Friday, September 01, 2006

Colleges on YouTube

Add your school; I just added mine. Says Liz:

This is definitely infringing on Facebook’s turf, but Facebook has yet to add video-sharing to its college-centered social network. Colleges, with their ample supplies of bandwidth and procrastinators, are the best source of early adopters you can get, and college student presence on YouTube is certainly huge. Though the company is shy about giving out demographic information, Lee Gomes reported yesterday 70 percent of YouTube’s registered users are American, with roughly half of them under 20 years old. Via Download Squad.

Vague and chilling

The impact of new FCC policy on fleeting profanity. From The Center for Creative Voices in Media:

Reports are coming in that out of fear of an FCC fine, some CBS stations will likely delay broadcast of the CBS documentary 9/11 until after 10 p.m. because it contains swearing uttered in the heat of the Sept. 11 disaster, despite the fact that the documentary has aired uncut twice before, without FCC sanction.  CBS has said it expects to have no problems with the FCC, which has been cracking down on profanity, but apparently some stations aren’t so sure.  This is yet more fallout from the FCC’s confusing and inconsistent indecency regulation.

Remember, the new indecency fines are $325,000 per instance. The fine for passing off fake news as real? $32,000.

Here’s the story from Broadcasting and Cable.

On porn and rape

Anthony D’Amato at Northwestern University has a theory on porn and rape. :

The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

I’m skeptical; I’ve not read it. Ampersand apparently has:

Three problems with D’Amato’s theory:

1) During recent years, the NCVS has found a steep decline in all violent crime, not just rape. It seems likely that whatever’s causing the decline in all violent crime measured by the NCVS, is also causing the decline in rape measured by the NCVS; but it seems unlikely that pornography reduces all violent crime.

2) The NCVS measurement of rape prevalence is crap. Many other studies - including two major studies conducted by the Federal government - have found much higher rates of rape prevalence than the NCVS. Particularly notable is this study, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which directly compared the NCVS’s methodology for measuring rape prevalence with modern “best practice” survey design - and found that the NCVS vastly undercounted rape.

(D’Amato does say that the decrease in rape is collaborated by other sources, but he doesn’t cite any specific sources other than the NCVS).

3) D’Amato has no measurement of porn prevalence other than internet access, nor does he do any real statistical analysis. In contrast, studies with sophisticated statistical analysis and more accurate measures of porn usage - such as the study published in Four Theories of Rape in American Society - tend to find that porn usage has little or no correlation with rape prevalence.

Now that I find persuasive.

Smooth the Ubuntu install

A letter to Wired from Kristoffer Nilaus Olsen:

I have [Ubuntu] installed on my ancient Thinkpad Celeron 450Mhz, which I use as my kitchen computer (for recipes and listening to music while cooking) and your story pretty accurately covers my experiences. One thing you might want to cover in the future is the Automatix script, which enables users to install a variety of needed extra functionality in Linux—including the much vaunted multimedia codecs—with the click of a few buttons from a graphical user interface. It’s really made it much simpler to make Ubuntu a proper multimedia system and then some.

Here’s the Wired story he was writing about. Here’s the Automatix Wiki.