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Comment Re:Heck (Score 1) 230

without having a degree to start with it's pretty much futile in terms of knowing what is and is not reliable information.

'Cause experiments are hard, and common sense doesn't come until you get a Ph.D

A smart person is a person who knows how to learn. People stop learning when they stop trying. Anyone can be smart (save for those with severe disabilities) in a different given way, so long as they continue activating their brain to study and learn about things. That's one reason, in my opinion, that college-schooled individuals are generally seen as smarter than the rest: they have continued to learn. If the lessons stuck, they won't accept their degree as a plateau and cease learning there, even.

To your comment that implies a degree itself makes one smarter and/or is required in order to know good from bad: take it from someone who is generally recognized as very intelligent that the piece of paper and title along with it do not mean as much as the work that went into them. And trust me, you can do that work and more without ever stepping foot into a classroom.

Comment Re:Claire Perry, way to admit to being a bad mothe (Score 1) 335

There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief.

If you actually care, you have more than the necessary resources to look it up yourself. Mine it is not to convince someone against their will that a cherished belief is wrong.

So which is it?

Read again. These statements do not contradict one another.

I happen upon you, who not only talks of evidence but suggests that there is an abundance of it, in favor of censorship

I'm sorry, where do you see support for censorship in my post? You clearly have mastered quotes, please do point it out.

I'd be lucky if I could perform a Google search on the topic without somehow lousing it up

It's called safe-search.

Your claim is fantastic. On par with claiming to have proof of evidence of God.

My claim:

it does appear that you (like many other slashdotters) regard pornography as being harmless. There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief.

A claim that evidence exists of sexually explicit material (mind you, not even having qualified what variety of pornography this would be, such as the forms directly depicting and portraying as pleasurable or erotic the violent beatings of other human beings) being something other than harmless is in your mind equivalently fantastic as the claim of having proof of God's existence? Perhaps you've simply never thought about pornography at all. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here.

Now for some links, which you also seem to enjoy very much.

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Cline
  2. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED364919&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED364919
  3. http://www.springerlink.com/content/nl0u0phwq6727n2t/
  4. http://www.strengthenthefamily.net/is_there_proof.php

Feel free to cry about the sources of some of these links. Again, I have already reasoned on the subject and seen enough evidence for me to be convinced in the direction that I am: the consumption of pornography is harmful. I do not need to prove this to myself again and I have no desire to do anything in your regard but to show that I believe what I say and am not making baseless claims, "bad bluffs." Again I will say, if you actually care about the subject there is more than enough material on the internet to show you what the esteemed medical/psychological community has found in their studies regarding pornography. I'm washing my hands of this thread. Good day sir.

Comment Re:Claire Perry, way to admit to being a bad mothe (Score 1) 335

Nice passive aggressive ad hominem. Really got a chuckle out of that. A fine way to further trivialize an already weak post.

I never asked you to adopt my point of view. If you want to believe that viewing pornography has no negative effect on you then you are welcome to continue doing so. Mine it is not to convince someone against their will that a cherished belief is wrong.

Regarding the aforementioned evidence: an arrogant and sarcastic post such as the one you have offered really doesn't merit very much of my time, as far as I'm concerned. We live in the information age, communicating on the information superhighway. If you actually care, you have more than the necessary resources to look it up yourself. The fact is, you are anticipating that I will further invest myself into a discussion/argument with you from which you most likely derive some pleasure. I won't be the one to offer it. Argue with someone else.

Comment Re:Claire Perry, way to admit to being a bad mothe (Score 1) 335

Your point of view sounds reasonable but it does appear that you (like many other slashdotters) regard pornography as being harmless. There is much evidence that contradicts such a belief. I revert to an illustration I'm quite fond of: if you know a drink is poisonous, how much of it do you drink? To add to the illustration, if your kids want to drink it, do you allow them to only as long as you can supervise them and watch them do it? Now clearly we are coming from entirely different viewpoints on this issue. Just know that for those of us who consider pornography to be objectively dangerous/harmful, the quantity, setting, or myriad other factors are of relatively little importance. I'm not the type of person who supports legislation to "fix" our problems for us (the only government I support is God's Kingdom) but I do empathize with where this mother seems to be coming from, i.e. there's a danger, help me protect my children from it.

Comment Re:you're missing something (Score 1) 206

Lest ye be totally misled: the original article states that the process that led to this discovery was applied in the image domain. That is, with graphical information (pixels?). The MRI is in the Fourier domain and thus benefits differently from this (this has been explained by other posters and frankly I don't clearly understand it), but you must consider that this all goes back to that one guiding principle under discussion: sparsity.

Comment Re:You can't create something from nothing - can y (Score 1) 206

You're missing the scope of the sampling. It doesn't sample a 200x200 square and give you a 1024x768 image, it samples random pixels from the range you are looking to come out with in the end.</p>

To put it in Javascript...

for(rows=1; rows < maxrows; rows++){
for(cols=1; cols < maxcols; cols++){
  if(Math.rand() < 0.2){ StorePixel(cols,rows) }
}
}

And if taking an image of something that typically appears in the natural world, you will come out with a picture that is "not wrong." That means that it won't put something there that isn't supported by the data, data that is randomly sampled and likely to represent at least a portion of every significant aspect of the original object. In practice, they have used this to great efficacy, so the arguments of "it won't work" are invalid. It has, it does.

Comment Re:The next line states... (Score 2, Informative) 360

browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and online communities

All of which would likely increase activity of which neuro-transmitter? Did anyone say dopamine? And what else increases dopamine activity? More witches! Err, no. Certain classes of drugs, illicit or otherwise. And depression is provably related to imbalances in norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine. I'd love to get a real biologist's take on this research.

Comment Re:Ugh... (Score 1) 252

Are you sure you didn't mean to quote this part:

shoulder pads, big hair, jackets with sleeves rolled up, zip-up shoes (remember Ciaks?), scraps of brightly fabric tied everywhere, puffy shirts, skinny leather neckties, faux military uniforms, solitary white gloves

Seems more GaGa to me. YMMV.

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