The Mathletes and the Miley Photoshop

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton's essay this week is about "A Tennessee man is arrested for possessing a picture of Miley Cyrus's face superimposed on a nude woman's body. In a survey that I posted on the Web, a majority of respondents said the man violated the law -- except for respondents who say they were good at math in school, who as a group answered the survey differently from everyone else." Continue on to see how.

On June 24, a Tennessee man was arrested for possessing photos that showed the faces of three underage girls, including Miley Cyrus, superimposed onto the nude bodies of adult women. Assistant District Attorney Dave Denny said of the arrest, "When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman, it's going to be the state's position that this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity." The phrase "simulated sexual activity" apparently refers to a Tennessee sex crimes law which states in part: "It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity that is patently offensive."

Assuming this is the crime that the D.A. plans to charge him with, to me it seems obvious that the defendant didn't violate the law as written. For one thing, if the nude women in the pictures were just standing there (and neither the article nor the D.A.'s statement suggests otherwise), then there was no "sexual activity" in the photos of any kind, real or simulated. But even if the nude adult women in the photos had been engaged in sexual activity (even just striking a mildly sexy pose), the law still would not apply, because the law requires an actual minor to actually be engaged in something, even if that "something" is simulated sexual activity. So if a video showed a real minor that appeared to be masturbating or having sex with someone in a manner that was "patently offensive", that could violate the law. (Hopefully the "patently offensive" clause would exclude artistic movies like The Tin Drum, although that defense has not always worked.) But if the girls' faces were simply cut and pasted onto the bodies of the women in the photos, then the minors in question were not "engaged in" anything. The D.A. appears to have confused "material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity" with "material that simulates a minor engaged in sexual activity". And the D.A.'s statement that "this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity" — clearly implying that the pictures are for sexual gratification and therefore this is "simulated sexual activity" — is ridiculous. The defendant probably used pictures of Miley with her clothes on for "sexual gratification" — does that make the photos "simulated sexual activity"? (Dave Denny's office did not respond to my request for comment.)

But I was more interested in a different question: What would people in a survey think about whether the defendant violated the law? And, would people who are good at math, answer the question differently from everyone else? And would those people answer the question differently from people who are good at, say, English composition?

That might seem like an odd twist to put on it. But if you can show that a certain answer correlates with mathematical ability, that indicates something special about that answer. And if you can show that that answer appeals to people with math skills, but not to people with English/writing/composition skills, then that indicates something interesting not just about that answer, but about mathematical ability as well, as opposed to writing ability. Whether that answer is "right" or "wrong" (or whether you think those terms are even meaningful for a legal opinion), it is a fact, not an opinion, that people with self-reported higher math skills are more likely to pick that as the correct choice.

By contrast, when the D.A. makes a public statement about the criminality of the defendant's actions, the implication is that we should give some weight to his statements because of his qualifications, such as being a member of the bar. But if we were to ask other bar members to decide independently of each other whether the defendant committed a crime, would they converge on the same answer? If not, then why should we listen to him, as opposed to someone else with the same credentials? When an expert cites their credentials in support of an opinion, if it's not true that other experts with the same credentials would back them up on that opinion, I don't think people realize the extent to which there is no there there.

So in the survey, I described the man's alleged actions and the Tennessee statute, and asked people if they thought he had violated the law. I also asked respondents to rate their math skills as "Excellent"/"Very good"/"Good"/"Fair"/"Poor" and to rate their English/composition skills as "Excellent"/"Very good"/"Good"/"Fair"/"Poor". The survey was posted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk site, where you can post "tasks" for people to complete in exchange for small payments of, say, 25 cents apiece. Some companies use this for grunt work (like hiring people to review user-submitted profile photos to make sure they don't contain nudity), but I use the site mainly to conduct surveys.

I think it's unlikely that the Mechanical Turk users are a representative cross-section of the population, but I use it more to find significant relative differences between demographic groups. If 60% of women on the site answer a question one way and 80% of men answer it the other way, that probably suggests that in a real cross-sectional survey of the population, men and women would largely disagree on the answer as well. (The alternative would be that the kind of men and women who use Mechanical Turk are predisposed to answer the question differently along gender lines in a way that average men and women are not, but that seems unlikely.)

For this survey, I offered users 25 cents apiece for completing this survey and collected 127 responses. The results in a nutshell:

1. About two-thirds of all respondents (85 out of 127) said that the man did violate the law.
2. However, among the respondents who rated their own math skills as "Excellent", only 44% (12 out of 27) said he violated the law, and 56% (15 out of 27) said that he did not. Out of all ten ability groupings (five different ability groupings for math, from "Excellent" to "Poor", and five for English), this was the only group where a majority said that the defendant didn't violate the statute.
3. Respondents who self-rated their English/composition skills as "Excellent", were also more likely than average to vote that the man did not violate the law, but a majority of them still voted that he did.

These results are significant at the 99% level, which you can check using an online statistical significance calculator. In other words, despite the modest sample size, the answers given by the respondents with self-rated "excellent" math skills are so starkly different from everyone else's, that there's less than a 1 in 100 chance that the difference is due to coincidence. Almost certainly, something about mathematical ability is correlated with a person's likelihood of giving the "not guilty" answer. (At this point I'm going to give in to my bias and hereinafter refer to that as the "right answer.")

Furthermore, while respondents with "excellent" English/composition skills were also more likely than average to get the right answer (a difference that is also significant at the 99% level, given the collected data), they were considerably less likely to do so, than the users with self-reported "excellent" math skills (again, significant at the 99% level). I tabulated all the responses.

If I could afford to pay a larger sample, I would investigate whether the effect of "excellent" English/composition skills disappears entirely when you control for math skills. In other words, it's possible that the people with excellent English/composition skills were more likely than average to get the right answer, but only insofar as their English/composition skills were correlated with excellent math ability — and maybe people with "excellent" English/composition skills, but only average math ability, score no better than the average respondents.

One thing that jumps out at me: Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis that good math skills lead people to converge on the correct answer. But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student. Without that insight, there was no reason to expect them to be better than average at answering a question that has no resemblance to their textbook's practice problems.

In fact, I suspect that many of the people who self-reported their math skills as "excellent", and who still answered "yes" to the question of whether the man violated the law, probably fell into that studious-but-not-insightful category as well. It would be interesting to test whether if you required respondents to actually answer a math question — not a standard textbook question, but a tricky question that required people to demonstrate an understanding of what is actually going on — if the correlation between correctly answering that question, and "correctly" answering the legal question, is even stronger.

But what I think is even more important than the correlation of the correct answer with "excellent" math ability, was the significantly lower correlation of the correct answer with "excellent" English skills. I've been saying for years that you can use excellent prose to defend an illogical idea, or you can use poorly crafted prose to defend a good idea, and so if you care about the quality of an idea and its impact on the real world, you have to look at the substance of an argument, not the style. Economics professor Steven Landsburg writes in his forthcoming philosophy book The Big Questions,

The bane of a college professor's existence is the student who has been taught in a writing course that there is such a thing as good writing, independent of having something to say. Students turn in well-organized grammatically correct prose, with the occasional stylistic flourish in lieu of any logical argument, and don't understand why they've earned grades of zero.

I call such people "vocabulemics", who seem to think the purpose of a discussion is to vomit up as many SAT vocab prep words as possible, rather than to form a coherent point. I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law.

If you're still unconvinced by the results of a survey of mathletes, consider that they do match up well with the comments provided to me by Mark Rasch, a lawyer and computer security specialist with Secure IT Experts and the former head of the Department of Justice Computer Crimes Unit:

First, an image of a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity is not the same as a simulated minor engaged in sexual activity... In other words, if you posed actual minors, nude, and made it look like they were having sex, it would be a crime, even though there was no "actual" sexual activity. In most other contexts, when the legislature says "simulated sexual activity" they mean real people engaged in what appears to be sex. The government is trying to apply this theory to real sex but simulated minors. I don't think that passes statutory muster.. its not what the statute prohibits... Under that rationale, if you had, for example, a picture of two dogs mating, and glued pictures of kids on the dogs faces, this would be "simulated sexual activity" but would not be prosecutable. Where do you draw the line? Under federal law, you typically draw the line at the use and posing of real kids.

Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from credentialed expert Mr. Rasch, vindicates the opinion of the math aficionados who voted that the defendant did not violate the law. I think it's the other way around — the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with mathematical ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Rasch.

Comments

I would have guessed otherwise

[Bemopolis]

It seems to me that those with advanced math skills would all agree that the Photoshopped images *were* of Miley Cyrus, via the transitive property.

I dunno...they gave ME a Reggi pole.

Re:I would have guessed otherwise

[Duradin]

The shopped in head would be transitive (a R b && b R c -> a R c)if you only considered the head, but the "body", in it's entirety, wouldn't be since (Miley_head + Miley_body) != (Miley_head + Adult_body). Unless the head has some property that consumes any other value paired with it such that it always produces the value of the head.

Re:I would have guessed otherwise

[jaraxle]

Wow...

Only on Slashdot would an article about pornography (ethical or not) turn into an argument about mathematics.

~jaraxle

This just in:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...

Re:This just in:

[schmidt349]

I know you're just trolling, but I'll bite. I've gone through two radically different forms of mathematics education in my lifetime. The one was largely a "how to solve" system of rote numbers and formulas, and the other was proof-based calculus. None of it ever got terribly high up the latter in terms of cutting-edge math; the most difficult stuff included properties of Hilbert spaces and Dirichlet's function. Anyway, the latter sequence was all taught at the level of comprehension through the proof.

I turned out to be much better about the proof-based math and enjoyed it a lot more even though it cost more time and labor. I actually felt like I was learning something about the properties of the world and not just serving as a second-rate calculator. Anyway, my experience was that the creative and literary types were much better at comprehending math through proofs than discrete calculations. It appealed more to their abstract and critical reasoning skills, and the outcomes really reflected that.

Of course I don't mean to say that a Hemingway is automatically a Lebesgue, but I've really come to believe that the gap between the kind of thinking required for "real" math and for "real" critical reading is much smaller than anyone will admit. The real problem is pedagogy in primary and secondary education, especially the false division between the humanity and ineffability of literature and the objectiveness and determinacy of mathematics. Both are the endeavors of human beings attempting to understand and describe the world around them. They rely on different patterns of thought that develop from the same raw ability.

For the record I'm a classical philologist, a research occupation which is more literary than mathematical but intensely dependent on critical reading skills in ancient Greek and Latin. Alan Sokal is as much our hero as he is to the so-called hard sciences.

Re:This just in:

[V!NCENT]

I think it's more about that people who are good at math, are inteligent.

Re:This just in:

[AGMW]

How about the possibility that highly educated people from whatever field, be it mathematics, English, chemistry, or whatever, are less likely to simply see the question as "save the children from the paedos" and vote to hang the guy.

They rationally look at the question and examine the facts, such as they are, to arrive at a conclusion. Some find for and some find against and the fact that some find the (alleged) perp not guilty isn't just because they can add up and/or spell, and it's actually not relevant which way they vote - the interesting thing is that they considered the evidence before voting whichever way they thought was the right way rather than following the herd!

Re:This just in:

[V!NCENT]

I've never said that I was intelligent and I am not a native English speaker and I do not live in an English speaking country. But I am sure that you are as fluent in a language that's not native to you, as I am in English.

Re:This just in:

[moderatorrater]

Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...

FTA:

I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law.

Finally:

Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis that good math skills lead people to converge on the correct answer. But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student.

Bennett, in his usual way, has made so many leaps of logic without enough support that it's astounding. He's making assumptions he can't support (such as above, or assuming that those using mechanical turk are a valid sample), and it's kind of sad. He's making the assumption the a minor's head pasted on the body of an adult constitutes a simulated minor, which may or may not be legally true. Here's the cogent argument: Miley Cyrus is a minor, her actual picture is being used to simulate her in a sexual position. By using her actual head, it's entirely possible that it fit the legal definition. What's more, in matters of legal opinion, the DA is more likely to know the law than some guy who goes off on Slashdot about it.

Seems to me that if we were really rational about this, we'd defer to the experts rather than read essays by people of middling intelligence and logic with no serious legal background and serious holes in his logic.

Re:This just in:

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well, the point of this is to make the "good" people (i.e. people who are good at math, Us) different from the "bad" people (i.e. ignorant fools who can't do math, The Other.) The good people agree with me, and the bad people...I've given it some thought, and their opinion is not only wrong, but head-scratchingly incoherent. By casting The Other as incoherent, we are saved the trouble of actually thinking, and can instead reassure ourselves that we are correct and don't need to examine any of our beliefs. I mean, look at this: I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law. What kind of debater can't take up either side of a position? Even if you don't agree with it, an intellectual can at least see the other side's points.

Implicit in this is the racism of the elite white people, as culture tells us that Latinos and African-Americans aren't as good at math as other groups in society. Thus, this is a socially acceptable way to express racism, as well as classism (white-on-white racism actually.)

Re:This just in:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oh, DAs definitely care about applying the law. Good and hard, to unpopular perps, by preference. That upcoming campaign isn't going to win itself, is it?

Re:This just in:

[sckeener]

add to 'unpopular perps' the term poor. Defending oneself is always expensive, so it is best to target those that can't afford to fight back well. For those about to chime in about court appointed attorneys for the poor, they are in most states paid by the case and not the duration. Their incentive is to finish the case as soon as possible and 'plea bargains' for the DA and the court appointed attorneys are their bread and butter.

Re:This just in:

[jhfry]

Actually, I must defend the author and say that his conclusion is not an "opinion". The law's intent was to protect children from exploitation and provide a means to prosecute those who participate in an industry that, by its very nature, exploits children. The use of a publicly available photo of a minor, which was taken with no exploitation of said minor is certainly not a crime. To convict this individual would infer that in some way Miley Cyrus was exploited, or that the possession of this image has somehow caused harm to a child.

Of course, quite often a law's intent is sidelined in favor of political or social gains, but I too can not think of a logical argument that would make the possession of such an image a violation of the law's intent. Of course this is assuming that a valid argument MUST conform to the intent of the law, which is rarely done.

The closest I can come is that the photo MAY serve to desensitize those who are attracted by pedophilia, therefore indirectly harming all children... but similar arguments have been repeatedly dismissed by courts as it is impossible to show causation. Sure a pedophile who assaults a child may posses this photo, but there is no way to say that this photo contributed to the assault.

So I agree with the author's assertion... however I agree with you that he should recognize that he weakens his arguments and the value of his data by assuming that the reader will agree with his assertion. An impartial presentation of survey results and a fair analysis and conclusion is far more likely to build consensus.

Re:This just in:

[CastrTroy]

Funny, my experience with math was the exact opposite. I did great in Algebra, while I did poorly in Calculus. My algebra courses could all be done without a calculator, and actually required you to think and apply principles to solve problems. Calculus was a lot more memorization, d/dx sin(x) = cos(x), and countless other formulas you had to remember to find derivatives and integrals. Maybe it's just a matter of having bad teachers in one subject or the other. Or the fact that both of them contains elements that are both repetitive memorization, and creative problem solving, and the some teachers tend to focus on one or the other.

Re:This just in:

[GargamelSpaceman]

And poor is just about everyone when it comes to the law. A public defender is not going to take your case to the supreme court.

Pic?

[Cereal Box]

So... the picture is located where?

Great formatting in this article

[Evro]

I

love

what you've

done with the

place. Makes it a

real treat to read

the story!

Re:Great formatting in this article

[Anonymous Coward]

I

love

what you've

done with the

place. Makes it a

real treat to read

the story!

Did anyone else read this with a Shatner voice?

Re:Great formatting in this article

[elrous0]

You

thought

you

would

pitusagainsteachotherforyouramusement

Re:Great formatting in this article

[interiot]

View the HTML source, the quotes are actually <i> elements — that is, it's a bug in Slashcode's CSS. The problem is that this bug doesn't occur on every Slashdot page, only some pages. So, likely, when the author composed their message, it was on a page that the bug didn't occur on, so they couldn't have known that it would have rendered so differently on another page.

The buggy part of the CSS page reads:

div.body i{display:block;padding-left:1em;margin:.5em;border-left:3px #ddd solid;font-style:normal;}

Re:Great formatting in this article

[Intron]

100 quatloos on elrous0

Re:Great formatting in this article

[Wisconsingod]

I

love

what you've

done with the

place. Makes it a

real treat to read

the story!

Did anyone else read this with a Shatner voice?

The real question is did anyone Not read this with a Shatner voice?

Off-topic, sort of, but funny

[Petersko]

Reminds me of when I worked front line hardware breakfix back in 1994 or so. A guy brought his machine in for service, and we transferred his files to a new hard drive. He had a hidden directory, and in it were pictures that had been clearly spliced. There were about fifty different shots of the same woman's face on various bodies engaged in porn acts.

He called to let us know his friend, Angie, would pick up the computer. Naturally I was somewhat surprised when I recognized Angie.

Re:Off-topic, sort of, but funny

[nedlohs]

And why exactly did you look at the pictures in the first place?

Doesn't seem a required step in copying files. Did you look at every other file you copied too?

Re:Sorry

[Late Adopter]

It's not the OP, it's Slashdot. In some pages (my user page, for example) "i" tags get rendered as blockquotes. Must be a CSS bug, I suppose.

Meh

[snarfies]

Good work. So far as the people who gave the "wrong" answer are concerned, you've proven that math nerds are also sex perverts.

Re:Meh

[hedwards]

It's not the wrong answer. The answer might not be what the legislature intended, but by the statute it was correct.

I'm fully in favor of changing the law to reflect the intention of the legislature, but it's completely inappropriate to have a law of this sort being interpreted in a way which deviates from the language used by that amount.

Some laws like the Sherman act are written in a way which is intentionally vague so that the judicial branch can refine it down to deal with the various forms of anti-trust misbehavior. But for something like this, that's bad, really, really bad. A person isn't generally possessing a JD and as such isn't likely to know that a whole lot about what the law actually means via case history.

While not applicable to this, other laws that deal with similar grey area of law allow for one party to define the crime where the perpetrator might not reasonably be able to determine the legality ahead of time. Sexual harassment laws are probably the best example of that, the most egregious cases are ones which everybody can recognize, but often times it's a matter of life experience which leads to one conclusion or another.

Re:Meh

[AlexBirch]

If they were statisticians, they would have a standard deviation.

Re:Meh

[wurp]

So in your view, there is no difference between "images of minors engaged in simulated sex acts" and "simulated images of minors engaged in sex acts"?

Because that's the difference the post is discussing, not whether you think either activity is OK.

Re:Meh

[tilandal]

The law means pretty much whatever you can manage to convince a judge and/or jury it means. What the legislature intended it to mean is largely inconsequential. Even if your representatives managed to read the law before voting for it (which is a matter of some considerable debate) each of the potentially hundreds of representatives voting will have differing interpretations.

Re:Meh

[Maximum Prophet]

True. When I was called for Federal Jury duty, the paperwork specifically said that the Judge would tell the jury what the law was. We weren't supposed to use our own knowledge of the law.

It was a boring trial that would have devolved into "he said", "she said", so I wasn't sad when I was released from jury duty. I'd really like to sit on an important case, because I believe in jury nullification. i.e. one of the principles that this country was founded on.

Oh purleeeease

[Rogerborg]

At this point I'm going to give in to my bias and hereinafter refer to that as the "right answer"

I think your bias was obvious right from the point where you decided to pay money to people to tell you what you wanted to hear, then decided to focus on the one subset of people who actually did so.

Re:Oh purleeeease

[Intron]

You evidently missed that he said the exact opposite in the article:

"Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from credentialed expert Mr. Rasch, vindicates the opinion of the math aficionados who voted that the defendant did not violate the law. I think it's the other way around -- the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with mathematical ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Rasch."

Re:Oh purleeeease

[Ronin X]

I did not miss that. That is NOT the exact opposite. He said a consensus of EXPERTS in LAW would be necessary to make one lawyer's opinion more important than anothers. Then he provides a consensus of 15 self-expressed math experts? So math expert = lawyer?

Fail.

To make the argument even MORE embarrassing, given his own data, one could easily assert:

"Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from Assistant District Attorney Dave Denny , vindicates the opinion of the English aficionados who voted that the defendant did violate the law. I think it's the other way around -- the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with English ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Denny."

How did you phrase the mechanical turk question?

[OgreChow]

Very interesting. I would be interested to see the exact phrasing of your Mechanical Turk question, to ensure that there is no bias hiding in the wording. I would also be interested in rerunning the experiment with two groups, one who sees the DA's argument and one who sees your argument, and seeing how much these arguments skew the numbers for each self-assessed Math/English segment.

Tough one

[RazorSharp]

I agree child porn is immoral and should be illegal, but the main reason I think it should be illegal is so the girl isn't subjected to the photo shoot. A Photoshop job like this, despite being offensive, seems to be a protected right of Americans. South Park, for example, is composed of many offensive collages but I couldn't imagine condoning censorship of the show. I'd have to take the defendant's side on this issue, even though it seems wrong to side with someone who whacks off to that type of shit. It's America, you take the good with the bad.

Re:Tough one

[TheRealMindChild]

There certainly is a conflict. Absolutely we should have the freedom to do what we want behind closed doors, so long as no one is harmed. This should hold true, no matter how twisted it is. However, if you were to see your child as the face on whoever's imposed porn, even absolute truths can become blurred.

Re:Tough one

[TheRealMindChild]

FYI, stopping child molesters from having home made porn isn't going to stop them from being a child molester.

Re:Tough one

[bmajik]

even though it seems wrong to side with someone who whacks off to that type of shit

Suppose that I am _imagining_ the face of a little kid super imposed on to the body of a naked adult [or a tentacale rape monster, or whatever upsets the largest number of people]. Suppose that in the near future, technology can read my thoughts through the walls of my home, and further suppose that I am not wearing my tin foil hat.

If I am thinking about little-kid/adult hybrid mutants and jacking off, and somebody catches me thinking about it, should that be a crime?

The court case here is essentially isomorphic to the situation I have described -- this case suggests that it is a thought crime to think about a kids face posted onto an adults body in a sexual way.

Here is what the US supreme court decided:

Cases like Campbell's present a unique legal issue. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 ruled that "virtual child pornography," in which no children were actually harmed, is protected speech and does not constitute a crime.

But the TN law says this:

For instance, Tennessee's laws state that in prosecuting the offense of sexual exploitation of a minor, "the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor."

Scary stuff.

Re:Tough one

[QCompson]

And as for psychological damages to the victim? Or social damages? Should slander be okay? What about parodies? Misrepresentation of other people's opinions either through intent or mistake?

Good points. All art and social commentary should be made illegal! It's the only way to save everyone from potential embarassment or psychological damage.

Another issue with this type of material is an argument you could give for copyright; the benefit of society. If we allow these pictures to propagate are we fostering child molestors or children who are susceptible to grooming?

Which is why violent movies, tv and books should also be banned. Aren't they just propagating violence?

I think there's more here than just a 'victimless crime' and that, due to its potency, slow and cautionary steps should be made in producing ideological priorities.

It certainly wasn't victimless. Who knows what harm may have befallen society if this creep had been allowed to keep his photoshopped Miley Cyrus picture in the privacy of his own home!

Re:Tough one

[hardburn]

Not only that, but:

"When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman, it's going to be the state's position that this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity."

Miley Cyrus is not a small child. She's 16. I could see the argument for saying a 16 year old can't legally consent, but certainly there's a difference between nude photos of a 16 year old versus a 9 year old (even if Miley herself was the one posing, which she isn't).

Also, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 made simulated child porn illegal. It was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2002.

Re:Tough one

[Artifakt]

The counter argument is that the photoshopped (or in this case literally cut and pasted) image does harm real children, just not necessarily the same level of harm as forcing one to actually participate in a sex act. There were two children whose heads were used, and while Miley is famous, the other one was 'just some kid'.

      If those photos get out, both of them face some possible harm to reputations, but in particular, there is probably less chance that the 'just some kid' will have any help from society if, a year from now, somebody prints of a bunch of copies and pastes them up all over her school with no explanation, or some nutcase sees them on the Internet, recognizes her, and is delusional enough to think she really did whatever her head was spliced into and starts stalking her. Damaging someone's reputation or recklessly endangering them are still harms. The real law has to look at how likely such risks are before they dismiss the idea that harm occurred.

        If you want to argue that the chances are very low in this case, or that the overall damage done to the children is a lot less than forcible participation in making such photos would normally be, you may well be right, but look at the law on reckless endangerment. One person can leave a car parked on the top of a hill in neutral and no handbrake set, pointed right at a schoolyard. Another person can forget to lock the gate on his backyard swimming pool and go on vacation. One feels much more significant than the other, but the law in most places counts both as reckless.

        In this case, it could well get into a debate about just how obviously the images are composites, and the accused may be better off if his skill level is low. Whether any of these images have 'leaked' by some action of the accused will also likely matter. It's pretty soon to be sure they haven't been posted to Usenet or something, after all.

      Before you argue that this is still a protected right, please consider this. If the accused in this case had swapped the children's heads onto clothed adult bodies doing nothing particularly sexual, and then swapped those images into ads for cigarettes, and those images had actually been used, he could have been prosecuted on any of several counts. The law could have easily construed that using a child's face in advertising cigarettes was targeting the ads at minors, there would be the problems with model releases, in Miley's case at least it would have been fraud to represent her as supporting a product and trying to cash in on her name that way, and there are probably other laws that apply.

      If there's problems in such laws, remember those laws are not Obscenity Law, they relate to other aspects of normally protected speech that have nothing to do with sex and/or minors. Those laws get applied all the time to recognized political, religious or commercial speech, and come up in libel, slander, and fraud cases. Even if sexually related speech should have all the protections of other speech, sexual aspects shouldn't give such speech more protection than we would give to philosophical, scientific, or political speech. This is why I don't think we really want a rule that no actual sex involving the children means we just assume no other harm should even be considered. Even if doing something with photoshop or old fashioned scissors isn't over the line, we need the law to look at what happens if such images go public and determine where the line really is. For now, the accused seems clearly to have committed at least some elements of several crimes, and at the least, a grand jury needs to determine if there are overall grounds to proceed.

Re:Tough one

[stonewallred]

"the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor." How can they prove it is child porn then? Seems if you are charged with possession of kiddie porn, then the state needs to be able to prove it is a kiddie.

Re:Tough one

[broken_chaos]

*scratches head* This is the same "Miley Cyrus" who has had camwhore-like (provocative, not nude) self-photos of herself spread over the internet, right? This is also the same "MIley Cyrus" who had pictures that she ended up feeling "embarrassed" about (similar to the previous - suggestive in some ways, but not nude) published in Vanity Fair? ...Completely avoiding the legal question here, is this really a sane response when there's already been so much sexually suggestive material of her available - stuff that isn't a (presumably bad) Photoshop job?

Re:Tough one

[1u3hr]

The counter argument is that the photoshopped (or in this case literally cut and pasted) image does harm real children

In reality: the guy made the pictures on his own PC for his own amusement. He didn't show them to the kids. How on earth could real children have been harmed by his imaginings?

if, a year from now, somebody prints of a bunch of copies and pastes them up all over her school

In that case, it's clearly the guy who printed and pasted them who is the guilty party. same as if he graffitied her name and phone number "for a good time".

And really, any idiot can paste a head onto a porn body in 10 minutes. I'm sure schoolboys all over the planet are doing so at his moment with portraits of their classmates. I've seen this used as a story device in sitcoms, years ago ("Boston Public", I think).

Just Google "Celebrity fakes" and find thousands of sites devoted to this (though not using children, the methods are obviously the same). And here's a how-to to get you started.

Re:Tough one

[Spectre]

Oddly enough, in my state (Kansas) a 16 year old can consent to actual sex with an actual adult. No problem.

But if you take pictures of it, you go to jail.

Re:Tough one

[hardburn]

Which makes you wonder what the legislators were thinking when they passed those laws... Those dirty old bastages

Actually, I think they're just old laws held over from when girls tended to marry much younger. Contrary to what many believe, overall teen pregnancy in the US has actually dropped quite a bit since the '50s. Unwed teenage pregnancy has gone up. Girls marrying at 16 was still relatively common at the time, as were shotgun weddings.

Re:Tough one

[ConceptJunkie]

Thoughtcrimes have been on the books for years, except they're called "hate crimes".

Don't rest assured just because you are not an anti-semite or anti-homosexual, etc, that you won't be subject to throughtcrime legislation at some point in the future. The slope is steep and slippery and our legislators are at the top, pushing with all their might.

Re:Tough one

[DavidTC]

And the GP has an epic fail anyway, as there's absolutely no different in the possible 'harm' caused to a 16 and a 18 with fake nude photos of them, but he's framing it in terms of child porn, which presumably means it would be legal to take a picture of someone the second they turn 18 and post those photos everywhere.

It's a really stupid argument to make. We can argue that photos can slander people, because they certainly can. That doesn't have anything to do with 'porn' at all.

Re:Tough one

[mdwh2]

There will come a day when computers can render people in an ultra photo-realistic sexual manner. Will these computer generated images be deemed "illegal" and "immoral"? QUICK, they are such a threat to society! Men act out their fantasies and we can't have that! Let's ignore why they want to do that in the first place -- and tempt them with the real thing since the virtual thing is "illegal."

Indeed - and they're already calling for that. The UK already passed a law on "realistic" fictional child porn (1994), and now even unrealistic images such as those in Second Life is being cited for a ban on all sorts of unrealistic images, whether it's people using an avatar that looks "childlike" (despite being played by an adult), or even adults doing cyber-S&M.

Re:Sorry

[dtmos]

It's a bug in Slashcode somewhere. Happens to all of my archived posts when I view them -- anything I put in italics or boldface turns into a

blockquote

. Yes, it's really annoying, but it's not the submitter's fault.

Re:Fix your tags

[TerranFury]

This is a bug in the Slashcode, I think. Try this: Make an HTML post in which you use italics. Then view that same post in your profile. The italics will have been replaced by quotes. Hopefully this high-visibility example will cause this to be fixed.

Really need a survey for that?

[tjstork]

Good work. So far as the people who gave the "wrong" answer are concerned, you've proven that math nerds are also sex perverts.

Did we really need a survey for that?

Bad science

[Nick Ives]

would people who are good at math, answer the question differently from everyone else? [...] it is a fact, not an opinion, that people with self-reported higher math skills are more likely to pick that as the correct choice.

You might be good at maths but you seem to be terrible at science. You can't demonstrate you collected results from anybody who was actually any good at maths, you just got a bunch of responses from people who thought they were good at maths. Maybe people with such a self perception are also more likely to pick views that are opposed to what they think most people will think in order to further demonstrate their superiority?

I think your study is quite interesting but it doesn't mean what you think it means. It also has an awfully small sample size.

Interesting

[somersault]

Here in the UK I think you're allowed to have pictures of breasts at 16, have to be 18 for fully naked pics though. Then again in some other countries it probably wouldn't be illegal no matter what the ages were, but I consider this a very borderline case since she's 17 at the moment, so it doesn't seem too perverted from my cultural perspective - in the UK you can legally marry or have sex as long as you're both 16 or over (think it's 18 for homosexuals). You can also start drinking here at 18. I'm glad I don't live in the US :P

Re:Interesting

[MBGMorden]

in the UK you can legally marry or have sex as long as you're both 16 or over (think it's 18 for homosexuals). You can also start drinking here at 18. I'm glad I don't live in the US :P

In the US you can legally marry in most states at even younger than 16 with parental consent, and in many states the age at which you can consent to sex varies, but 14 to 16 is common. We just have completely weird notions on "porn". In the majority of US states you could have sex with Miley Cyrus perfectly legally. You snap a picture though (or hell even photoshop one apparently) and you're a dirty pedo that should be taken out back and shot.

Re:Interesting

[AnyoneEB]

Depends on the state. Some do have separate limits based on age differences for people under the age of consent. For example, in Pennsylvania, for minors aged 13-15, the age difference must be under 4 years (so a 15 year old and an 18 year old is okay even though the former is a minor and the latter is not) while the age of consent in Pennsylvania is 16.

Re:Interesting

[DavidTC]

You're partially right, but wrong about the age. 16 is usually is the top.

In my state, Georgia, the age of consent is 16. People who are over 16 can have sex with anyone else who's over 16. A 116 year old can have sex with a 16 year old.

It's people who are under 16 who can have sex with people if within three years. (IIRC it's three years.) Actually, strictly speaking, it's a misdemeanor, so it is illegal, but that's mostly so cops can grab you in public and call your parent, and stop kids from renting hotel rooms. (And it explicitly does not count as a 'sex crime'.)

Also, that exception only goes down to 13 or so, but that's because at that point they don't charge anyone with anything. If two ten year olds are 'having sex', um...it's not the legal system who need to fix that.

So, yes, there's a 'window', but it's below the age of consent, which is, indeed, usually 16. (I believe there's only one state where it's 18, and a few 15 and 17, and one 14!)

As an aside, in Georgia, this sliding window exception stupidly didn't apply to oral sex, which resulted in a rather spectacular court case and uproar a while back. I forgot the name of the guy, but a 17 year old boy let a 15 year old girl give him a blowjob at a party, and somewhat accidentally got charged with felony statutory rape. (The police burst in on the party during it, and the parties involved, thinking they'd be better off if it was just oral sex, admitted to it in their statements to the police, who didn't even realize the law said that.) That law has been changed, and I think he was pardoned by the governor.

However, the 'nude picture' thing is 18, everywhere, resulting in the absurdity, in 49 of the 50 states, where people cannot possess pictures of people they are legally allowed to have sex with. (Both fully legally, or 'misdemeanor so we can hassle children doing it' legally.)

Oh, actually, that's true in all 50. Even in the sole state you can't have sex in until you're 18, which is, I think, Oregon, you can still get married younger with parental permission, which give an 'age of consent' exception everywhere that people can marry younger below it. But legally, you cannot take nude pictures of your spouse.

Jury Nullification Nullified

[resistant]

Obviously, jury nullification of bad interpretations of hot-button laws doesn't work when the juries themselves react convulsively to the mere hint of child pornography, even when the "child" is not an actual child except under the most hyper-technical legal definition. Just think, juries tend in the main to be exactly these semi-illiterates who aren't bright enough to slip out of jury duty. It's all really depressing and makes me wonder what will become of the Republic.

Oh, and for the slightly clueless who need a hint, a surefire way to get out of jury duty is to clearly declare that you believe in jury nullification.

Re:Jury Nullification Nullified

[sanosuke001]

That's the biggest issue I have with our legal system. The prosecution and the defense should not be allowed to pre-screen the jurors. How is that fair? Everyone should be randomly selected with a set of alternates. If you have a legitimate reason for getting out (ie. in the hospital, in jail, out of the country for extended period ex. from when they sent the letters to the initial show-up date) then you can be replaced. As for your opinions, they shouldn't matter. If you're a racist, fine. If you believe in abortion/death penalty/hitler lives in your basement, fine. It's supposed to be a selection of your peers.

Now, if they want to screen for bias, etc, then fine; though I'm still against it but I understand why someone might want this. Find a third party with no affiliation or connection to anyone else in the trial and have them pre-screen. However, jury nullification should in no way be a reason for dismissal.

I would love to run the trial on its own and just give the jury a transcript after the fact. No emotions, no pandering to the jury by the defense/prosecution, and all the "stricken from record" items won't even be heard. Stick each juror in a hotel room to read it all and them let them meet to deliberate when they all finish. If they can't read, get them a computer with a voice synthesizer.

No no no no no - please learn what a p value means

[Ardeaem]

If the results are significant at the 1% level (you mean .01, not .99 - low p values indicate higher significance), then this does NOT mean that there is less than a 1% change that the results are due to chance. It means that IF THERE WERE TRULY NO DIFFERENCE, we'd expect to see an effect this large or larger only 1% of the time. This is Statistics 101 stuff. A p value conditions on the null hypothesis being true; it is not a statement about the probability of the null hypothesis. For that you need a Bayesian inferential technique.

Statistical significance in surveys

[SeanTobin]

Surveys are inherently difficult to present in a neutral fashion, especially when attempting to determine correlation. Take the following (simplified) survey for example:

I like Cheerios:
[Yes] [No] [Sometimes]

Rate your proficiency at math:
[Excellent] [Good] [Average] [Poor]

Now, let's say you found a statistically significant correlation between people who like Cheerios and people who are excellent at math. Congratulations! You just did not find a correlation related to math proficiency at all.

What you did just find is a correlation between people who selected the first option in your survey.

Now, randomizing your answers is a good start and will resolve the above issue. However, there are hundreds of other things which can affect your results and there is an entire survey industry formed around these problems. The immediate problems that spring to mind about the survey in TFA is:
-Respondents must have internet access
-Respondents must have signed up to Amazon's mechanical turk
-Respondents were paid for the survey
-Respondent proficiency at math/language was self-assessed
-Respondents must be able to comprehend English

Anyway, I could go on but my point here is this: despite the fact that a statistically-significant correlation that was found, that correlation may not stem from the questions themselves.

Re:Statistical significance in surveys

[SatanicPuppy]

The best one I saw recently was CNN soliciting email from people about how bad the recession was. Unsurprisingly people who had cable tv and internet access said that things were fine.

It's a classic mistake dating back to the dawn of polling: during the great depression a poll was done that showed that the great depression wasn't nearly as bad as everyone was saying! How was the sample set determined? They polled everyone who had a car license plate, and they called them on the phone to ask the poll questions.

50%

[digitalsushi]

Somehow, and I don't understand this, but if you asked everyone if they have above or below average abilities on any random topic, people always partition themselves into two groups, almost exactly evenly. It seems completely unfathomable that people do not artificially inflate their own assessment of self, yet every single time, people objectively rate their abilities in these personal assessment surveys. How weird is that?

Re:50%

[ratnerstar]

Ummm ... citation needed.

Much research has found that drivers perceive themselves as being better than average. Evans (1991, p. 322) cites Svenson (1981) who had a group of subjects in two countries rank their own safety and driving skill relative to others in the group. Seventy-six percent of the drivers considered themselves as safer than the driver with median safety, and 65% of the drivers considered themselves more skilful than the driver with median skill.

http://www.ambulancedriving.com/research/WP65-rateaboveav.html

Re:50%

[digitalsushi]

i actually completely made this up so that someone would do the harder work of proving me wrong. they deserve some credit.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ug.

[SatanicPuppy]

"A Tennessee man is arrested for possessing a picture of Miley Cyrus's face superimposed on a nude woman's body. In a survey that I posted on the Web, a majority of respondents said the man violated the law -- except for respondents who say they were good at math in school, who as a group answered the survey differently from everyone else."

Therefore: Mathematicians like child porn.

Talk about flamebait summaries. Can we have something that roughly represents the article?

I have a ton of problems with the methodology as well. Self-selected tiny sample set with self-reported aptitudes used to make blanket statements, with no attempt to get a rational cross-section (which he acknowledges and then says it's not a problem despite lack of any evidence supporting that conjecture), and all the problems/bias associated with internet-only research (we are a biased sample set, in that we're all here).

In short: wanking. You can't even begin to effectively correlate decision making to mathematical ability without actually testing that ability.

If you asked me to describe my own math ability, I'd say "average", because I routinely deal with people who are so much better than me at math that I can't in good conscience say I'm better than that...I mean, I never progressed beyond the simplest multi-variable calculus! But put me up against someone who is average across the entire population, and I'll rate much higher.

Re:Austistic Spectrum

[jedidiah]

The question isn't about "social norms" it's about "the law".

You've just demonstrated the original point and why juries are so easy to manipulate,
especially when both sides of the trial have done all they can to strip the jury of
anyone with any sense, expertise or education.

This isn't about what personally offends you but what will give the state the
right to PUT YOUR SORRY ASS IN A CAGE WITH ANIMALS.

Clearly many people don't have a full understanding of all the relevant consequences.

Re:The logical conclusion...

[Dunbal]

It certainly did in ancient Greece. In fact, that's how you ended up paying your "tuition"!

Now get on all fours, boy, and we're going to talk about triangles again...

Double Plus Good...

[tekrat]

So, if someone was to take the prosecutor's face and photoshop it onto a picture of a dead body, that photoshop artist would be arrested for murder? Clearly, the way the prosecutor has re-worded the law in his favor, the victim is being charged with a thought-crime.

And if MERELY THINKING of a sexual act with a minor is punishable, then we are in a very sad state of affairs.

What is up with this country?

Re:Austistic Spectrum

[loutr]

The question was not "Do you feel it is morally wrong ?" but "Do you think he violated a law ?". There's a huge difference.

Re:Sorry

[johndiii]

In order to get italics with the current stylesheet, use <em> tags.

Re:Sorry

[SatanicPuppy]

You need to use the

<em>

tag if you want actual italics and the

<strong>

tag if you want actual boldface.

Italics
Boldface

The "b" tag and the "i" tag both tend to get rendered incorrectly now. I think it must default to the annoying block quote...The tags above are supposed to be in an "ecode" tag, but it fricking blockquoted those as well.

Re:How did you phrase the mechanical turk question

[Brett Johnson]

The survey was linked to in the original post. You can see it here.

He presented only the line from the statute, and the DA's 1-line argument, not his own interpretation. In my opinion, he actually provided too little context to make an informed decision, not too much.

Re:Fix your tags

[Canazza]

Quite clearly this man is guilty of Copyright infringment, as the photo was likely taken from promotional material and is property of Disney. Quick! Call the RIAA!

Re:Fix your tags

[TheRaven64]

White on white titles in Idle are not a bug. Text that isn't white-on-white in Idle is a bug.

Re:you lost me at hello

[Endo13]

People who are 'good at math' are more likely to analyze the law exactly as written and determine logically whether or not he actually violated the law as written. People who are good at math are far more likely to see answers as absolute - either it's absolutely correct or absolutely incorrect.

Most people just look at the first question, which is "Is what he did sick and disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical?" To which the answer of course, is an obvious 'yes'. Math people ignore that, because that's not really relevant when it comes to law. The real question is "Did he violate the law as written?" And the answer to that in this case is a pretty clear 'no'.

Utterly meaningless--made of statistical FAIL.

[MoralHazard]

This statistical extrapolation is not valid (AT ALL, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, NEVER EVER). For this kind of analysis to mean anything, you have to conclusively demonstrate that you collected a representative sample of the population. That means: A random sample, drawn in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, from the whole underlying population. Ask a real statistician, and (s)he'll tell you: Your extrapolations are only as good as your sampling methodology.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that you're somehow, magically, exempt from this mathematical fact because you are making relative comparisons between two subsets of your sample. Where the hell did you get that idea?

To understand why, try considering this hypothetical: What if the subset of the population that is drawn to answer your MechTurk question is biased in more than one way? For instance, it could contain a larger-than-normal proportion of highly-intelligent social misfits who sympathize with outcasts, as well as a larger-than-normal proportion of under-educated Moral Orals. It could easily generate similar results to yours, as could an infinity of other hypothetically biased samples.

Statistically, then, how do you differentiate between your pet theory and the infinity of alternatives? YOU CAN'T. Methods of statistical extrapolation obtain their effectiveness from their relationship with the law of large numbers (probability, basically). Your poor sampling method has completely discarded that link, leaving zero support for your conclusions.

You cannot fix this problem with math: If your sample is not a truly random sample, drawn from the full underlying population in a non-biased (or bias-controlled) fashion, your numbers don't mean shit W.R.T. the population, and they never will. PERIOD.

(As an aside, there are methods that can control for sampling bias in certain LIMITED circumstances, when the nature of the bias can be quantified. But you aren't using this method, AND it doesn't apply to your situation, because you can't make reliable quantifying statements about how your sample is biased.)

You are officially part of the problem. Either learn more stats, or STOP MISLEADING YOURSELF AND OTHERS by mis-applying them.

Shopping Miley

[frozentier]

Shopping Miley's head on to a naked woman doesn't make her naked, just as shopping her head onto an old photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't suddenly make her a male bodybuilder.

Summary:

[Weedhopper]

Author understands neither statistics nor survey methodology.

Re:Sorry

[dtmos]

Thanks for clearing up the mystery. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, however, I do have the following subsidiary questions:

1. How the heck is one supposed to know this, if not via an off-topic conversation with one of the knowledgeable?

2. Who the heck decided that <i> for "italics" and <b> for "bold" was too complicated, and needed to be simplified to <em> and <strong>, respectively?

Obligatory (I think..)

[KingAlanI]

Howard Wolowitz: In a model base don the Drake Equation, I have calculated that there are 5,512 mate-able women within a 40-mile radius...

Leonard: Howard, really?

Howard: I'm a horny engineer - all I can think about is math and sex.

The real reason

[DoofusOfDeath]

Math geeks are deathly afraid of porn regulation.

Re:Austistic Spectrum

[AGMW]

Lets assume you meant ... Ask those same people about having THEIR face superimposed on a nude's body and see how their answers change. ... because the change to use of a nude child changes things drasticly.

OK ... it's either illegal or it isn't and the fact that when people are involved in an 'event' their opinions of whether or not the event is, or should be, illegal change has no bearing on the actuality of the legality of the event - and thankfully so! That is the reason why vigilantes are frowned upon, because they will more often than not have an emotional attachment to the event, and almost by definition will be looking to string someone up for it!

To examine any event for legality you really need to be able to step outside emotions and look at the problem rationally, and, as per my previous post, this is perhaps where the better educated are at an advantage.

Re:you lost me at hello

[AlecC]

Also, people who are "good at math" have a natural tendency to divide things up. That is one of the basic tricks of maths - to divide complicated things into simpler things which can, hopefully, be solved separately and the solutions then combined. So a mathematician will have no problem of seeing minor's head and adult's body as separate entities that have been brought into proximity. If neither of the two is itself illegal, then prima facie the combination is not illegal.

When you have the face of a small child

[Maxo-Texas]

"When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman"

Hmmm
What if it was fixed beside the mature ladie's face giving a two headed monster?
What if it was attached to the elbow? The knee? Completely replacing her crotch? One copy over each breast like a bikini (so what if you made a real bikini with miley faces and a lady with big breasts wore it?).
What if it was attached to the body of a nude mature male?
How about a mature nude obese woman?
How about a mature very ill woman?
How about a *very* mature nude woman (in her 90s?)

I've seen a lot of frankensteins. My reaction to them was not sexual-- it was more of a novelty.

Funny story, a friend of ours always talked about his girlfriend, "X" and yet we never met her. We finally asserted that "X" was really him. Finally he brought a picture of him and her to magic the gathering night to *prove* that he had a girlfriend. While he played his first game, I scanned the picture and frankenstiened his head onto her body. When someone new showed up, we mentioned that he had brought the picture-- and showed it to the newcomer who broke out laughing-- which prompted him to look at his picture to see why it was so funny. It was the most amazing exasperated, surprised, amused reaction. Hysterical.

Re:you lost me at hello

[Monkeedude1212]

And therein lies the problem. People get away with sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical things everyday, simply because they aren't against the law.

And honestly, the guy had pictures of a pop star celebrity photoshopped onto a nude body, which is not ANYTHING new and really not that big a deal. Yeah, she's under-aged, which makes him a sicko, but its better that he's looking at fake stuff then the real under-aged stuff, which is WHY the laws were imposed in the first place.

If someone is being charged for this, either the law enforcement isn't doing their job to catch the right criminals, or they're doing an excellent job and are running out of people to catch.

Either way, the system appears flawed.

Re:Sorry

[broken_chaos]

<em> and <strong> are preferred, particularly in XHTML documents (and maybe HTML 4 Strict - I'm not certain) because HTML is intended to define the structure of a document and not the formatting. Using tags to apply bold, italics, and underline (the trio - <b>, <i>, <u>) is using HTML to define the formatting and not the structure. <u> was eliminated (and underlining can only be done in CSS now), with <em> and <strong> introduced for the structure (an emphasized statement or a strongly-spoken statement if you will) that typically is represented by italics and bold.

Also of note is that several tags apply the same formatting (italics in this case) while defining a different element structurally. The <address> tag, for instance, defaults to also italicizing the text within. In short, while it may not be as intuitive when you're using HTML for formatting, it does preserve the intent of HTML as a structural markup language better.

This is something I hope is NEVER MADE ILLEGAL

[RaigetheFury]

What the hell is wrong with me?!? First... forget anything you know about this guy and look at the issue at hand.

1) We have a picture that's been photoshopped to have an underage persons on it.

The question at hand is if this should be illegal or not. Child pornography has become a major issue... and the definition of what child pornography is up in the air. My best friend was pulled on our way to canada and interogated for an hour about pictures and movies on his computer. It wasn't until after we left that we realized it was videos of his daughter doing the funky chicken dance.

To me this is EXTREMELY dangerous to say "yes... putting a kids head on a naked adult" is illegal.". That's a gray area to me as there are FAR too many possibilities for that happening. Jokes, funny images, etc.

What if he had Miley's face on some 90 year old dropping breast woman. Would it be the same to you? That's the problem... law has to be made so that anyone who reads it interprets it the same (or at least pretty damn close).

Tennessee law does NOT prevent what he did. It's not illegal according the law and whether it should be or not isn't the point. It's not.

People are screaming to burn this guy and they nothing about him nor care. There are thousands of creeps out there and this is like busting a pot head for wearing a shirt that shows a charicature of him smoking pot. SURE... I think this would be probable cause to search his house and home computer... but it's not illegal to do. And shouldn't be.

I love the right to be able to put Miley Cyrus's annoying face on midget porn. It's tasteless sick humor and we have hundreds of thousands of images that are similar. You may not like it and it's borderline crossing the law... but it's NOT. It disturbs me that so many people that are so conservative they can't accept peoples rights to do this. It's so stiffling.

Again... this guy is a creep and I think that HAVING pictures like this should be probable cause for investigating him further but it's stupid to try to put him in jail for this. Find something that is unquestionable.

Re:you lost me at hello

[dgatwood]

People who are intelligent (and thus good at math or English) are also more likely to discount the DA's comment describing this as victimizing a "small child", while others are likely to focus on that and discount everything else. Afterwards, they judge the case based on emotion rather than on its legal merits, but their first mistake was likely misinterpreting the fundamental question of whether being attracted to Miley Cyrus is deviant behavior or not.

The facts? Miley Cyrus is almost 17 years old, and given that she's an actress in Hollywood, I'd imagine she has been forced to grow up somewhat faster than normal. Thus, it stands to reason that in a test for competence, she would be held to the same standards as an adult. If she killed someone, she would be tried as an adult. If she sued for emancipation, she would no doubt succeed. In short, she is so thoroughly unlike a "small child" in every way that describing her as such is patently offensive to anyone with the slightest degree of intelligence.

I'm appalled by this case at so many levels that I don't even know where to begin. Pretty much the only thing the DA has going for him is that feeling that their "hometown girl" has been abused by this guy's actions. We are talking about her home state, after all, and there aren't that many Tennessee girls who become famous. So there's inherently a bias sufficient to warrant a change of venue....

Why?

[Petersko]

"And why exactly did you look at the pictures in the first place?"

Because it was probably pornography, and because I knew I wouldn't get caught.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it was probably pornography, and because I knew I wouldn't get caught.

The first true thing written on the internet, ever.

Re:you lost me at hello

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah, she's under-aged, which makes him a sicko

She's 16, and very much sexually mature from the Wikipedia pics of her. How does this make him a sicko, again?

Re:No no no no no - please learn what a p value me

[Ardeaem]

Consider the two following statements: 1) If you are a US congressman, the probability you are an American citizen is 1. 2) If you are an American citizen, the probability that you are a US congressman is (about) 1.5e-6. The difference in the two statements, although they both involve the same events (US congressman and US citizen) is the conditioning. (2) conditions on the US citizenship, and (1) conditions on congressional membership. The difference is critical. p values are conditioned on a null hypothesis being true. Think: "If you there is truly no difference between the groups, the probability of finding this evidence (or more extreme evidence) is 0.01" The statement in the summary was conditioned in the opposite way: "Given this observed difference in the groups, the probability of the observed difference being due to chance (that is, that the chance hypothesis is true) is .01"

The p value computed in the summary is the former statement. In order to get the later statement, you have to use Bayes theorem and the p value, which requires additional assumptions and could be a wildly different number. I teach stats, and I have to cram this into my students' heads every year. It is critical to understand the difference in the two statements in order to understand the statistics you use.

His poll was too squishy

[ianchaos]

Having people categorize themselves on an objective technical skill such as math is at least slightly more reliable than having people self judge on such a subjective skill as writing.

Many people I went to college with were certain their one act plays could win awards and that their sonnets would outlive them. I certainly wouldn't trust many of them when it comes to something as nuanced as the American legal system.

A better breakdown of the populace would have been to separate out people based on the level of education achieved, or perhaps by specific college degree, or even split out people with legal backgrounds from the average layperson. This would remove all the "touchy, feely" issues his current survey has.

With that said, this Tennessee man may be a danger to society, and his actions really creep me out, but I don't believe that he broke the law as it is currently written.

For what it is worth, on his poll I would have fit this profile
Writing skills > Math Skills

Analysis error

[Todd Knarr]

I think Mr. Hasselton made a fundamental error in his analysis. When you ask people to self-rate how good they are at a subject, you first need to read Unskilled and Unaware of It. The research can be summed up simply: people who are not very good at X are more likely to rate themselves highly than people who truly are good at X.

Re:you lost me at hello

[chrb]

Two of the faces were of local girls -- a 10-year-old and 12-year-old, the station reported. The third face appears to be Miley Cyrus, 16

16 is legal for sex in most jurisdictions of the world. 10 is illegal for most. The more interesting question is, were the photos just nudes, or did they show sexual activity? Nude photos of teenagers not engaging in sexual activity (e.g. this) are usually not illegal in Western society.

Re:the cult of high iq

[gizmonic]

I like the idea of a Social IQ, but, I think in most cases, what you refer to as a Social IQ is really just an emotional response with no rational thought applied.

Child porn cases are very good at exposing this kind of reaction. It evokes a VERY strong negative emotional reaction in most people. Even the most logical among us would feel differently if it was OUR kid's head on photo-shopped on that body.

But, despite what you might think, you do NOT want emotion (or Social IQ) running the legal system. That's how ape-shit laws get passed, and now you have a 14 yo kid sending a naked picture of herself from her cellphone to her 14 yo boyfriend, and getting tagged a sexual criminal for life for distributing child porn. Why? Because the law is the law, and when it was passed, no one took the time to think and say, hey, if it's a kid taking pictures of themselves, why don't we add some form of exclusion for that? Instead the emotional knee jerk response crafted a zero tolerance law leading to situations like that.

I think the truth of the matter is that what is lost here is critical thinking skills. Most people these days no longer have them. Kids are never taught to actually stop and think. They go to school, do their homework, go to 12 different after school activities, all while their parent (or parents) work 60 hour weeks trying to pay for everything. And any down time is spent wasting their brains away in front of the TV.

True philosophical thought is, for the most part, dead. Who has spent the time to actually sit down and ponder anything? Most are trained to react based on emotional response and call it thinking, but it's not. It's a robotic programmed reaction to something. Critical thinking of a higher order requires just as much time and practice as anything else. You don't get it from soccer practice or football or watching the latest sitcom on TV.

And this isn't to say I disagree entirely with you. I think you are correct in your idea of a Social IQ, where the ability to interact with other people in social situations is not at all related to your ability to handle spatial reasoning or deep critical thinking.

However, the law is based on critical thinking, not Social IQ, and trying to apply the latter to the former is what makes the prosecutor take the exact wording of the law, and twist it to apply to something that it, as written, doesn't cover. No amount of Social IQ nor emotional reaction can change that fact. And it takes critical thinking, not Social IQ, to understand that.

Re:you lost me at hello

[billcopc]

The interpretation of "sick and disgusting" is a highly subjective concept. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think I do sick and disgusting things every day, without having anything to do with Miley Cyrus or any other stupid little spoiled whore. I'm sure I could find someone who finds thai food "sick and disgusting", I could probably even draw some bogus correlation between thai lovers and people who suck at math.

The reality is that law should be firm. It needs to be cut-and-dried, you're either guilty or you're not. To achieve this, we need to define the intent of the law, not the loosely-coupled description of contravening acts. Child porn is illegal because it is considered child abuse, right ? So here's the question we should be answering:

Did Miley suffer abuse as a direct effect or consequence of this man's photo editing activities ?

I rest my case, your stupor.

Re:you lost me at hello

[Majik Sheff]

Do you consider the phrase "patently offensive" to be well defined?

The problem with laws is that they have to deal with concepts that are often fuzzy at best, completely undefinable at worst and almost always irritatingly vague. This is why judges have jobs, because they are where the laws meet reality. Unfortunately judges are also humans subject to their own biases and preconceptions and so we often get objectionable outcomes.

Is this guy guilty of bad taste? Definitely.
Is it kiddie porn? No, and shame on the D.A. for trying this.

Re:you lost me at hello

[AlecC]

I simplified slightly. A mathematician would regard that only as the default behaviour, while accepting that such addition might not be possible in some circumstances. However, the circumstances require to be specified.

In your classified field, does that mean that a journalist who collects those pieces of information in good faith, made available independently from different unclassified sources, and publishes them together is now guilty of a criminal offence? That seems unreasonable to me. Which raises the question of how close the putter together of the two pieces of information has to be to be guilty.

Re:you lost me at hello

[mmaniaci]

+5 insightful for ignorance? Hmm... wish I had mod points

What he did was not "obviously sick" or "disgusting," nor was it "probably immoral and/or unethical." I would love to put you to a test to distinguish 16-year-olds from 18-year-olds and watch you fail miserably, then through the Socratic method, make you realize how fucked up putting a blanket age on consent actually is. There is nothing morally wrong with getting aroused, even to a 16 year old when you are 18+. It used to be normal for people to be married by 16 and have kids by 18, so how can it be unnatural, unethical, or immoral? Yes, there are laws to protect kids from porn and there should be. I understand that the age of 18 is used because there has to be something. But morals and ethics have nothing to do with law, and your opinion of sick and disgusting is situational. I do not condone what he did, but for fucks sake this is not that big of a deal and he should have gotten a small fine for approaching the boundaries of child porn laws.

And besides, How many old farts do you see heckling young girls, not because they're going to go rape and victimize them. There is no harm in that, yeah its "gross" but only a very very VERY small percentage of people would even give a shit. America is so god damned afraid of being raped that we seem to just rape ourselves before anyone else has a chance...

Re:you lost me at hello

[2obvious4u]

I'm curious when we reached http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point on this issue, because I can recall just three generations ago people getting married at age 13. I also recall in many states having 16 as the legal age to wed. So why is it that when a male looks at a female who has entered puberty and starts producing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheromone and all the other outward appearances that she is ready for sex, that it is somehow "sick and disgusting"? I wouldn't want someone looking at my daughter that way, but that doesn't mean what they are doing is wrong.

Not only that now you're criminalizing thoughts and desires or even human curiosity. For instance my wife wanted me to turn out the light last night so she reached out her and said "go, go, gadget arm". I walked over and turned out the light, then on the way back to bed I said "go go gadget penis", at which she laughed for a while. This reminded me of http://xkcd.com/305/ (rule 34); so I Googled "go go gadget penis" and instead of the obvious image of inspector gadget with an extend able penis, I get his daughter doing the dog. This image would be enough to land me in jail according to the current laws and as you can see that wasn't what I was looking for at all. I did also find a great quote from Leslie Nelson that "go go gadget penis" is the greatest one liner of all time.

Cases like this one scare the crap out of me because the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality of the people in this nation are putting innocent people in jail. We might as well just form a good old fashion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching

Creeping criminalization

[TaleSpinner]

Our society has reached the point where it criminalizes things not because they are Bad, Wrong, or Evil, but simply because it makes things easier for the police. In this case, a photoshopped picture cannot be illegal since it depicts something that never happened. Nevertheless, we still criminalize sexualized sketches of children, cgi images of sexualized children, or even written pornography that talks about sexualized children, and all for the same reason: so police don't have to prove an actual crime occurred in court. Of course it violates the 1st Amendment! Like anyone pays attention to that any more. This is part and parcel with modern "law enforcement". Photocop and red light cameras seldom produce pictures that can identify the driver, so states using them (for revenue) always change the law to hold the registrar of the vehicle responsible for the moving violation, thereby eliminating the need to identify the actual perpetrator, and neatly bypassing the law about one spouse testifying against another, since 90% of the time it's one of the two spouses. It also changes the remaining 10% to a score since either the registrar doesn't know who it was, or is forced to testify against a friend.

Like 24x7 tracking of citizens, no-warrant searches and wiretaps, the fiction that just because email may pass through someone else's computer it cannot have an expectation of privacy, all these are designed to eliminate work for police, so they are free to do what society hires them for - generating revenue. That is what is really meant by "law enforcement".

Cynical? Oh, yes. But I come by it honestly. Yes, I would rather live in anarchy, since as near as I can tell, the only difference between what we have now and anarchy is the fact that one of the biggest lawbreakers is the government and its agents. Anarchy would at least remove that source of crime.

Drama feels gooooood - (Ethos, Pathos, Logos)

[LCValentine]

Albeit, statistics can always be skewed to tell a story. If I have a database of US Presidents, and their birth dates, and their places of birth, I believe you could statistically say that the best Presidents that the US has ever had have come from Illinois (despite the fact that this occurred before the US was fully annexed.) Further more, you could argue that better leaders are born in April (fictionalization) because it's a coincidence what month they were born in.

When I was in college, a lady from the Wall Street Journal came to my statistics class telling us that the average Per Capita Income of subscribers was $200,000 annually. This is not a cause -> effect relationship. Chances are better than a) some of the richest people in the world read this paper and b) the upper middle class are dragging down the average cuz they want to be rich also. It does not however imply that one would be richer for buying WJS.

I am surprised that nobody has given mention to Aristotle's Rhetoric where it is described in great detail the invaluable skill of utilizing the feelings (ethos / ethics) of the words that surround raw logic (logos / logic) and collectively provide a persuasive argument (pathos / pathology). It is our human nature that gives us greatness for being able to decorate words into so much more than they are, with simple things like CAPITALization, overly obfuscated alliterated onomatopoeia of oration, and rhymes so nice they splice the skies of sun and set.

It seems easy to see that people far more easily acquiesce to the involvement of their emotions than to their hair splitting logic. How else would myspace and facebook make so much money? Drama feels gooooood!

Re:you lost me at hello

[imgod2u]

And therein lies the problem. People get away with sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical things everyday, simply because they aren't against the law.

Probably because not everything that's "sick, disgusting, and probably immoral and/or unethical" is something that should be illegal. Eating roaches is disgusting, adultery is immoral, lying is unethical, yet all these things are legal and rightfully so.

The purpose of law is to protect people from one another, not to make people moral. If something someone does cannot be shown to conclusively cause harm to the life, liberty of pursuit of happiness of someone else, then it is not something the law should be concerned with.

Re:Sorry

[timothyf]

They've been un-deprecated in HTML 5:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#changed-elements
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-i-element

So continue using b and i without fear. They're still in HTML 4 (if "deprecated") and will almost certainly continue to be in HTML 5.

Non-graphical terminals

[tepples]

Who the heck decided that <i> for "italics" and <b> for "bold" was too complicated, and needed to be simplified to <em> and <strong>, respectively?

People who read on non-graphical user agents, such as a web browser designed for a character-cell terminal or a speech terminal or a Braille terminal. Such terminals don't use italic or bold text to represent emphasis; instead, they might use different coloring, different tone of voice, etc.

ObTopic: Non-graphical terminals bring me to another issue. If I search and replace a pornographic text with the name of an underage celebrity, have I created simulated child porn?

Re:Sorry

[adolf]

Good explanation.

[raises hand] I have a question. Why should any of this matter here? I'm just writing a comment on a forum, not engineering a database-backed CSS-enabled web site. Why should I care?

I mean, I've got this little helper box down at the bottom of my screen:

Allowed HTML
<b> <i> <p> <br> <a> <ol> <ul> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <em> <strong> <tt> <blockquote> <div> <ecode> <quote>

I'm just a user. Why in the fuck should I have to study the ongoing development of HTML, XHTML, CSS, and so on just to get properly italicized text?

Re:zero tolerance on possession of plutonium?

[LionMage]

Oh, how I wish I had my mod points today.

Dude, you're exactly epitomizing the sort of knee-jerk, irrational argument that just about everyone else here has been talking about. That this little masterpiece of yours is a follow-up to a response to your initial diatribe against "them highfalutin' smarty-pants jerkwads" (my take on your rant about how social IQ is somehow superior to more traditional measures of human intellect) shows that you want to glorify irrationality and perpetuate a social order that suppresses intellectualism and, apparently, encourages mob rule.

say i have a pound of plutonium. should i be free and clear? or does mere possession of it suggest intent? that is, no one has a valid reason for possession of plutonium, other than malfeasance

Ridiculous half-assed attempt at a straw-man argument. What if you have permission from the relevant authorities to possess a pound of plutonium? What if you are building a nuclear reactor? What if you are working in the field of nuclear medicine? By itself, saying you have a pound of anything doesn't really mean anything, and you're relying on a "big scary" like nuclear material to try and get automatic buy-in to your fallacious straw-man argument.

there is no godly reason to be in possession of [...]

Considering how many times the phrase "godly reason" showed up in your prose, it's pretty clear where your bias comes from. Why don't you just give up any pretense of trying to argue rationally and just admit that you have a religious bias? Then your lack of actual rational argument and, apparently, critical thinking skills won't be seen as quite so much of a detriment.

not that pedophilia is anything on the scale of plutonium possession, i'm simply using the analogy to suggest that if you possess item X, that is enough to suggest some sort of intent, since there is no godly reason to have item X that doesn't suggest some sort of malfeasance.
That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is "probable cause," and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing -- and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.

say i have kiddie porn, real or fantasy: WHY do i have that? there is no reason you can give me for having that that doesn't imply some sort of mal intent

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you have "fantasy" child porn in your possession, which I shall interpret as so-called virtual porn. Just so we're not too far off base from TFA, let's say you have porn that consists of some teenager's face photoshopped -- badly! -- onto someone else's adult naked body. Why would you possess such a thing? Maybe for the same reason other men who possess such images would -- for sexual self-gratification, i.e., masturbation. Now, was a minor harmed? Remember that in TFA we've been discussing a teenager who is a public figure, so her image is already everywhere. So the photographs have been taken in a non-exploitive manner. I would argue that, in this type of scenario, no minor was actually harmed.

The whole point of child pornography laws isn't to stop adults from fantasizing about something you might consider "sick," but to protect children from being harmed and exploited. The law isn't there to prevent thought crimes (even though some would like it to be).

not that i think drawn/ photoshopped kiddie porn should be illegal. i think it should be legal. in order to trac

Argh, bad formatting

[LionMage]

I hate to reply to myself, but apparently a missing close-tag rendered a mess of my response to some quoted material. So, here's the same section, disambiguated:

not that pedophilia is anything on the scale of plutonium possession, i'm simply using the analogy to suggest that if you possess item X, that is enough to suggest some sort of intent, since there is no godly reason to have item X that doesn't suggest some sort of malfeasance.

That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is “probable cause,” and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing — and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.

Re:Invasion of privacy?

[Petersko]

"Aren't you invading his privacy a bit too much? Even though I admit that I'd be tempted to do the same (especially because the work in itself must be pretty boring), it's not like we don't read news about privacy problems around the world every other day and should know better, right?"

Well, this WAS 15 years ago - not yesterday. I'm 15 years wiser, and I haven't worked retail support since 1997. Plus hard drives aren't 40MB anymore, porn is everywhere, and you wouldn't be copying directories with drag-and-drop or CLI these days (hopefully).

So even if I cared enough to browse people's files (which I don't), and had access to them (which I don't), I'm mature enough to avoid doing so. Unless they were famous people, in which case my internal voyeur might be unable to resist.

Re:you lost me at hello

[Daengbo]

Adultery is illegal here in South Korea. Ok So-ri was given an eight-month suspended sentence for it. Saying something bad about the royal family in Thailand is illegal, even if what you say is true or false but written about fictional characters in fiction.

My point? The law is the law. What it defines as illegal is, by definition, illegal. How that law is interpreted also changes over time and depends on the people determining guilt.

It sucks, and I wish that your "life, liberty of pursuit of happiness" mandate would actually work -- life, liberty, and happiness are difficult to define, after all.