Month: September 2006

3rd District Court Judge Upholds Libel Exemption for Web Site Comments

In June, U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell rejected a lawsuit by a public relations firm against blogger Tucker Max that centered on comments made by others to Max’s weblog.

PR firm Renamity threw a part which apparently didn’t go very well and in turn became a subject of discussion on Max’s blog. Renamity owner Anthony DiMeo III then sued Max arguing that Max could be held personally liable for allegedly defamatory anonymous comments about the party and Renamity.

Dalzell rejected that, arguing in a 22-page opinion that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act explicitly exempts website operators from being held liable over comments, even when the website owner exercises some editorial control over what comments appear.

As the judge wrote,

Congress believed that § 230(c)(1) would promote these ideals. With the number of Internet users reaching [**12] the hundreds of millions, the quantum of information conveyed through interactive computer agencies is staggering:

The specter of tort liability in an area of such prolific speech would have an obvious chilling effect. It would be impossible for service providers to screen each of their millions of postings for possible problems. Faced with potential liability for each message republished by their services, interactive computer service providers might choose to severely restrict the number and type of messages posted.

Zeran, 129 F.3d at 331. In other words, absent federal statutory protection, interactive computer services would essentially have two choices: (1) employ an army of highly trained monitors to patrol (in real time) each chatroom, message board, and blog to screen any message that one could label defamatory, or (2) simply avoid such a massive headache and shut down these fora. Either option would profoundly chill Internet speech.

I receive significant amounts of e-mail from people angry at one thing or another that someone has posted on one of my websites — many of them accompanied by legal threats to do this or that unless I remove some offending comment or another.

So far, all of the legal decisions here have favored website operators, though the Supreme Court has yet to rule explicity in this matter. The closest it has come was to reject an appeal against a similar finding in the 9th Circuit a few years ago.

The full text of the judge’s decision can be read here.

Too Smart for Their Own Good

The Village Voice ran a fascinating article about the strange world of uber-elite IQ test societies. The profile revolves around Ronald Hoeflin who got bored with MENSA. According to the Voice profile,

Since the early ’80s, he’s founded four societies for the “severely gifted”: the Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Prometheus Society (top .003 percent), and Mega Society (top .0001 percent).

The article notes that Hoeflin is “fascinated by the idea of a ‘maximum human potential'”, but for someone with whose IQ is supposed to be around 190, Hoeflin doesn’t seem to be doing much with his potential. For example, the Voice notes that Hoeflin is working on a multi-volume work, but the contents of the book don’t sound particularly intelligent,

In an autobiographical section in his Encyclopedia of Categories, he interprets the cover design he did for one journal as an unconscious manifestation of the stages of psychosexual development (“There’s the bell-shaped curve. It looks like a breast. The Y-axis is phallic. 99.9 is sperm”) and reproduces the results of his aptitude and intelligence tests . . .

Not exactly world-changing, potential-reaching stuff there.

I’ve been skeptical of raw capabilities on standardized tests ever since taking the ACT and SAT tests in high school. I scored so high (99+ percentile) on both that I got my picture in the local paper and got a couple of nice scholarships that were driven by test scores. My GPA at the time — 2.5. The university I ultimately went to actually sent me a letter after I graduated bitching that I had failed the math class I took in my last semester of high school.

I read a story a couple years ago about a kid who illustrates the silliness that goes with these sorts of tests and evaluations. The student had achieved a perfect score on the ACT — but he had retaken it several times to do so. Getting a 99.9 percentile score wasn’t enough; only perfection would do. What a waste. I hope he doesn’t end up writing digressions about the psychosexual meanings of the bell-shaped curve.

Source:

The Intelligencer. Rachel Aviv, The Village Voice, August 1, 2006.

Into the Black — “Firefly” Fan Shows In Progress

Into the Black is a “Firefly” fan film project that is attempting to do original episodes set in the “Firefly” universe whose aim is to feature “full television quality production values.” You can track their progress in making the first hour-long episode at the group’s weblog.

Ever-increasing computer processing power allows for Babylon 5-level CGI at a price that even fan film types can afford.

What Has Longer Lifespan Done For Us Lately?

For obvious reasons, there is considerable interest in extending human lifespan — few of us, even those who believe in any of the numerous varieties of life-after-death, would voluntarily choose to depart our existence provided we are in good mental and physical health. Of course humans are from Mars and bioethicists are from Venus, so inevitably there is a small cottage industry of ethicists who, in fact, are not so sure extending human lifespan is such a good idea.

MSNBC covered this debate in a May article titled, appropriately enough, Longer life could have a downside.

On the one hand are bioethicistis like Daniel Callahan who laments that longer lifespans probably won’t solve all our social ills,

We have war, poverty, all sorts of issues around, and I don’t think any of them would be at all helped by having people live longer. The question is, ‘What will we get as a society?’ I suspect it won’t be a better society.

Hmm. Lets think about that for a moment. In 1900, the average lifespan in the United States was just 49 years. In 2002, the average lifespan in the United States was 77.3 years.

In just over a century, life expectancy in this country increased by almost 58 percent. But was our society 58 percent better? Were we 58 percent happier? Assume the answer is no — does that mean the huge increase in life expectancy was pointless because it didn’t necessarily result in a better society? Anyone want to give back those 28.3 years?

But Callahan and others have another objection — increases in human lifespan might have dramatic social changes. Callahan tells MSNBC,

If you have people staying in their jobs for 100 years, that is going to make it really tough for young people to move in and get ahead. If people like the idea of delayed gratification, this is going to be a wonderful chance to experience it.

That’s just plain silly — really, Callahan should take an economics course or even an economic history class. Just look at the past 100 years in the United States. That 58 percent increase in lifespan has not been accompanied by an attendant handicap on the young. In fact, just the opposite — the economy is ruthless in not caring about age or experience either at the individual or company level. Callahan’s concern might be valid if we lived in a country with highly rigid regulations and significant attempt by the state to plan the economy (Japan comes to mind as the closest capitalist economy where Callahan’s concerns might have a grain of truth), but not in a relatively open economy like the United States that reward entrepreneurship.

But Callahan is all about planning. MSNBC concludes his story by quoting Callahan as saying,

If this could ever happen, then we’d better ask what kind of society we want to get. We had better not go anywhere near it until we have figured those problems out.

Please, the last thing we should do is hold back medical progress while Callahan and others meticulously plan things. The most pervasive, society-changing medical advance in the last 100 years is easily oral contraception. The existence of oral contraception is largely due to the efforts of Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick who underwrote and pushed forward efforts by Gregory Pincus to create the birth control pill that was eventually released by Searle in 1960.

Sanger, McCormick, Pincus and Searle didn’t wait for some sort of society-wide consensus about the impact of convenient, effective birth control to emerge — in fact they were going against stringent anti-contraception laws that existed in many states.

And the birth control pill has brought tremendous changes to our society, most of them positive, but certainly some negative as well. Rather than have some master plan in place about how to handle those changes, as Callahan would want for a similar medical revolution in life expectancy, the United States coped as human beings have for thousands of years with constant changes in their physical and social environment. As a species, it turns out we’re actually pretty good at dealing with even fundamental social changes.

If, and when, medical technology exists to double current life spans, somehow we’ll cope with that change without bioethicist micromanagement. It’s what we do.

Source:

Longer life could have a downside. Ker Than, MSNBC, May 22, 2006.

Free, Online Book about Learning Objects

Reusability.Org is hosting a free, online book, The Instructional Use of Learning Objects. The book is released under the Open Publication license which means it can be redistributed for free. Nice stuff, but it is a shame that the version on the Resuability.Org site is in Microsoft Word format. Yuck.

It makes sense to put documents on the web in Word or PDF format if the document has layout features that are beyond HTML’s capabilities, but for just straight-up text like this, why bother with proprietary formats that require additional applications beyond the browser?