
so sex is is fun, sex is pleasurable, sex is good, sex is harmless... unless it is someone else having it. then it is bad. is this selfish? absolutely. and evolutionarily advantageous. and therefore hardwired into how our brains function: there is no way the neighbor's children are going to get more bananas than my children, so there is no way the neighbors are going to freely have sex without my approval
in this perverse way, the urge to prevent other people from enjoying sex is the same urge underlying the desire for social justice, for equality: you can't have more than me, its not fair. community standards on sex is simply the most primitive form of birth control. no, that's not "just say no", that's "you have sex and i'll punish you, because your children are taking resources from my children"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The comparison is skewed.
I knew that when I saw the word "lawyer"You can't take the sky from me...
A little almost on topic background to the cliche "Hoist with his own petard" before getting entirely ON topic:
My thought on using google trends is that perhaps the petard hasn't yet detonated, and may well not detonate at all.The only reason one would look up "apple pie" would be to get a recipe for it. And "orgy" could mean, according to wikipedia, asecret cultic congregation at nighttime in Ancient Greek religion; a synth rock band from Los Angeles, California named "Orgy"; or a musical marathon radio format created by WHRB 95.3 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Perhaps the defense should look up some other words besides "apple pie" and "orgy". Perhaps "vinyl siding" and "anal sex" would be better search terms. Surely the prosecution will see this and counter.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I seem to remember a case in Utah where a local obscenity ordinance was being used to try an shut down a video rental store. The argument was local values in the town didn't truck with XXX videos.
The defense got anonymized records from one of the big hotels right across the street from the video rental. It showed that in-room, adult movie rentals were quite popular -- well above the national average. It also showed that the majority of those renting were from the local area, and not out of town perverts.
The defense showed that the "local values" were, in reality, not in line with the stuffy, Victorian puritanism that was being touted publicly. The defense won the case.
This Florida case strikes me as very similar.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The problem that I see with this issue is that it isn't *really* about protecting the children so much as protecting one's self from having to encounter something that makes one squeamish.
Pictures of naked women painted to look like cows (for example) are pretty darn weird. A lot of people are well within their rights to be freaked out by the existence of such pictures. They are exactly the sort of thing that makes someone squeamish. But does that, in and of itself, mean they should be illegal?
In a country that is founded upon personal freedom, the answer is "no." In a country founded on moral oppression the answer is "yes," but America is not (at least in theory) such a country. Here the acid test is (or at least should be) "is it directly harmful to a human." And, in the case of these pictures, the answer is obviously, "no."
I have friends who are fond of saying, "I will fight to the death to defend your right to free speech" (interestingly enough, none of them have actually joined the military, but that is beside the point). They like to pretend to be patriotic. In my opinion, a REAL patriot would say, "I will fight to the death to defend your right to do things that freak me the fuck out."
If we are enforcing our opinions on obscenity on others, we are little different than the Islamists who are enforcing their belief that women showing any skin are being obscene.