The Mathletes and the Miley Photoshop 555
On June 24, a Tennessee man was arrested for possessing photos that showed the faces of three underage girls, including Miley Cyrus, superimposed onto the nude bodies of adult women. Assistant District Attorney Dave Denny said of the arrest, "When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman, it's going to be the state's position that this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity." The phrase "simulated sexual activity" apparently refers to a Tennessee sex crimes law which states in part: "It is unlawful for any person to knowingly possess material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity that is patently offensive."
Assuming this is the crime that the D.A. plans to charge him with, to me it seems obvious that the defendant didn't violate the law as written. For one thing, if the nude women in the pictures were just standing there (and neither the article nor the D.A.'s statement suggests otherwise), then there was no "sexual activity" in the photos of any kind, real or simulated. But even if the nude adult women in the photos had been engaged in sexual activity (even just striking a mildly sexy pose), the law still would not apply, because the law requires an actual minor to actually be engaged in something, even if that "something" is simulated sexual activity. So if a video showed a real minor that appeared to be masturbating or having sex with someone in a manner that was "patently offensive", that could violate the law. (Hopefully the "patently offensive" clause would exclude artistic movies like The Tin Drum, although that defense has not always worked.) But if the girls' faces were simply cut and pasted onto the bodies of the women in the photos, then the minors in question were not "engaged in" anything. The D.A. appears to have confused "material that includes a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity" with "material that simulates a minor engaged in sexual activity". And the D.A.'s statement that "this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity" — clearly implying that the pictures are for sexual gratification and therefore this is "simulated sexual activity" — is ridiculous. The defendant probably used pictures of Miley with her clothes on for "sexual gratification" — does that make the photos "simulated sexual activity"? (Dave Denny's office did not respond to my request for comment.)
But I was more interested in a different question: What would people in a survey think about whether the defendant violated the law? And, would people who are good at math, answer the question differently from everyone else? And would those people answer the question differently from people who are good at, say, English composition?
That might seem like an odd twist to put on it. But if you can show that a certain answer correlates with mathematical ability, that indicates something special about that answer. And if you can show that that answer appeals to people with math skills, but not to people with English/writing/composition skills, then that indicates something interesting not just about that answer, but about mathematical ability as well, as opposed to writing ability. Whether that answer is "right" or "wrong" (or whether you think those terms are even meaningful for a legal opinion), it is a fact, not an opinion, that people with self-reported higher math skills are more likely to pick that as the correct choice.
By contrast, when the D.A. makes a public statement about the criminality of the defendant's actions, the implication is that we should give some weight to his statements because of his qualifications, such as being a member of the bar. But if we were to ask other bar members to decide independently of each other whether the defendant committed a crime, would they converge on the same answer? If not, then why should we listen to him, as opposed to someone else with the same credentials? When an expert cites their credentials in support of an opinion, if it's not true that other experts with the same credentials would back them up on that opinion, I don't think people realize the extent to which there is no there there.
So in the survey, I described the man's alleged actions and the Tennessee statute, and asked people if they thought he had violated the law. I also asked respondents to rate their math skills as "Excellent"/"Very good"/"Good"/"Fair"/"Poor" and to rate their English/composition skills as "Excellent"/"Very good"/"Good"/"Fair"/"Poor". The survey was posted on the Amazon Mechanical Turk site, where you can post "tasks" for people to complete in exchange for small payments of, say, 25 cents apiece. Some companies use this for grunt work (like hiring people to review user-submitted profile photos to make sure they don't contain nudity), but I use the site mainly to conduct surveys.
I think it's unlikely that the Mechanical Turk users are a representative cross-section of the population, but I use it more to find significant relative differences between demographic groups. If 60% of women on the site answer a question one way and 80% of men answer it the other way, that probably suggests that in a real cross-sectional survey of the population, men and women would largely disagree on the answer as well. (The alternative would be that the kind of men and women who use Mechanical Turk are predisposed to answer the question differently along gender lines in a way that average men and women are not, but that seems unlikely.)
For this survey, I offered users 25 cents apiece for completing this survey and collected 127 responses. The results in a nutshell:
- About two-thirds of all respondents (85 out of 127) said that the man did violate the law.
- However, among the respondents who rated their own math skills as "Excellent", only 44% (12 out of 27) said he violated the law, and 56% (15 out of 27) said that he did not. Out of all ten ability groupings (five different ability groupings for math, from "Excellent" to "Poor", and five for English), this was the only group where a majority said that the defendant didn't violate the statute.
- Respondents who self-rated their English/composition skills as "Excellent", were also more likely than average to vote that the man did not violate the law, but a majority of them still voted that he did.
These results are significant at the 99% level, which you can check using an online statistical significance calculator. In other words, despite the modest sample size, the answers given by the respondents with self-rated "excellent" math skills are so starkly different from everyone else's, that there's less than a 1 in 100 chance that the difference is due to coincidence. Almost certainly, something about mathematical ability is correlated with a person's likelihood of giving the "not guilty" answer. (At this point I'm going to give in to my bias and hereinafter refer to that as the "right answer.")
Furthermore, while respondents with "excellent" English/composition skills were also more likely than average to get the right answer (a difference that is also significant at the 99% level, given the collected data), they were considerably less likely to do so, than the users with self-reported "excellent" math skills (again, significant at the 99% level). I tabulated all the responses.
If I could afford to pay a larger sample, I would investigate whether the effect of "excellent" English/composition skills disappears entirely when you control for math skills. In other words, it's possible that the people with excellent English/composition skills were more likely than average to get the right answer, but only insofar as their English/composition skills were correlated with excellent math ability — and maybe people with "excellent" English/composition skills, but only average math ability, score no better than the average respondents.
One thing that jumps out at me: Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis that good math skills lead people to converge on the correct answer. But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student. Without that insight, there was no reason to expect them to be better than average at answering a question that has no resemblance to their textbook's practice problems.
In fact, I suspect that many of the people who self-reported their math skills as "excellent", and who still answered "yes" to the question of whether the man violated the law, probably fell into that studious-but-not-insightful category as well. It would be interesting to test whether if you required respondents to actually answer a math question — not a standard textbook question, but a tricky question that required people to demonstrate an understanding of what is actually going on — if the correlation between correctly answering that question, and "correctly" answering the legal question, is even stronger.
But what I think is even more important than the correlation of the correct answer with "excellent" math ability, was the significantly lower correlation of the correct answer with "excellent" English skills. I've been saying for years that you can use excellent prose to defend an illogical idea, or you can use poorly crafted prose to defend a good idea, and so if you care about the quality of an idea and its impact on the real world, you have to look at the substance of an argument, not the style. Economics professor Steven Landsburg writes in his forthcoming philosophy book The Big Questions,
The bane of a college professor's existence is the student who has been taught in a writing course that there is such a thing as good writing, independent of having something to say. Students turn in well-organized grammatically correct prose, with the occasional stylistic flourish in lieu of any logical argument, and don't understand why they've earned grades of zero.
I call such people "vocabulemics", who seem to think the purpose of a discussion is to vomit up as many SAT vocab prep words as possible, rather than to form a coherent point. I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law.
If you're still unconvinced by the results of a survey of mathletes, consider that they do match up well with the comments provided to me by Mark Rasch, a lawyer and computer security specialist with Secure IT Experts and the former head of the Department of Justice Computer Crimes Unit:
First, an image of a minor engaged in simulated sexual activity is not the same as a simulated minor engaged in sexual activity... In other words, if you posed actual minors, nude, and made it look like they were having sex, it would be a crime, even though there was no "actual" sexual activity. In most other contexts, when the legislature says "simulated sexual activity" they mean real people engaged in what appears to be sex. The government is trying to apply this theory to real sex but simulated minors. I don't think that passes statutory muster.. its not what the statute prohibits... Under that rationale, if you had, for example, a picture of two dogs mating, and glued pictures of kids on the dogs faces, this would be "simulated sexual activity" but would not be prosecutable. Where do you draw the line? Under federal law, you typically draw the line at the use and posing of real kids.
Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from credentialed expert Mr. Rasch, vindicates the opinion of the math aficionados who voted that the defendant did not violate the law. I think it's the other way around — the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with mathematical ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Rasch.
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Informative)
It's a bug in Slashcode somewhere. Happens to all of my archived posts when I view them -- anything I put in italics or boldface turns into a
blockquote
. Yes, it's really annoying, but it's not the submitter's fault.
Re:Fix your tags (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I would have guessed otherwise (Score:3, Informative)
The shopped in head would be transitive (a R b && b R c -> a R c)if you only considered the head, but the "body", in it's entirety, wouldn't be since (Miley_head + Miley_body) != (Miley_head + Adult_body). Unless the head has some property that consumes any other value paired with it such that it always produces the value of the head.
Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Here in the UK I think you're allowed to have pictures of breasts at 16, have to be 18 for fully naked pics though. Then again in some other countries it probably wouldn't be illegal no matter what the ages were, but I consider this a very borderline case since she's 17 at the moment, so it doesn't seem too perverted from my cultural perspective - in the UK you can legally marry or have sex as long as you're both 16 or over (think it's 18 for homosexuals). You can also start drinking here at 18. I'm glad I don't live in the US :P
No no no no no - please learn what a p value means (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great formatting in this article (Score:5, Informative)
View the HTML source, the quotes are actually <i> elements — that is, it's a bug in Slashcode's CSS. The problem is that this bug doesn't occur on every Slashdot page, only some pages. So, likely, when the author composed their message, it was on a page that the bug didn't occur on, so they couldn't have known that it would have rendered so differently on another page.
The buggy part of the CSS page reads:
Re:Austistic Spectrum (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sorry (Score:3, Informative)
In order to get italics with the current stylesheet, use <em> tags.
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Informative)
You need to use the
tag if you want actual italics and the
tag if you want actual boldface.
Italics
Boldface
The "b" tag and the "i" tag both tend to get rendered incorrectly now. I think it must default to the annoying block quote...The tags above are supposed to be in an "ecode" tag, but it fricking blockquoted those as well.
Re:50% (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm ... citation needed.
http://www.ambulancedriving.com/research/WP65-rateaboveav.html [ambulancedriving.com]
Re:Oh purleeeease (Score:3, Informative)
You evidently missed that he said the exact opposite in the article:
"Depending on how you look at it, you may think that this opinion from credentialed expert Mr. Rasch, vindicates the opinion of the math aficionados who voted that the defendant did not violate the law. I think it's the other way around -- the fact that this answer was correlated in the survey responses with mathematical ability, vindicates the opinion of Mr. Rasch."
Re:Tough one (Score:5, Informative)
Suppose that I am _imagining_ the face of a little kid super imposed on to the body of a naked adult [or a tentacale rape monster, or whatever upsets the largest number of people]. Suppose that in the near future, technology can read my thoughts through the walls of my home, and further suppose that I am not wearing my tin foil hat.
If I am thinking about little-kid/adult hybrid mutants and jacking off, and somebody catches me thinking about it, should that be a crime?
The court case here is essentially isomorphic to the situation I have described -- this case suggests that it is a thought crime to think about a kids face posted onto an adults body in a sexual way.
Here is what the US supreme court decided:
But the TN law says this:
Scary stuff.
Re:Tough one (Score:5, Informative)
Not only that, but:
"When you have the face of a small child affixed to a nude body of a mature woman, it's going to be the state's position that this is for sexual gratification and that this is simulated sexual activity."
Miley Cyrus is not a small child. She's 16. I could see the argument for saying a 16 year old can't legally consent, but certainly there's a difference between nude photos of a 16 year old versus a 9 year old (even if Miley herself was the one posing, which she isn't).
Also, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 [wikipedia.org] made simulated child porn illegal. It was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2002.
Re:Austistic Spectrum (Score:4, Informative)
OK ... it's either illegal or it isn't and the fact that when people are involved in an 'event' their opinions of whether or not the event is, or should be, illegal change has no bearing on the actuality of the legality of the event - and thankfully so! That is the reason why vigilantes are frowned upon, because they will more often than not have an emotional attachment to the event, and almost by definition will be looking to string someone up for it!
To examine any event for legality you really need to be able to step outside emotions and look at the problem rationally, and, as per my previous post, this is perhaps where the better educated are at an advantage.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Informative)
So in your view, there is no difference between "images of minors engaged in simulated sex acts" and "simulated images of minors engaged in sex acts"?
Because that's the difference the post is discussing, not whether you think either activity is OK.
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Informative)
<em> and <strong> are preferred, particularly in XHTML documents (and maybe HTML 4 Strict - I'm not certain) because HTML is intended to define the structure of a document and not the formatting. Using tags to apply bold, italics, and underline (the trio - <b>, <i>, <u>) is using HTML to define the formatting and not the structure. <u> was eliminated (and underlining can only be done in CSS now), with <em> and <strong> introduced for the structure (an emphasized statement or a strongly-spoken statement if you will) that typically is represented by italics and bold.
Also of note is that several tags apply the same formatting (italics in this case) while defining a different element structurally. The <address> tag, for instance, defaults to also italicizing the text within. In short, while it may not be as intuitive when you're using HTML for formatting, it does preserve the intent of HTML as a structural markup language better.
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
The law means pretty much whatever you can manage to convince a judge and/or jury it means. What the legislature intended it to mean is largely inconsequential. Even if your representatives managed to read the law before voting for it (which is a matter of some considerable debate) each of the potentially hundreds of representatives voting will have differing interpretations.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Analysis error (Score:3, Informative)
I think Mr. Hasselton made a fundamental error in his analysis. When you ask people to self-rate how good they are at a subject, you first need to read Unskilled and Unaware of It [apa.org]. The research can be summed up simply: people who are not very good at X are more likely to rate themselves highly than people who truly are good at X.
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
It was a boring trial that would have devolved into "he said", "she said", so I wasn't sad when I was released from jury duty. I'd really like to sit on an important case, because I believe in jury nullification. i.e. one of the principles that this country was founded on.
Re:you lost me at hello (Score:3, Informative)
16 is legal for sex in most jurisdictions of the world. 10 is illegal for most. The more interesting question is, were the photos just nudes, or did they show sexual activity? Nude photos of teenagers not engaging in sexual activity (e.g. this [met-art.com]) are usually not illegal in Western society.
Re:Tough one (Score:3, Informative)
Oddly enough, in my state (Kansas) a 16 year old can consent to actual sex with an actual adult. No problem.
But if you take pictures of it, you go to jail.
Re:you lost me at hello (Score:3, Informative)
I'm curious when we reached http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point [wikipedia.org] on this issue, because I can recall just three generations ago people getting married at age 13. I also recall in many states having 16 as the legal age to wed. So why is it that when a male looks at a female who has entered puberty and starts producing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheromone [wikipedia.org] and all the other outward appearances that she is ready for sex, that it is somehow "sick and disgusting"? I wouldn't want someone looking at my daughter that way, but that doesn't mean what they are doing is wrong.
Not only that now you're criminalizing thoughts and desires or even human curiosity. For instance my wife wanted me to turn out the light last night so she reached out her and said "go, go, gadget arm". I walked over and turned out the light, then on the way back to bed I said "go go gadget penis", at which she laughed for a while. This reminded me of http://xkcd.com/305/ [xkcd.com] (rule 34); so I Googled "go go gadget penis" and instead of the obvious image of inspector gadget with an extend able penis, I get his daughter doing the dog. This image would be enough to land me in jail according to the current laws and as you can see that wasn't what I was looking for at all. I did also find a great quote from Leslie Nelson that "go go gadget penis" is the greatest one liner of all time.
Cases like this one scare the crap out of me because the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality [wikipedia.org] of the people in this nation are putting innocent people in jail. We might as well just form a good old fashion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sorry (Score:3, Informative)
They've been un-deprecated in HTML 5:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#changed-elements [w3.org]
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-i-element [w3.org]
So continue using b and i without fear. They're still in HTML 4 (if "deprecated") and will almost certainly continue to be in HTML 5.
Re:This just in: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Informative)
You're partially right, but wrong about the age. 16 is usually is the top.
In my state, Georgia, the age of consent is 16. People who are over 16 can have sex with anyone else who's over 16. A 116 year old can have sex with a 16 year old.
It's people who are under 16 who can have sex with people if within three years. (IIRC it's three years.) Actually, strictly speaking, it's a misdemeanor, so it is illegal, but that's mostly so cops can grab you in public and call your parent, and stop kids from renting hotel rooms. (And it explicitly does not count as a 'sex crime'.)
Also, that exception only goes down to 13 or so, but that's because at that point they don't charge anyone with anything. If two ten year olds are 'having sex', um...it's not the legal system who need to fix that.
So, yes, there's a 'window', but it's below the age of consent, which is, indeed, usually 16. (I believe there's only one state where it's 18, and a few 15 and 17, and one 14!)
As an aside, in Georgia, this sliding window exception stupidly didn't apply to oral sex, which resulted in a rather spectacular court case and uproar a while back. I forgot the name of the guy, but a 17 year old boy let a 15 year old girl give him a blowjob at a party, and somewhat accidentally got charged with felony statutory rape. (The police burst in on the party during it, and the parties involved, thinking they'd be better off if it was just oral sex, admitted to it in their statements to the police, who didn't even realize the law said that.) That law has been changed, and I think he was pardoned by the governor.
However, the 'nude picture' thing is 18, everywhere, resulting in the absurdity, in 49 of the 50 states, where people cannot possess pictures of people they are legally allowed to have sex with. (Both fully legally, or 'misdemeanor so we can hassle children doing it' legally.)
Oh, actually, that's true in all 50. Even in the sole state you can't have sex in until you're 18, which is, I think, Oregon, you can still get married younger with parental permission, which give an 'age of consent' exception everywhere that people can marry younger below it. But legally, you cannot take nude pictures of your spouse.
Argh, bad formatting (Score:3, Informative)
That kind of reasoning might be good enough to get you into the police academy, and it might be good enough as a legal theory to arrest someone, but that doesn't make the theory correct, nor will it automatically win a conviction. Incidentally, the term of art is “probable cause,” and all it means is that some material or behavior created a reasonable level of suspicion in a cop's mind that a crime had been committed. Sometimes the cops find nothing, which is embarrassing — and don't think that a cop won't take that embarrassment out on the suspect. Sometimes they find what they think is something, and then it turns out at trial that they had nothing.
Re:Invasion of privacy? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, this WAS 15 years ago - not yesterday. I'm 15 years wiser, and I haven't worked retail support since 1997. Plus hard drives aren't 40MB anymore, porn is everywhere, and you wouldn't be copying directories with drag-and-drop or CLI these days (hopefully).
So even if I cared enough to browse people's files (which I don't), and had access to them (which I don't), I'm mature enough to avoid doing so. Unless they were famous people, in which case my internal voyeur might be unable to resist.