Your reading comprehension is not as good as you think it is.

For somebody who says that we should respect women, your language towards someone you disagree with is too snarky and disrespectful for me to want to continue this discussion.

That was in a university. At that time, we had a strong principle of academic freedom, and it would have been inappropriate and a violation of their AAUP contracts for HR to say anything.

My freshman physics professor, who was a great teacher, was teaching in the U.S. for the first time in several years, because he had been blacklisted during the McCarthy days. An oceanography professor had escaped Nazi Germany. One of my art teachers was arrested in an obscenity case. So they were very defensive of free speech.

One of the leading Supreme Court cases in free speech was the one known as the "Fuck the Draft" case. So even the Supreme Court defended free speech back then.

Now, we have much less free speech. In the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case, the Supreme Court took a dive.

It's not a coincidence that several college teachers who have been fired by their administrations, over the objections of the faculty, "Not for what he said but the manner in which he said it," had criticized Israel, like Norman Finkelstein and Steve Salaita. Salaita was fired after a billionaire contributor said he wouldn't give the university any more money. Or search Google for "professor fired" to get an idea of the state of free speech in America.

The original PLOS article was about the academic profession. That's an environment in which we try to give people maximum freedom.

Either you have free speech or you don't. As Lennie Bruce said, if you can't say "Fuck", you can't say "Fuck the government." And now, sure enough, we can't say either.

Yes, but in this survey, they only asked Question 32 about "inappropriate or sexual remarks" and Question 39 about "physical sexual harassment".

You can't tell from this survey whether the subject said "no", or whether the incidents happened once or repeatedly.

The survey asks them for a completely subjective response. They say in the article that they deliberately didn't give definitions. So these "inappropriate sexual remarks" might have been something as innocuous as telling an off-color joke in a bar after work. The "physical sexual harassment" might have been a co-worker putting his hand on your arm.

If you join a group of people and they have a certain style of conversation, should everybody else accommodate your standards, or should you accommodate theirs? I don't see why everybody else should be required to change their language to your standards. This is what anthropologists study. I'd like to see studies of these real issues.

Some people are very prudish. If you say "fuck", they get upset. Other people say "fuck" all the time. When I was in college, my English teachers assigned us poems by Alan Ginsberg, who used "fuck" all the time. Some people -- very few -- were upset. What were we supposed to do -- censor Alan Ginsberg's poems? Should we all change? Or should that one Freshman English student from a religious high school realize that she's being too fastidious and that this is the way adults talk?

Suppose the incidents happen repeatedly, and the subject doesn't say "no"? That's what happened in the Bora Zivkovic case. Nobody stopped coming to work. They even encouraged him. Then they suddenly started complaining that they were being harassed all along.

It's not that simple. That's why people study anthropology.

I did read the study, and the appendix S1. I just reread it, searching for "assault" and "rape."

They define "assault" to mean "unwanted sexual contact, up to and including rape." Apparently, they measure it by the answers to Question 39, about "physical sexual harassment," which is where they got that 26% figure from.

They don't define "unwanted sexual contact." For example, Bora Zivkovic had a habit of hugging women, some of whom didn't enjoy it. That is literally an "unwanted sexual contact." It may be creepy, unpleasant or inappropriate, and it should (and did) stop. But it's not rape.

This study doesn't distinguish between unwanted hugging and forcible rape, and it doesn't break down the 26% figure into more or less violent forms of unwanted sexual contact. It doesn't even give the number of violent rapes.

If you have an unknown number of unwanted huggings, at one end of the spectrum, and an unknown number of violent rapes, at the other end of the spectrum, then that's a big grey area.

Managers get their orders from the legal department. The legal department sets rules that will give them a safe harbor from lawsuits, and not necessarily rules that are fair, reasonable, logical, or based on evidence.

This study is oversimplified. I think they're using science to advance their political agenda. That's OK, but they need better science. I'd like to see a better-quality study.

No, what they're talking about is, according to the article:

That's not sexual assault. I'm not even sure it rises to the level of sexual harassment.

Flirtation isn't sexual harassment. I'm sure every woman in the country must have been the subject of welcome and unwelcome flirtations.

At a recent professional meeting, a woman made suggestive sexual remarks to me about a computer program. If I had said the same thing to another woman, the second woman could have interpreted it as harassment under that definition.

There's a lot of grey areas and political correctness. If you want to look at it with publications in the scientific literature, fine. Let's use rigorous scientific methods to find out what the magnitude of sexual assault is. The first step is get your definitions right.

Here's one of the questions:

In terms of good experimental design, that does seem too broad. "Comments about physical beauty" could be harassment or not. It's a leading question. What's inappropriate? They're not measuring sexual harassment, they're measuring their respondents' subjective perceptions of their colleagues' comments.

It seems as if the researchers were designing the study with the intent of coming up with the largest numbers possible, in order to make the problem seem as big as possible.

Last week a girl said to me, "that's a nice sweater," which I as a geek trying to understand social interactions interpreted as a friendly way of making small talk. If I said the same thing to a girl, these respondents could report it as sexual harassment.

This study has flaws that the peer reviewers should have identified.

I'd like to see studies of sexual harassment that meet the standards I see from rigorous scientific studies elsewhere.

You didn't go to Antioch, by any chance? That's where Nobel laureate Mario Capecci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... graduated.

One of the most useful books I read in college was an art history book, Mechanization Takes Command, by Sigfried Giedion. (Here's a sample http://www.ediblegeography.com... you might be able to find the complete edition online).

He taught me about how technology changed things -- when that technology was first steam and then electricity. I learned about the Bauhaus from that. It's pretty insightful to learn about engineering from a historical perspective, starting with stone axes, the way an art historian looks at it.

I found it in the school library by picking an interesting book off the shelf of architecture and design books.

There was a story, I think on Slashdot, about cops who would go online and pretend to be sexually aggressive 13-year-old girls, luring in social misfits.

A lot of it seemed to be entrapment, that is, they trapped people into committing a crime who would never have committed a crime without the encouragement and manipulation of the cops. The entrapment defense has an unreasonable burden of proof.

That's not the kind of policing I would admire.

If Timmy said that Frank had been doing something heinous, then the cops could get a search warrant to arrest Frank and search his house and computer. They wouldn't need to trap him into exchanging child porn.

Unfortunately it's usually impossible to prosecute cops for misconduct. The only thing that has some small deterrence is throwing out the evidence (which the cop shouldn't have gotten in the first place).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
Challenges Seen in Prosecuting Police for Use of Deadly Force
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
SEPT. 3, 2014
MIAMI — For decades, Florida has had a history of deadly, racially tinged police confrontations, many of them involving unarmed men, which have led to riots, protests and a steady undercurrent of rancor between minorities and the police. But in the past 20 years, not a single officer in Florida has been charged for using deadly force.

18 years for trading child pornography?

I'll come out and say it, these laws are wrong. We have a higher incarceration rate than anyplace else in the world, rivaling Russia and China. Do you want to send those rates up even further?

I agree that child sexual exploitation is wrong. I think child pornography should be used as evidence for prosecuting the underlying crime. I can accept a reasonable criminal punishment for distributing child pornography, if that's the only way to send a message that our society strongly condemns child sexual exploitation. It seems that prosecuting people for having child pornography on their computers does more harm than good overall. I'm not convinced that prosecuting people at six degrees of separation from the underlying crime should be a crime itself. And I'm also not convinced that possessing child pornography created outside the U.S. should be a crime within the U.S. (Our bombs blow children to pieces in our many wars, which I think is a greater harm than their being sexually abused.) We don't prosecute web sites like bestgore.com that show beheadings and rapes.

But 18 years for trading child pornography is way out of bounds. That's the sentence we should give to somebody who originally abused the children to create the pornography, not someone at several steps removed who winds up with the images of it.

I think child pornography prosecutions are like traffic tickets. It's a lot easier for a cop to sit on his ass eating donuts in front of a computer monitor than it is to go out and prosecute actual sex crimes. And it would take a large shift in budget from uneducated cowboy cops to social workers, criminologists and social scientists who actually understand child sexual abuse and how to stop it.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Child abuse rises with income inequality
February 11, 2014
Summary: As the Great Recession deepened and income inequality became more pronounced, county-by-county rates of child maltreatment -- from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to traumatic brain injuries and death -- worsened, according to a nationwide study.

http://www.bmj.com/content/347...
Research: Preventing sexual abusers of children from reoffending: systematic review of medical and psychological interventions
BMJ 2013; 347 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.... (Published 9 August 2013)

http://www.miamiherald.com/201...
Florida spurns $50 million for child-abuse prevention

If we don't get it, the terrorists will get it first.

Grow a big moustache.

Right-wing wacko. Ignore. Put name on bozo list.