I am also in Vine, and I don't think I am more generous to the free products that I get. In fact, it is sometimes the opposite, as Vine almost by definition provides things you don't really want, and I'm less likely to give a strong review to something I don't really want.
Membership in Vine makes me sensitive to the number of reviews each item on Amazon has, and I have recently noticed that the average number has increased dramatically. It used to be than an obscure or expensive item had 2-3 reviews. Now, virtually every item I look at has hundreds of reviews. Yesterday I called up a newly released $2500 camera lens to find that it already had almost 100 reviews. It feels odd to me, and I suspect that there may be astroturfing taking place on a massive scale, but I have no way to prove it.
You ignore the fact that they earned income on it in the meantime. Revenue in 2008 was $900 million (I don't know what the profit was). I believe that News Corp's investment in MySpace may have been quite profitable, even if they had only a stub left at the end.
Kodachrome is hard film to use; I gave up trying to take indoor photos with it years ago. I have continued to use it (about 25 rolls in the last two years), mostly because the quality of the images is obviously different from modern film or digital, and evokes nostalgia in older viewers. And I liked the bragging rights. It's no surprise that Kodachrome is gone; Kodak had been phasing it out for years -- first killing the larger format versions, then the iso25 and iso200 variants, and the motion picture film. The economics just weren't there; virtually every other color film uses identical (C41 or E6) processing chemicals, and Kodachrome used a different and apparently more toxic set. Without scale, it was more expensive to buy and process than other color films, and the emulsion can't even be scanned by most slide scanners. You're left with only nostalgia and archival properties to drive sales, enough for a small specialty chemical company perhaps, but not for Kodak.
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
Can't comment on Riesman; she may be as bad as you say or even worse. Note that Pornified does not cite Reisman, so it would not be fair to tar Pamela Paul by association.
Paul had an essay on Eric Alterman's blog yesterday, talking about the warring studies on porn. It overlaps with some material in the book and should give a pretty good idea of her writing style, objectivity, etc.
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
In point of fact, the book cites controlled studies that, as best as I can tell, were legitimately and responsibly executed. Pamela Paul never claims that the anecdotes from her interviewees prove porn is bad; they're just illustrations to make the results of the scientific studies more vivid.
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
Re-reading Mr. Garcia's rejoinder to the original article, I find myself considering a passage in Pornified in which Pamela Paul summarizes experiments by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant. A group of subjects looked at porn over a period of six weeks (a control group was not asked to do so). Their opinions on various topics were surveyed at various points through the six weeks.
One result of this study was the realization that the more porn you watch, the more fervently you defend porn. This is not a selection effect; people did not volunteer for the "high porn" group in the study. Zillmann and Bryant took a random sample of people, showed them porn for six weeks, and the more porn they watched, the more intensely they defended porn.
You can argue that they were somehow educated by watching the blue movies in the study, and their defense of porn reflects a good civil libertarian instinct. However, at the same time that they were defending porn, they were developing a demand for more of it, and more explicit porn, and more violent porn. The preponderance of evidence suggests that porn had an addictive effect on some people in the experimental group, and they defended it the same way a nicotine addict defends access to cigarettes.
I don't know what Mr. Garcia's personal life is like, beyond what he has shared with us here, and the following suggestion is not aimed at him particularly. If you find yourself angry at the thought of this book, and you look at a lot of porn, do a "Seinfeld-like" experiment and try going for a couple of weeks without looking at any at all. If that's difficult, maybe there is something subconsciously at work in your defense of porn, rather than just a patriotic defense of free speech.
Others in this discussion have posted their personal stories of escalating porn additiction. Many of those were posted anonymously and now have scores of 0, so others coming into this discussion may miss them. If you fail the "two week" test, maybe come back to these pages and read those posts.
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
I do think the most disturbing statement in the review was that pr0n significantly affects all who watch it
Well, you can rest easier if you re-read the review, as it nowhere says that porn affects everybody. The book does not make that claim either.
Paul's claim is not that porn is some satanic vice that corrupts all who gaze upon it, but that it can addict people, and that it hurts both men and women. She explicitly compares Porn to cigarettes in her concluding chapter.
Re:political bias of the author...
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
I don't know of any online links, but the index to Pornified cites a number of articles that you should be able to find in a good university library. Somebody here on/. should have access.
See, for example
J. Bryant and D. Zillman, "Pornography, Sexual Callousness and the Trivialization of Rape," Journal of Communication (Autumn 1982), pp.10-21
J. S. Lyons, R. L. Anderson, and D. Larsen, "A Systematic Review of the Effect of Aggressive and Nonaggressive Pornography," in Media, Children and the Family: Social Scientific, Psychodynamic, and Clinical Perspectives (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, 1993), p.305
Ryan J. Burns, "Male Internet Pornography Consumers' Perception of Women and Endorsement of Traditional Female Gender Roles" (Austin, Tex: Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas, 2002), p.11
I have not read any of these; they are selected pretty much at random from the Notes section of Paul's book. Buy a copy if you want to see the complete list of citations, which run to thirteen pages (of course, only a fraction of the sources are scientific studies).
“everyone else’s right to view this must be restricted to protect them.”
The book never says this. The review never says this. Only you have said this.
Pamela Paul's argument is more subtle than a demand for censorship. I suggest you buy her book and then, if it still makes you want to scream, you can post a rebutting review.
Re:I have my doubts about the conclusions
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
“I'd be willing to bet that a anti porn book would sell more copies than a pro porn book.”
Actually, the Jenna Jameson autobiography has been on the the best seller list for weeks. I don't see any anti-porn books other than this one, and can't think of any in the past either.
There are coffee table books of porn stars portraits, sex manuals by porn stars, et al. Porn sells. This book is a worthwhile aberration.
Re:More pro-censorship Propoganda.
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
You discard the research as "total BS" without reading it. You accuse the author of being rabid and supporting totalitarianism without reading her book either.
Your closed-mindedness makes you a poor defender of "liberal ideals". One such liberal ideal is to understand a problem before passing judgment. Pamela Paul took the time to do so; you would be more persuasive if you were to do the same.
If the French effort had succeeded, you would compute from 100 degrees in a circle, not 360. Sin[100 degrees] equals about 0.985 on your calculator, but it would have been 0 if the French method had caught on.
Grier footnotes the story; I don't have my copy of the book here, but I think he may have gotten it from Ida Rhodes.
The story is, in any case, perfectly believable when you consider that the goal of the Mathematical Tables Project was to produce tables with great accuracy. A semi-literate with rudimentary math skills might be able to compute a long subtraction, but his error rate would be higher than it would be with addition. Therefore, leave him with addition and leave the subtraction to those with greater skill.
Re:Sorry Timothy, You're an Idiot
on
The Code Book
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· Score: 1
Slashdot queues its reviews before running them. This review was submitted well before the Swedish team cracked code ten.
Stern
This book does not claim to be a get rich quick guide. It's a practical introduction to the kids of big software systems used by big companies nowadays.
Anybody interested in this topic can join the Foresight Institute, which is dedicated to nanotechnology. They hold several conferences during the year, where you can meet Drexler and other luminaries in the field.
If you have read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the general idea here should be familiar. Eric S. Raymond says that every bug is trivial to somebody. He also thinks that every other kind of question is trivial to somebody, the trick is just finding the right somebody. Eric is on the board of Information Markets Corp., which created "infomarco".
The site hooks up people who have questions with people who have answers, for money. You set your own price, and you own your own answer. As Hemos points out, you can even GPL it if you want to.
The Software and Information Industry Association calls this one of the 28 "most exciting" companies for the year 2000.
It does not cost anything to registe r as an expert, and people who sign up early will be eligible for all kinds of cash and other good things when the company's marketing efforts start in a few weeks.
Re:Nice to see someone going the other direction
on
Sinclair Does Linux
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· Score: 1
In the 1980s, many companies explored the bottom end of price range for home computers. Sinclair's model 80 was repackaged by Timex in the U.S. and sold for under $100. Several companies sold old models in the $200 - $500 range while newer models sold for over $1000. As there was not much difference between the processing capability of 8-bit game machines and 8-bit personal computers, many people thought it would be possible to bridge the gap between them. This would have meant selling people a $200 game machine, then later a $100 add-on which gave it more general capabilities. Coleco drove itself into bankrupcy with the failure of the "Adam" line of computers based on this reasoning.
Though it is true that the average price of computers has dropped in recent years, the significant question remains of why consumers have consistently rejected these bargain-basement offerings.
Slashdot Mirror
I am also in Vine, and I don't think I am more generous to the free products that I get. In fact, it is sometimes the opposite, as Vine almost by definition provides things you don't really want, and I'm less likely to give a strong review to something I don't really want.
Membership in Vine makes me sensitive to the number of reviews each item on Amazon has, and I have recently noticed that the average number has increased dramatically. It used to be than an obscure or expensive item had 2-3 reviews. Now, virtually every item I look at has hundreds of reviews. Yesterday I called up a newly released $2500 camera lens to find that it already had almost 100 reviews. It feels odd to me, and I suspect that there may be astroturfing taking place on a massive scale, but I have no way to prove it.
You ignore the fact that they earned income on it in the meantime. Revenue in 2008 was $900 million (I don't know what the profit was). I believe that News Corp's investment in MySpace may have been quite profitable, even if they had only a stub left at the end.
Kodachrome is hard film to use; I gave up trying to take indoor photos with it years ago. I have continued to use it (about 25 rolls in the last two years), mostly because the quality of the images is obviously different from modern film or digital, and evokes nostalgia in older viewers. And I liked the bragging rights. It's no surprise that Kodachrome is gone; Kodak had been phasing it out for years -- first killing the larger format versions, then the iso25 and iso200 variants, and the motion picture film. The economics just weren't there; virtually every other color film uses identical (C41 or E6) processing chemicals, and Kodachrome used a different and apparently more toxic set. Without scale, it was more expensive to buy and process than other color films, and the emulsion can't even be scanned by most slide scanners. You're left with only nostalgia and archival properties to drive sales, enough for a small specialty chemical company perhaps, but not for Kodak.
Can't comment on Riesman; she may be as bad as you say or even worse. Note that Pornified does not cite Reisman, so it would not be fair to tar Pamela Paul by association.
Paul had an essay on Eric Alterman's blog yesterday, talking about the warring studies on porn. It overlaps with some material in the book and should give a pretty good idea of her writing style, objectivity, etc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
(part way down the page)
In point of fact, the book cites controlled studies that, as best as I can tell, were legitimately and responsibly executed. Pamela Paul never claims that the anecdotes from her interviewees prove porn is bad; they're just illustrations to make the results of the scientific studies more vivid.
c id=13498342
c id=13498176
In other posts here, I have summarized some of the methodology in these studies
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161288&
and listed some of the sources that Paul cites
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161288&
Re-reading Mr. Garcia's rejoinder to the original article, I find myself considering a passage in Pornified in which Pamela Paul summarizes experiments by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant. A group of subjects looked at porn over a period of six weeks (a control group was not asked to do so). Their opinions on various topics were surveyed at various points through the six weeks.
One result of this study was the realization that the more porn you watch, the more fervently you defend porn. This is not a selection effect; people did not volunteer for the "high porn" group in the study. Zillmann and Bryant took a random sample of people, showed them porn for six weeks, and the more porn they watched, the more intensely they defended porn.
You can argue that they were somehow educated by watching the blue movies in the study, and their defense of porn reflects a good civil libertarian instinct. However, at the same time that they were defending porn, they were developing a demand for more of it, and more explicit porn, and more violent porn. The preponderance of evidence suggests that porn had an addictive effect on some people in the experimental group, and they defended it the same way a nicotine addict defends access to cigarettes.
I don't know what Mr. Garcia's personal life is like, beyond what he has shared with us here, and the following suggestion is not aimed at him particularly. If you find yourself angry at the thought of this book, and you look at a lot of porn, do a "Seinfeld-like" experiment and try going for a couple of weeks without looking at any at all. If that's difficult, maybe there is something subconsciously at work in your defense of porn, rather than just a patriotic defense of free speech.
Others in this discussion have posted their personal stories of escalating porn additiction. Many of those were posted anonymously and now have scores of 0, so others coming into this discussion may miss them. If you fail the "two week" test, maybe come back to these pages and read those posts.
Well, you can rest easier if you re-read the review, as it nowhere says that porn affects everybody. The book does not make that claim either.
Paul's claim is not that porn is some satanic vice that corrupts all who gaze upon it, but that it can addict people, and that it hurts both men and women. She explicitly compares Porn to cigarettes in her concluding chapter.
See, for example
I have not read any of these; they are selected pretty much at random from the Notes section of Paul's book. Buy a copy if you want to see the complete list of citations, which run to thirteen pages (of course, only a fraction of the sources are scientific studies).
The book never says this. The review never says this. Only you have said this.
Pamela Paul's argument is more subtle than a demand for censorship. I suggest you buy her book and then, if it still makes you want to scream, you can post a rebutting review.
Actually, the Jenna Jameson autobiography has been on the the best seller list for weeks. I don't see any anti-porn books other than this one, and can't think of any in the past either.
There are coffee table books of porn stars portraits, sex manuals by porn stars, et al. Porn sells. This book is a worthwhile aberration.
You discard the research as "total BS" without reading it. You accuse the author of being rabid and supporting totalitarianism without reading her book either.
Your closed-mindedness makes you a poor defender of "liberal ideals". One such liberal ideal is to understand a problem before passing judgment. Pamela Paul took the time to do so; you would be more persuasive if you were to do the same.
If the French effort had succeeded, you would compute from 100 degrees in a circle, not 360. Sin[100 degrees] equals about 0.985 on your calculator, but it would have been 0 if the French method had caught on.
I think you are confusing two people. David does refer to his grandmother in the introduction to the book, but she is not Gertrude Blanch.
Blanch never married and had no children. This was, bizarrely, one the reasons that the FBI suspected she was a Communist.
Grier footnotes the story; I don't have my copy of the book here, but I think he may have gotten it from Ida Rhodes.
The story is, in any case, perfectly believable when you consider that the goal of the Mathematical Tables Project was to produce tables with great accuracy. A semi-literate with rudimentary math skills might be able to compute a long subtraction, but his error rate would be higher than it would be with addition. Therefore, leave him with addition and leave the subtraction to those with greater skill.
Slashdot queues its reviews before running them. This review was submitted well before the Swedish team cracked code ten. Stern
This book does not claim to be a get rich quick guide. It's a practical introduction to the kids of big software systems used by big companies nowadays.
Anybody interested in this topic can join the Foresight Institute, which is dedicated to nanotechnology. They hold several conferences during the year, where you can meet Drexler and other luminaries in the field.
-stern
One of our team attended Ted Nelson's end-of-year party last year, and several people actually posited this use for infomarkets.
They figure you post the joke for free, and the punchline for money.
If you have read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the general idea here should be familiar. Eric S. Raymond says that every bug is trivial to somebody. He also thinks that every other kind of question is trivial to somebody, the trick is just finding the right somebody. Eric is on the board of Information Markets Corp., which created "infomarco".
The site hooks up people who have questions with people who have answers, for money. You set your own price, and you own your own answer. As Hemos points out, you can even GPL it if you want to.
The Software and Information Industry Association calls this one of the 28 "most exciting" companies for the year 2000.
It does not cost anything to registe r as an expert, and people who sign up early will be eligible for all kinds of cash and other good things when the company's marketing efforts start in a few weeks.
In the 1980s, many companies explored the bottom end of price range for home computers. Sinclair's model 80 was repackaged by Timex in the U.S. and sold for under $100. Several companies sold old models in the $200 - $500 range while newer models sold for over $1000. As there was not much difference between the processing capability of 8-bit game machines and 8-bit personal computers, many people thought it would be possible to bridge the gap between them. This would have meant selling people a $200 game machine, then later a $100 add-on which gave it more general capabilities. Coleco drove itself into bankrupcy with the failure of the "Adam" line of computers based on this reasoning.
Though it is true that the average price of computers has dropped in recent years, the significant question remains of why consumers have consistently rejected these bargain-basement offerings.
-stern
I got flamed a couple of weeks ago after being too generous to Wendy Grossman's book net.wars and may have overcompensated in this review.
EVERYBODY GO OUT AND BUY THIS BOOK.It is better than I made it sound.