A Curious Statistical Anomaly

I read the reports about how awful piracy is for the the artists who create the intellectual properties that are downloaded or copied.  Then there’s the “Don’t steal our property” commercials and the lawsuits by RIAA and MPAA and similar or related international agencies.  However, I’ve long suspected the numbers that these groups float around regarding the loss of monies due to downloading.  This article in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre (Friday 5 June 2009), actually tracked down the genesis of one of those sets of numbers. He found that the numbers referred to were actually from a one page press release and not from a scientific study as was implied in their presentation.

I’m not surprised. I’m sure piracy goes on and that movies and music are being ripped off, but this is usually by big businesses who stamp out thousands of copies and sell them very cheaply. In fact, we don’t go after them or actually prosecute — or at least not to the degree that the various governments go after college students and individuals. I suspect the reason is because money changes hands and monies are paid into coffers somewhere that make it worth while to look the other way.

Okay, I’ll admit to being a cynic with regards to this topic. I’ve read enough of the online copies of testimony and trials to believe that lawyers and judges seldom know what they’re talking about. Expert witness (usually on the side of the victim in the suit — the college student or individual being sued by the corporation) are indeed experts and put forth their finding clearly, succinctly and with examples and statistical analysis backing them up. On the other hand the expert witness put forth by the corporation bringing the suit are almost exclusively NOT experts. By their own testimony they don’t do the research themselves, can’t explain the results, and bluster when pressed for details. What this country (USA) needs is expert witnesses who work for the judges to explain to them the merits of the testimony of expert1 vs expert2 vs known research in the field. Sometimes the cases, from reading transcripts, are truly cut and dried and the judgment is — surprise — totally opposite of what one would expect.

The point is that people have an inherent concept  of intellectual property and actual most respect it, and have no intention of stealing an electronic version of a work. The problems arise when common sense and law doesn’t agree. People (and I’m using this generic term because it’s a collective term) believe that when they buy a music CD, video tape, or DVD, that they own it. Thus they feel that they can watch it on any machine they want to. They also feel that since they own, say a music CD, that they should be able to rip the songs off it and play them on their MP3 player while they’re away from their CD player since they own it and they can’t listen to both at the same time — so that it’s okay to do this.

MPAA and RIAA, for example, believe that you don’t own the CD, DVD, or whatever.  They claim that you just bought a license to use it in the manner that they deem appropriate. As you can see this is the basis of the problem. If what a person buys doesn’t belong to them and they can’t use it as they see fit why bother to buy it; or sell it for that matter.

If I rent a movie, I expect to return it without making any copy because I didn’t buy it and I don’t own it. I believe from conversations with many people that most, if not all, people feel the same. It’s not ours, we just borrowed it — like a library copy so we return it to the owner– the person we rented it from.   It makes sense.  But if you go to the store and buy a DVD or CD, you would expect that, the media being in many cases breakable, making a copy of the CD or DVD to put aside in case the purchased copy is destroyed or broken is okay. Unfortunately, the courts seem to say “No”, at least under the new (now old) Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since you don’t own what you bought, even though you have a sales receipt — you can’t make copies or move it to another medium for ease of use. That’s counter-intuitive for many people and thus more and more people acting on common sense are actually committing crimes against intellectual property.

[Hyperion: If RIAA/MPAA didn’t act in such a counter-intuitive and heavy handed fashion, they might actually have people on their side.  Instead their flagrant violations of common sense and real world custom cause the people who understand the technology and culture to turn against them.  As someone (I forget who) said: What kind of sane business model consists of suing your best customers?]

Somehow it seems that when things go from hard copies to digital, the courts and the law don’t see them as being equivalent.  Somehow being digital makes them all nervous and scared. Then they start talking about things like digital crowbars, forgetting completely that crowbars are not illegal to own in the real world. Just because a criminal sometimes uses a crowbar to commit a crime doesn’t make everyone who owns one a criminal but the digital crowbar argument says if you own a digital crowbar you are in fact a criminal — even if you never use it to commit a crime. I have yet to hear of a lawyer bringing that point up against the digital crowbar scare tactic — though maybe I missed it somewhere.

My belief is that people are basically law abiding and that they use internalized morals to determine their behavior. I think the courts have been bamboozled into believing that piracy, intellectual property theft, and loss of revenues is far larger than it really is, because they have been lied to or mislead by agencies who cheated by not doing the research they purport to have done or who have knowingly supplied incorrect numbers and statistics to bolster their arguments.

In most documented cases, a person downloading a copy of a movie from a site, wasn’t going to buy it anyway. If you look at who is being taken to court, they’re usually low income persons who can’t fight back. I’ve yet to see them go after the big pirates — no they have money, lawyers and can fight back. (Cynicism again, yeah big time.)

In most of the cases (found and investigated by real researchers), it’s found that people who downloaded something illegally either then bought the movie or CD or got rid of it because they didn’t like it. Net result is that it wouldn’t have been a sale anyway (or there was actually a sale). I would imagine that most of the people who have a NetFlix subscription or belong to one of the movie rental places do so for the same reason. Why buy something you haven’t seen and don’t know if you’d want to see it over and over again.

In fact most reports show that RIAA’s bottom line has gone up since file sharing sites started having musical downloads. Why?  Because more people bought the music that they heard. There is a reason why music stores have those earphones and places where you can hear snippets of the music you are thinking of buying.

Instead of changing their business model to take into account the way people actually purchase and use media, these corporations are trying to use the legal route to force everyone to do things as they were done before the advent of digital media. (Of course it doesn’t help that many artists who couldn’t get the time of day from these big corporations, are now, because of the internet, able to develop a following and sell their material directly to their listeners/fans.

[Hyperion: When RIAA isn’t demanding that the music be taken down, despite having no authority to represent these artist’s interests and, in fact, acting completely in opposition to said interests.  But then it isn’t about the artists … it’s about the control.  Yeah, Gayle isn’t the only cynical one in the family.   But that doesn’t mean we’re wrong.]

I still think if I buy something I own it — too bad the big corps don’t feel the same way.

My father was in the Army during WWII. My grandfather was in the Navy. One of my uncles was in the Marines and I think the other was in the Army but he didn’t live in the same state and I hardly know him, so I’m not sure. When I lived in Mexico, Maine we’d go to the cemetery on Memorial Day or the day before to make sure there were flowers and a flag on my father’s grave, and later also on my grandfather’s. I spoke with my mother yesterday and she put a wreath on each of the graves of our family members.

Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day and it was a time to reflect on those who had been lost with an emphasis on those who’d lost their lives protecting their country — a day to remember Veterans. Time passes and now it seems with hardly anyone staying in one place anymore that the graveside laying of wreaths and flowers and leaving a flag have past. My mother was complaining that when she was at the cemetery that there were hardly any flowers on any of the graves. I reminded her that most of the youth have had to move away for jobs, and graves are now handled by the groundskeepers.

I’m in Maryland and my son is in Rhode Island. When my mother moves down here, in the sometime future, there will be little family left in the town I was born in — an aunt,  a niece,  a nephew, a sister-in-law once removed, and their families. The graves will probably then just get the usual groundskeeping and maybe a veterans group will remember to place a flag by the headstones of veterans.

Memorial Day has changed. It seems to me now that it’s a celebration of family. The living — with picnics and bbqs. And, as is usual at family gatherings, remembrances of those who are no longer with us except in our memories and our stories. The newspapers are filled with stories about how the holiday has lost its significance. I don’t think so, I think it has broadened its scope to include remembrances of all the fallen no matter how or when they past from present tense to loving memory.

Each of us, whether a veteran of a war (current or past), must do our part to preserve our nation’s heritage and now to restore our country to one that is looked up to as a beacon of hope and freedom — from oppression, from tyranny, from the misuse of power, and from torture and the abuse of human rights. Over the last few years, those “froms” have becomes “fors” and we, as a nation, need to stand up and put our country back on track. We’ve lost, as a nation, credibility in the eyes of the world and each of us must do our part to see that we never lose sight of the rights and freedoms guaranteed for all in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Those documents have always applied to all citizens of this country and anyone under its jurisdiction and we need to reaffirm our commitment to the principles that our founding fathers saw as the underpinning for our government.

In this fight to regain our status and credibility, we may not all risk our lives but we all have a duty to do our part to watch our elected officials and stay informed of their actions on our behalf and to make sure that we once again become a “shining beacon of freedom” for the world.

Those that gave their lives to defend this country did so because they held that freedom and those principles to be more important than their own lives.  When we remember them on this one day of the year, shouldn’t we also think of the kind of country that held such meaning for them?  Doing the right thing can be hard.  It’s far easier to just let things go and say that there was nothing that you could do.  I think the generations of Americans who have fought to the death against those that would currupt our country deserve a little more.  They gave their lives … is a letter or e-mail to your congress critter really that much of an inconvience?

I’ve been rushing to finish up the second sock that I’ve been knitting. Well, actually I want to finish up a number of projects that have just a bit left to go  because I want to start several new ones. So, I thought I’ll finish this sock then the sweater, then the next three things and then start the new stuff.

But on the very last row of the after-thought heel as I was turning it inside out to do the 3-needle bindoff — I dropped a stitch. It’s a stripped sock on number 2 needles and the stripe at the end was black… I’m sure you know where I’m going. At the moment, I’m unknitting down to where the stitch ran but it keeps running so I think I’m going to end up at the start of the heel again.

My grandmother had a saying for times like these — “the faster I go the behinder I get.” That’s how I feel right now. This whole day has been like that. Maybe knitting is sort of a metaphor for life. You run along great and then unlike real life you get an opportunity for do-overs. Well, I suppose you get opportunities for do-overs in real life too but they’re much more painful than with knitting. I can unravel knitting and just start over but with life there’s all the other connections with events and people and those can’t be just unraveled as if they never were to start from scratch again.

Yarn might be a bit kinked from being unraveled but basically it’s very forgiving — people, well, not so much. So, I guess I’m lucky that it’s only the stocking’s heel that’s giving me problems. So, I guess I’ve now talked myself into a better state of mind about the bungled heel and the dropped stitch. This is just another of knitting’s do-overs.

I’ve been going through my spam again and I started to wonder about the world as spam sees it:

• No one will respect me if I don’t have the perfect watch to match my ensemble. Heck, I don’t even match my ensemble — well, maybe I do … everything works with jeans. Besides I don’t wear a watch … there’s one in my phone.
• Evidently, bank fraud isn’t a crime in the UK or Nigeria since that’s where most of the email urging me to launder money comes from.
• I can lose weight and eat everything in sight if I just use one of the 100’s of products that claim to work. If any of these products worked they wouldn’t need to advertise, word-of-mouth would sell them.
• Somehow my work experience and my college degrees are going to expire … what, the wind of forgetfulness will waft through my skull and remove my memory?
• Drugs of all kinds are available online without a prescription — so why find a dealer in your local area????
• You can make millions of dollars by sending other people money… the mind boggles.
• This week alone I’ve won at least 4 billion dollars with my email address. So send me the check already.
• I’m not going to get into the spam reportedly from women who want my body or to thank me for the wonderful night we spent together (couldn’t have been too great since I don’t remember them any of them and you’d think I’d remember at least one of the 10-30 per night.)

Personally, I find it hard to believe that Congress thinks that trying to control spam is a bad idea because it interferes with legitimate businesses. I don’t get any spam from legitimate businesses, they only send me information that I specifically sign up to get. Since a good chunk of the spam I receive every day is sexual in content, I’d think the government would more than happy to Can Spam since they’re so verbal and vocal about protecting children from sex and sexual content on the internet.  Of course these are the same people who won’t authorize a XXX domain so we can just ignore all mail or sites with that extension.

Do people really fall for this stuff? They must or it wouldn’t be so prevalent. But, I have to wonder who reads those notes about “I’m from such and such bank and we have a customer who just died with no heirs and lots of money so how about you claim to be the heir and we split the money?” Yeah, I can imagine that lots of people read that and think, “Gee, what a great idea. I must help that poor bank manager embezzle that money.”

If the world according to spam was real, it would be a shallow sad place to live.

As many of you know, I’m a fan of science fiction and fantasy among other forms of entertainment and enjoyment.  Usually, hubby and I attend the World Science Fiction Convention which this year will be held in Montreal and is called (this year) Anticipation.  Members of the convention get to nominate and vote for the Hugo Awards which are given out at a ceremony held at the convention.  A friend pointed me to this great article on voting for the Hugo Awards. Kate Heartfield has raised many of the issues that have niggled at me for a long time.

We attend Worldcon every year that we can manage it. We attended our first as our honeymoon — we’d gotten married the weekend before the convention. Ever since, we celebrate our anniversary by attending the world science fiction convention and we’ve only missed three since that first one. We’ll be missing Anticipation this due to a variety of events including the current economic situation in the US. This year, because we were attending members of the last convention, we did nominate for the Hugo awards but we’ll be ineligible to vote for them.

Each year it has been a bit of work to figure out what to nominate (it has to have been published or first presented during the previous year), and once the nominees are announced to gather all the works and view and/or read them. But we, as do many others, take this privilege seriously. Hugo awards are presented to the best work of the previous year. The list of winners is impressive and many of the books, stories, and media that has won has withstood the test of time and is still remembered and read by fans of the genre.

Yet, each year when the numbers are published it seems that only about five hundred people (plus or minus a couple of hundred depending on the category) take the time and effort to nominate and vote for these awards. When the convention is in the US, membership (those attending is in the thousands (4-6,000) when the convention is outside the country the numbers are fewer but still many buy supporting memberships in order to nominate or attending in order to vote (whether they attend or not). Yet the numbers who actually nominate and vote remain fairly constant.

[NOTE: I’m not bothering to look up the actual numbers. These numbers are out there in the internet but I’m going from my memory and impressions and I’m fairly sure I’m only off on specifics and it’s the generalities that I’m talking about.]

When we first started attending the conventions, we had to go out and find all the nominated works and read them and then vote. One rule we’ve had is if you don’t read/watch it you don’t vote in that category. These awards are for the best and if you don’t know that category and haven’t read in it or haven’t read anything published in the appropriate year then you can’t make an informed decision.

Over the last several years, publishers and authors have been making the works available to members of the convention so that they can read all the nominated works for free. Of course finding and viewing the nominated works in the media categories is a bit trickier but the advent of Hulu, NetFlix and other sites have made this easier also.

So, why don’t the members who are eligible nominate or vote? I don’t know. For the last several years, I’ve been asking and some of the reasons I’ve been given are:

• I don’t have time
• My vote won’t count, it’s sewn up before we even get to nominate/vote
• I’m not an expert on the field, I just read it for fun
• No one cares what I think
• I don’t read any of the people who get nominated (follow-up question: did you nominate the ones you do read — answers is usually, No, why bother)
• Why bother, the best stuff never wins (follow-up question: did you nominate or vote — answer, No)

In point of fact, these answers are pretty similar to why people, in the US at least, don’t vote in their political elections. What I can’t understand is how you can expect that your choices would ever win if you don’t bother to get out there and nominate (too late for this year) and vote. I get truly baffled by the people who say “my opinions/wishes/vote doesn’t count” and then a follow up shows that these same people don’t nominate or vote or let their opinions/wishes be known. Seems to me if you sit and do nothing, you can’t expect to have your opinion/wishes taken into account.

Many years none of my nominees make the ballot. Many years people on the ballot are ones that I’ve never read before — and who have later become favorite authors. By taking part in the process, I’ve found authors I might not have found otherwise. I’ve at least done my part to see that the best in the field gets a fair chance at the spotlight.

So, why do so few chose to exercise their option to make a difference and to celebrate the best in the field?

Today, I  saw the news that the SciFi channel was changing its name to SyFy. Okay… but what were they thinking to do this? Then came the reason…

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don’t like science fiction enjoy a film like “Star Wars,” they don’t think it’s science fiction; they think it’s a good movie.

“We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”

Mr. Howe said going to Syfy will make a difference.

So, let me get this straight. First you insult your core audience and then you hope to widen that audience with the name change? Does this make sense to anyone but a TV executive? I’m female. I’m an avid reader of science fiction and have been all my life … at least since I ran into it about age 6 or 7. I’m also technologically literate and have been at various times a programmer, web designer, computer tech, and system administrator. I was also, once part of that core SciFi Channel viewing audience.

I say once because as the reality shows and wrestling seemed to take over I stopped watching. Guess maybe the name change is a good idea since as it stands now it has nothing to do with science fiction, little to do with science, and certainly nothing to do with excellence in programming.

All day today I’ve felt sort of off. By they time we had supper ready, I realized I had a headache — took some Tylenol. Two hours later I realized it was a whopping migraine. After taking one of my bazooka pain pills (of which I’m getting really, really low) it seems like the edge is off a bit but I can’t wear my glasses around my neck, everything has a halo, and just this bit of typing is taking for ever. (I’ve got a spell checker that works in forms and just about every other word is coming up with the red underline that means it’s misspelled. Thanks to the geeks of the world, I can still post correctly spelled drivel with a migraine.)

At least I got the proofing I needed to get done today for work before the migraine hit hard. I’d forgotten just how bad and painful these things can be. I had a minor one last month. Tomorrow I see my acupuncturist, she’s really helped with relieving the migraines. Usually, I have the halo and inability to think clearly but I don’t have more than the usual headache level of pain. So, now I’m not used to it like I was when I was on Tamoxifen (after having breast cancer) and had migraines every day for five years.

It’s like falling into a black pit of memories that I would really rather do without. If you’ve never had a migraine and you’re thinking, “it’s only a headache.” Well, take the worst headache you’ve every had in your life then imagine whacking yourself with a hammer or 2×4 and then multiply that by 100 — that’s migraine pain. If you’re really lucky you manage to medicate yourself enough to fall asleep or pass out — either one is a god sent relief. I’m signing off and taking another of my hoarded pain pills (remember doctors are very leary of giving out pain medications — my insurance company says aspirin and Tylenol work just as well for migraines as the Rx’d pain meds — I wish every medical insurance company exec would have a migraine at least once a week for a year and be only allowed to have aspirin or Tylenol — I believe they’d rapidly change their tune.)

Hopefully, the weather will stabilize (I’m pressure sensitive), and my acupuncturist will be able to help, and by tomorrow evening I’ll be able to think straight and talk coherently.

An article reports that scientists have mapped a first draft of the Neanderthal genome.

Highlights of the article:

Researchers used DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian fossils to map out more than 60 percent of the entire Neanderthal genome by sequencing three billion bases of DNA.

The analysis showed it is highly unlikely that much interbreeding occurred as there was “very little, if any” Neanderthal contribution to the human gene pool, said lead researcher Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute.

But it also revealed that our Neanderthal cousins may have been closer to us than we thought: they share a gene which plays a key function in speech and language.

I notice that no matter what they find out about Neanderthals, that it is continually stressed that Homo Sapiens are somehow much much better. I’ll grant that we’re different. I’ll even grant that our genetic makeup is different enough that there may have been little interbreeding. But that only means that they differ from us, not that we’re better, or they’re less because of it.
After all, it’s believed that we shared a common ancestor about 300,000 years ago. And, lets face it, genetically we’re not really all that different.

Look at the picture. If we put a tanned modern man next to him in the same clothing and with the same spear — would they really be that much difference between them other than the forehead?

We, as a species, are reaching out to the stars hoping to meet other sentient species out there. But what would we do if we had a first contact with another species? I don’t think we’d do very well, personally. Here on earth every time we find that a species meets our criteria for sentience, we change the criteria rather than admit that the species just might be intelligent. If we met aliens and they didn’t look like us would we just figure they were the intelligent species equivalent of a bird in a mining cave and ignore it, or try to kill it? I don’t know.

Watching my species over the last few decades, I have my doubts about our ability to logically think, find solutions to problems without resorting to violence, or even to act together for the good of our planet rather than the bottom line of a corporate spreadsheet. So, my opinion of our ability to actually make first contact and to correctly assess the intent or intelligence of the alien species — is not very high at the moment.

However, I’m excited by the new information that geneticists are making in finding our how our and other species genomes are put together and how they work.