Day: August 11, 2005

James Dobson on Raising Heterosexual Kids

This nutty article by James Dobson on how to ensure your son or daughter doesn’t grow up to be gay is making the rounds. Its not anything that Dobson himself says that is so nutty (though there is plenty of Dobson’s usual nuttiness in there), but rather an unpublished manuscript by Joseph Nicolosi that Dobson quotes from extensively in his article. Dobson describes Nicolosi’s as “the foremost authority on the prevention and treatment of homosexuality today. His book will offer practical advice and a clear-eyed perspective on the antecedents of homosexuality.” So what does Nicolosi recommend? Stuff like this,

Girls can continue to grow in their identification with their mothers. On the other hand, a boy has an additional developmental task—to disidentify from his mother and identify with his father. At this point [beginning at about eighteen months], a little boy will not only begin to observe the difference, he must now decide, “Which one am I going to be?” In making this shift in identity, the little boy begins to take his father as a model of masculinity. At this early stage, generally before the age of three, Ralph Greenson observed, the boy decides that he would like to grow up like his father.

This is a choice. Implicit in that choice is the decision that he would not like to grow up to be like his mother. According to Robert Stoller, “The first order of business in being a man is, ‘don’t be a woman.'”

Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Who knew the cure for homosexuality was as simple as a game of catch and showers with Dad?

Google’s CNet Tantrum

Google’s tantrum over this CNet story strike me as a classic example of a corporate public relations disaster. In order to highlight the privacy concerns that some people have about Google, CNet’s story published personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt that it obtained through Google Searches on Schmidt. The CNet story begins,

Google CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t reveal much about himself on his home page.

But spending 30 minutes on the Google search engine lets one discover that Schmidt, 50, was worth an estimated $1.5 billion last year. Earlier this year, he pulled in almost $90 million from sales of Google stock and made at least another $50 million selling shares in the past two months as the stock leaped to more than $300 a share.

He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out “Bennie and the Jets.”

Schmidt has also roamed the desert at the Burning Man art festival in Nevada, and is an avid amateur pilot.

That such detailed personal information is so readily available on public Web sites makes most people uncomfortable. But it’s nothing compared with the information Google collects and doesn’t make public.

In retaliation for that story, Google has forbidden its employees from talking to CNet reporters for one year.

Aside from the obvious tantrum aspect of it, Google is simply giving more ammunition to its critics concerned about the sort of privacy breaches that the search engine allows. Until now, Google’s message has been that all it does is collect disparate published information for indexing and there’s nothing unseemly or wrong about that.

For example, here’s what Schmidt had to say when defending Google aganist critics who complained about Google-enabled privacy invasions,

Google does not discover things that are not public. Many people are disturbed to find their home phone number. But we found it because it was a public piece of information.

But the reality is that typically such information might be public but its in disparate forms and locations. Full text search engines allow the curious to quickly find, filter and collate that disparate collection of public facts and build a profile of a person that is — as Schmidt himself found out — a bit unnerving.

By conceding that and overreacting to the CNet story, Google simply lends ammunition to critics who say the company needs to do more to prevent just this sort of use of its search engine (though its difficult to imagine how they’d do so, especially for public figures like Schmidt).

I’ve had people do to me what CNet did to Schmidt. I’ve seen people who clearly used Google or other search engines who published a complete rundown of my personal information on Internet forums. It was creepy, but as Schmidt himself has said in the pass, the overwhelming value of having more information and having it more easily accessible far outweighs the problems that this also can present to people who suddenly discover that their privacy is largely illusory.

P2P Studies Make People Stupid

Yesterday, ZDNet UK reported on a study of P2P traffic. CacheLogic monitored P2P traffic on Internet backbones and found that 61.44 percent of P2P packet traffic was video files, 11.34 percent was audio files, and 27.22 percent was other traffic. On the audio side, a surprisingly large 12.3 percent of all P2P traffic was for files in the Ogg Vorbis format.

Unfortunately, many outlets seem unable to report the results of this study accurately.

It wasn’t surprising to see Slashdot screw it up. The headline on the Slashdot post falsely claims, “Ogg Vorbis Share Reaches 12.3% on P2P Traffic.” In fact, Ogg Vorbis share of P2P traffic is 12.3 percent of the 11.34 percent of traffic that is audio traffic. Or, in Slashdot’s way of summarizing the study, just under 1.4 percent of P2P traffic is Ogg Vorbis files.

But it was not just Slashdot. The BBC also misreported the findings of the study. The BBC claims,

Almost two-thirds of digital files being swapped on file-sharing networks is video, according to P2P traffic analysts CacheLogic.

But that’s not what the study said at all. Since video files are so much larger than audio files, even the two-thirds difference means that there are almost certainly far more audio files being swapped through P2P than video files.

The BBC simply treats traffic as synonymous with files when it erroneously claims that,

Video made up 61.4% of files on the four peer-to-peer networks. BitTorrent had the highest proportion of video traffic at 47%. Just over 42% of files on it were categorised as “other”.

Source:

File-sharers swap more than video. The BBC, August 11, 2005.