Debunking a Viral Internet Post About Breastfeeding Racism 350
You can see the side-by-side pictures in the November 10 editorial by Ruby Hamad. My first thought, upon seeing the pictures, was that this is not a controlled experiment -- the woman on the left is breastfeeding in public, while the woman on the right is breastfeeding against a blank wall inside a presumably private room. While I think breastfeeding in public should be completely normalized, it's not the same thing as breastfeeding in private, and so that might have accounted for the difference in reactions, if there was any.
My second thought was that the data on people's reactions was not collected in a systematic way. According to the editorial, the black photo of the black mother, Karlesha Thurman, was posted on the Facebook page Black Women Do Breastfeed, and "[w]hile Karlesha received many supportive comments, the backlash was so severe, she eventually deleted the photo." The photo of the Australian woman, Jacci Sharkey, was posted by the University of the Sunshine Coast on their Facebook page, where it received 275,000 Facebook "likes", but also, according to the editorial, "more than a few detractors, proving that breastfeeding in public is (still!) a contentious issue for women of all races." There's no apples-to-apples comparison gauging people's reactions to the two photos under similar conditions.
But just because the methodology was imprecise, doesn't mean that the underlying phenomenon might not be real. Maybe Internet users really do have different gut reactions to pictures of black women and white women breastfeeding.
One quick way to get a rough answer is Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, where you can pay legions of workers some small amount of money per person to complete some menial task that can't be automated by a computer. I've used it dozens of times for surveys (such as gauging whether people would strongly prefer slideout keyboard phones) and for amateur psychological experiments (including one experiment which suggested that people who answered a math problem correctly were more likely to disagree with an attorney general's dubious legal argument). So I created a poll on Mechanical Turk, limited to U.S. users and with a payout of 25 cents for each person who answered. The poll asked:
Our academic department has asked everyone to submit a "fun" photo of themselves, so that our photos can be displayed together on the department home page. One of our employees submitted a photo that has caused some internal debate about whether the photo is inappropriate. I wanted to do a poll to get the opinion of a random sample of Internet users of different backgrounds.
Do you think this is an appropriate picture to be used in a photo collection on our academic department home page?
Since the original photos had been published in different contexts anyway, I tried to find a middle ground for the wording of the survey question, to emphasize that the photos were going to be published in a "fun" setting, but still integrated into the women's professional environments. The survey-takers were then (randomly) shown either the black woman's photo or the white woman's photo, and answered "Yes, the image is fine" or "No, the image is inappropriate". Then respondents were asked to fill in their age, gender, ethnicity, and education level.
(One thing that I've found with all of my previous surveys on Mechanical Turk, is that there is strong evidence that survey-takers are not answering randomly. Strong correlations often occur where you would expect them to -- for example, in a survey about what are the greatest causes of global strife, the same people tend to select "Energy shortages" and "Environmental damage" above other options, whereas another subgroup will tend to select both "Atheism" and "Decline of traditional values". And any survey where I've added a textbox for users to enter "more thoughts", most users enter something reasonably thoughtful which corresponds to the multiple-choice answers they've selected. Formal research by the psychologist Samuel Gosling has similarly found that Internet surveys can be useful for psychological research and are not plagued with bot-responders or random answers. So I'm working under that assumption.)
The results: Out of 47 respondents who saw the black girl's picture, 36 said the image was inappropriate (77%). Out of 54 respondents who saw the white girl's picture, 38 said the image was inappropriate (70%). For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed. What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos.
In both surveys, both male and female respondents voted the photos "inappropriate" with about the same frequency. For the black woman's photo, 22 out of 26 men (86%) and 14 out of 21 women (67%) voted the photo inappropriate; for the white woman's photo, 19 out of 30 men (63%) and 19 out of 24 women (79%) voted it inappropriate. There also didn't appear to be any correlation between the age of the respondents and their responses. (You can view the breakdown of answers in terms of respondent demographics here for the black woman's picture and here for the white woman's picture; the crummy layout is because I just copied-and-pasted the output from my own custom-written survey-taking tool, where I usually just view the results for myself.) As for the gap between black and white survey-takers, in the case of the black woman's photo, 24 out of 34 white survey-takers (70%) and 5 out of 6 black survey-takers (83%) voted it inappropriate, while for the white woman's photo, 25 out of 36 white survey-takers (69%) and 4 out of 4 (100%) of black survey-takers voted it inappropriate -- but those discrepancies probably don't mean much, since the population of self-identified black respondents was too small in both cases to draw any conclusions.
Even with small samples, though, I would argue that this is a better way to answer the question of latent racism than to draw fuzzy conclusions based on the trolling comments posted on a Facebook photo. My guess is that even if there was an underlying difference in the frequency of negative comments posted to the two photos, part of it could have been due to the photo being posted in a Facebook group titled "Black Women Do Breastfeed", a group name that is practically begging for trolls to wait for a chance to try and provoke an outraged response. The white woman's photo, on the other hand, was posted on the University of the Sunshine Coast Facebook page, which is not the kind of place that maladjusted nitwits hang out trying to start a flame war. And for the trolls who did post on the white woman's photo, their natural inclination would be to make some immature comment about b00bs; whereas for the trolls posting on the black woman's photo, the easiest cheap shot would be to make it about race. But that doesn't mean that there is actually a racially motivated difference in people's reactions to the photos.
Besides, if you want to use Facebook to raise awareness of racism, there are properly controlled scientific experiments that have demonstrated the extent of prejudice, such as the infamous 2003 resume callback experiment which showed that resumes with white-sounding names on them received about 50% more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. A viral story with 24,000 Facebook shares, about two isolated incidents under different circumstances, is not necessarily evidence of racism. It might be. But you have to do some kind of controlled experiment to check first.
I can haz experiments too! (Score:2, Funny)
First we'll post a video of ISIS beheading an innocent hostage.
Then we'll post a video of ISIS beheading Bennett Hasselton.
Afterwards, we'll look at the massive differences in the level of outrage, which is to say we'll have a kegger to celebrate Bennett's demise.
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Nice try Bennett. Nobody in their right mind would call anything you say "educated" or "meaningful". Instead we use words like, "malignantly narcissistic," and "full retard."
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Bennett is a "frequent contributor" who writes long and sometimes rambling and pointless mini-essays and gets them put up on Slashdot. Nobody knows why the editors keep putting his stuff in.
This one, on the other hand, I actually find interesting. It's got some actual quantitative research. It's not like the time he was thinking that the Fifth Amendment (against self-incrimination) was probably a bad thing.
Shut up Bennett! (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty please?
Seconded. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really. He's offended by a FACEBOOK posting.
So he decides to write his own "survey" or whatever. Except he knows NOTHING about writing them. Or how to conduct them.
And then he puts it up on Amazon's Mechanical Turk site. Further evidence that he knows NOTHING about conducting a survey.
Which leads him to "analyize" the crap "data" that he has "collected".
The only "News for Nerds" here is how badly this was done. Anyone who publishes is (that would be you, Timothy) is an idiot for doing so. If anyone else had conducted this at any other site it would have been mocked here.
Re:Seconded. (Score:4, Interesting)
You forgot to mention that he has an embarrassingly small sample size and doesn't do any sample correction. He doesn't publish any significance values, so we have no way of knowing if 70% is the same or different than 77%, to the accuracy of the methodology (as well or as poorly thought out as it may be). Then he considers 86% and 67% to be about the same, and subsequently 63% and 79% to be about the same.
I am not a professional statistician -- I hire people to do that sort of work for me when I need definitive answers because I don't know the details. But I know enough to recognize handwaving, and that's all the long-winded original posting is.
Re:Seconded. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, his sample sizes are small. He says this about your 70% to 77%:
For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed. What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos.
This is correct: for around 20 or 30 people, you can expect random chance of e.g. 20% (I don't care to remember how to do the math here). That's 20% of the value: if 70% of group A respond one way, then you would be within random chance if group B's responses fell within 56% and 84%, and not have any conclusion. Bennett says here that groupings of 70% and 77% don't conclude a difference due to random chance, but they DO indicate a small magnitude.
Let's say that the actual numbers are 72% and 71.5%. If you performed a properly controlled experiment with tens of thousands of people on each side, you'd find one group showing 72% and one showing 71.5%. Your alpha value would be around 0.001%, so you'd expect an identical population to show something like 72% and 71.93% A value of 71.5% would be conclusive of a nearly 0.4% difference between populations.
With the small sample size, you'd need a bigger gap. If the numbers were 70% and 20%, you'd have conclusive evidence of a significant difference between populations. At 70% and 77%, you have no evidence for any difference at all; a small difference could exist, but it is exceedingly unlikely that a LARGE difference exists.
Following this logic, 86% and 67% are about the same, and 63% and 79% are about the same. If you want these values to be different from each other, you need bigger sample sizes. Small sample sizes like this are only good for striking divides such as "is your skin more like a banana or chocolate?" surveying black vs white people.
To put this into perspective: out of 14 trials with a deck of 20 red/black cards shuffling 5 times and then predicting the top card, I am 68% likely to predict the correct card drawn from a deck; out of 180 trials, I am 54% likely; out of 700 trials, I am 53.8% likely to correctly predict the card. I did better on early trials, consistently getting 2/3 or more correct. Even hundreds of trials in, I haven't closed on random chance; but we also have about a 5% confidence value at 700 trials, and 53.8% - 5% is less than 50%, so it's quite possible I'm exactly 50% likely to select correctly.
There is no power. (Score:5, Informative)
I am actually a statistician. And this 'study' looks pretty worthless.
The problem is the issue of a 'huge gap'. What gap is huge? Well, we can try and do a power calculation. How big does the gap between the black and white targets *need* to be, to have a good chance of showing up in this test?
This is simple enough to calculate. Plug in some numbers:
1. Sample size in each group - 50
2. Level of Significance - 0.05
3. Power - i.e. the desired probability of finding there to be a significant difference, *if a difference exists*. I've chosen a standard number of 0.8 - i.e. allow for a 20% chance of missing a true effect by accident.
Fixing the proportion of inappropriates for the white woman at 70%, we find.... 91.8%.
In other words, with this sample size, we actually only rule out a difference of 70% vs 91.8%, or in other words, an over 2/3rds drop in the proportion of people finding the picture appropriate.
To rephrase: if the truth was that 2/3rds of the people who think a white woman is breastfeeding would *not* think a black person breastfeeding is appropriate - a situation that I think you'd agree is very racist - then we'd miss such an effect in an experiment like this over 1/5th the time. Even assuming the experiment was conducted ideally, and no one was just randomly clicking to earn money.
This article is meaningless.
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Your reasoning doesn't hold. The sample size has to be so small as to make the size of random chance distribution bigger than the size of the total possible distribution (i.e. 50% +/-50%, 70% +/- 70%) before you can't draw any conclusion whatsoever. If this weren't true, then even huge samples of millions of data points wouldn't provide enough information to draw any conclusion whatsoever.
There are two general areas in a statistical measurement: the area which shows a likely correlation, and the area wh
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Umm, he gave you enough information to do the significance test yourself under standard polling assumptions.
No, he didn't use a particularly large sample size. But the way the sampling distribution works means that you pretty quickly reach the level of diminishing returns so his survey is a pretty good guide to whether there is a substantial difference in reactions.
Are his respondents trully selected at random from the population under examination (as all the statistical tools assume). Well no, not really
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Well, hold on. He made a lot of good points about statistics, sample size, and research into study of surveys; as well as some insightful analysis of credibility of answers. This person clearly has a passable grasp of statistics, at least; having myself gained a perfect score on the AP Statistics and Probability exam, I still evaluate him as having further exposure to structured statistics education than I have. I'm familiar with a few credibility models used in psychology as well; he used a very statis
Are you trying to get (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are you trying to get (Score:5, Funny)
Tell me about it. They talk about breastfeeding in public but the photos are nowhere to be seen.
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Dude, seriously, it's the internet. Do you actually require assistance to see breasts?
If so, well, there's google [google.com].
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Actually I need assistance to not see breasts when I'm searching for something else.
My comment was about the fact that a lot of websites never seem to publish any photo to go with their articles but yet have no problem pushing auto-play video ads on their readers.
Gives me a new Mechanical Turk research idea! (Score:2, Insightful)
*laughs until cries* Man, this guy is so much fun to hate...
Breastfeeding? (Score:5, Funny)
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Unless you can find a way to network breastfeeding or find a way to run Lunix on it, I don't see how the topic is appropriate for /.
The interest is using Amazon Turk for a quick survey.
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apt-get install breastmilk
The following extra packages will be installed:
antibodies lipids fluids newdiaper nutrients
The following extra packages will be purged:
olddiaper poo pee
Astonishing grasp of the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
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If the presence or lack of a wedding band influences your reaction to that picture then it sounds like you're just trying to justify your bias. Breastfeeding in public has exactly zero to do with marital status.
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1. Have computers.
2. Post on Slashdot.
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Whether it offends me or not is irrelevant (I didn't post on either of the women's FB pages). It does offend many people. Not sure how you are connecting that to marital status, I agree they are not connected
The wedding band is important though. Are you really saying there's no difference between a married couple having a baby and a single woman having a baby?
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I find it astonishing that someone is actually reading Bennett's drivel. And parsing it.
I mean, it's still drivel, but your user# doesn't suggest you're so new that you haven't seen his 6000-word screeds before?
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Yes. The presence of a wedding ring on woman with a baby indicates, to some people, that her pregnancy is acceptable because it was done within a certified union, whereas a woman without a wedding ring would be looked upon as just another example of an unwed mother who was unable to control herself.
It wouldn't matter if the woman's husband died in an accident so she no longer wears the ring, the fact that she's a woma
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Bullshit (Score:3)
Actually it has concern has little to do with 'a certified union' and is more of a concern with the epidemic of single mothers forced to live on social welfare programs to support their kids, being given incentives to not have 2 parent families, and punished by the welfare systems if they attempt to establish or maintain a two parent household.
http://newsblogs.chicagotribun... [chicagotribune.com]
http://www.census.gov/prod/201... [census.gov]
http://www.actrochester.org/ch... [actrochester.org]
http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs... [crosswalk.com]
http://www.huffingtonpost [huffingtonpost.com]
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Well, yeah .. but you're not breastfeeding in public. ;-)
Do that sometime, you'll definitely raise a few eyebrows.
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Let's see...I think I stopped wearing my wedding ring the first time I had to put that hand into a junction box with some 450V circuits. Reminding myself to remove the ring every time I had to do something similar just seemed a particularly stupid way to live my life, so into a drawer it went, and it's never come back out.
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a wedding band would make breastfeeding seen in a better light?
Not breastfeeding, motherhood. The perception (perhaps incorrect, but still very real) is that no wedding band implies an unwed mother. And single motherhood is generally bad for both the child and society [wordpress.com]
Typical news article -CLICKBAIT (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the difference between journalism and science. Journalism needs to get attention, science works best with little attention.
You can't trust science articles if they have any outrage.
Can't draw conclusions from this study (Score:5, Insightful)
"For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed."
Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
"What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."
No, it doesn't. You cannot draw conclusions from your results without significant data, because as you just said, your results could be due to random chance. I see this all the time in papers submitted for peer review. They'll say something like, "our technique showed benefit over the other techniques, even though the difference was not significant", and try to claim this as a win.
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Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
No, by taking those photos so far out of context and asking a question about them that is so far out of context, his survey is made meaningless.
If the question is about general reactions to a photo, then trying to put those photos into a "fun photo on an academic website" you've already changed the question so much that it cannot answer the first. What you found out is that NATURALLY, 3/4 of people think a picture of a woman breastfeeding on an academic website is inappropriate. It's not about black or wh
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Look, let's be honest here.
Bennett isn't doing a survey. He isn't doing science. He isn't even doing journalism.
He looked at pictures of tits on the interwebs, wrote a blog entry about an article someone else did, and looked at more tits on the interweb.
Timothy, who apparently is the dedicated handler for this click-baiting automaton which is Bennet Haselton, duly posts the crap onto Slashdot so he can tell
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Look, let's be honest here.
Bennett isn't doing a survey. He isn't doing science. He isn't even doing journalism.
Hardly. His effort, this one time, was a lot more thorough[1] than the numerous womens studies "research" that we routinely get here on slashdot. What exactly can you fault him for above, other than using MT? What would you do different?
[1] IOW, He didn't start with a conclusion and then try to find evidence to support it. He started with a question ("Is this about race or context?") and attempted to honestly find an answer using the cheapest method known to man. Could he have done this better? Sure - if h
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Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
You misunderstood. Read it again.
He's saying, there is no significant difference between the two groups. This contradicts the hypothesis; the hypothesis being that there would be a difference between the two groups.
He phrases it that way to remind the reader that there might still be significant difference, but if there is, it's smaller than the margin of error for his poll.
An actual weakness here is that he didn't establish a margin of error.
In any case, this is a huge improvement from previous Benne
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You read it again.
He's saying, there is no significant difference between the two groups. This contradicts the hypothesis
And everyone with a clue is saying that the conclusion doesn't hold, because the sample size is ridiculously, uselessly small.
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He's saying, there is no significant difference between the two groups.
But the issue is "groups of what"? The original groups were "people who are racist and don't like seeing pictures of black women breastfeeding because they are black" and "people who aren't etc." He converted the groups being tested into "people who think pictures of women of any color breastfeeding posted to a faculty webpage is inappropriate" and "people who don't...".
You can't ask a radically different question and expect to get statistically significant information about the original question out of
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Ugh (Score:3, Insightful)
from the believe-the-worst dept (Score:4, Informative)
"Bennett Haselton writes"
Yep. Checks out. But I don't believe it.
I also don't understand the point of this post. Is Slashdot hoping to get picked up on HuffPo and on a bunch of mommy blogger sites? I don't really see how Bennett's keyboard diarrhea this week is anything remotely related to "News for Nerds".
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Clickbait is now the dominant business model for most of the internet, as far as I can tell. People don't really give a damn about debunking, they just hit the "Share" button and pass it on to the echo chamber of their $group_of_friends who echo it back to each other and agree wildly with each other.
It's pretty much the evolution of the chain letter -> MMF/forwarded urban myths -> google finds people just like me -> FaceTwitterInterest helps even more - BuzzFeed,Upworthy,et. al generate content fro
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I'd expect they have terabytes of that already
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I don't really see how Bennett's keyboard diarrhea this week is anything remotely related to "News for Nerds"
They knew that Haselton's horrible grasp of statistics would prompt the nerds to click frantically to point out what a tool he is.
An interesting article by Bennett (Score:5, Insightful)
OK
People here like to poke fun at the long posts by Bennett Hassleton. This one is actually pretty good.
He saw something, constructed an experiement using readily available resources, got statistically significant results (just about) and made an intereesting post detailing the methodology.
To my mind this is interesting in comparison to more formal academic studies as it shows that you can get reasonable results as a lone wolf with a limited budget and no research institution.
I like this post. Go Bennett.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it relevant to Slashdot's audience? No. Perhaps Bennett should go peddle his wares at sites where people care about racism and/or breastfeeding. What if Bennett tried shopping this post to engadget, Linux News or other popular tech/gadget/science blogs? He'd be told to go away and come back with something relevant.
If you buy that the survey methodology is relevant, you need to read a lot more about making relevant surveys. The world is awash in "studies" like this one, that would have trouble getting thr
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OK
People here like to poke fun at the long posts by Bennett Hassleton. This one is actually pretty good.
He saw something, constructed an experiement using readily available resources, got statistically significant results (just about) and made an intereesting post detailing the methodology.
To my mind this is interesting in comparison to more formal academic studies as it shows that you can get reasonable results as a lone wolf with a limited budget and no research institution.
I like this post. Go Bennett.
He posted an ad hoc, anecdotal, unscientific "survey" and generated 101 responses and then claims credibility, and you commend him?!?! You must have been dropped on your head, too, then, yes?
Re:An interesting article by Bennett (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest complaint I have with this post is that the prose needs to be tightened, it's kind of stream-of-conciousness writing, and thus a lot of people commenting have missed his main points.
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Yet his "experiment" was conducted so incompetently, and his conclusions so dubious, that it would even make the mythbusters blush.
Bennett, buddy (Score:3)
Ok, bud?
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We're happy to hear your stories. But, listen: maybe they should go on the fridge, instead of the front page of Slashdot. Ok, bud?
I didn't know Mom posted the "F" graded assigments on the fridge?
Warning Tag (Score:3)
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Leading question (Score:2)
Your question mentions a work context and already suggests that the image is inappropriate. The wording is hardly impartial and may sway respondents who might otherwise be unsure how to answer and thus influenced by internalized/unconscious bias.
Also, this is a delicate topic. If you want to people to take your writing seriously, you should work hard at using respectful language. Referring to to the two graduates/mothers as "girls" is belittling.
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(The fictional context I described was close to the real-life contexts that the real pictures were published in.)
What utter bollocks. The originals were on FACEBOOK. You asked about putting them on an academic department home page on a college or university website. Those are two VERY different venues with two very different purposes and audiences.
Any academic department that put pictures of breastfeeding women on their HOME PAGE, where potential and current students are supposed to come to find information about the department, just because someone figures those pictures are FUN, should be laughed out of the colleg
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The issue is that the sample population is small and the effects of bias is often subtle so the suggestion that the image is "inappropriate" by overwhelm what my already be a "weak signal."
I don't think the goal was to determine of one image is considered more or less inappropriate it was to determine bias. So why not - "Our university is developing promotional material to attract more women. Would you use this image?" Or even better, show both images and then say "Which image would you choose for promot
I hate to feed this, but (Score:2)
Anther issue that you bring up is that people who perform mechanical turk tasks see the world differently. Energy shortages are a problem in places like India where a lot of the "turks" live. Having not grown up in America their view of race is completely different than ours and they're not going to bring the usual prejudices with them.
Simply stated, there's no good way to get useful results in this manner.
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Really /.? (Score:2)
Seriously, stop with the drivel from this Miley Cyrus looking boob, with his winking and mouth gaping. Go ahead. Image search him.
Not bebunked (Score:2)
While the methodology used for the original inquiry (I hesitate to use the word study) is non-statistical and therefore impossible to validly extrapolate from, so is the methodology used to debunk the original. At best, both reports provide anecdotal evidence, but without a statistically valid approach, either could be correct or both could be wrong.
Two words (Score:2)
"Outrage Pornography".
H-O-L-Y fucls .. people so damn UP TIGHT ! (Score:2)
Oh noes! B(.)(.)Bies and _natural_ instinct of a mother feeding their child. /sarcasm Quick! Get out the pitchforks and pull the racism card out of your ass!
If people are so damn uptight how about a big dish of:
"Grow the fuck up and get over yourself."
This is a NON ISSUE.
Had it! (Score:2)
This is so appropriate to "News for Nerds" (Score:2)
This is educational for us Nerds as breasts have another, all natural and nurturing use not at all related to their common portrayal as fun bags.
Quick chi-squared test, FWIW (Score:3)
Re:Popular research subject (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Popular research subject (Score:5, Funny)
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Bet they are tripping over themselves to get more research grants
They aren't going to get it with this garbage. The black woman is nursing in public, while a crowd looks on. The white woman is nursing in private, just her and her baby, and has less of her breast exposed. It is absurd to attribute the different reactions to these photos as "racism". The race of the two woman is minor compared to the other differences between the two photos.
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Even bigger difference: the white woman is in Australia and the black woman is in the US.
Re:finally (Score:4, Funny)
I was afraid he was back on his meds. What a relief!
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Can these breasts be used to create decentralized networks of ice cream for Burning Man?
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My main page goes from "Ask Slashdot: How To Unblock Email From My Comcast-Hosted Server?" to "Popular Smartphones Hacked At Mobile Pwn2Own 2014" with no Bennett Haselton at all.
How? This greasemonkey script will prevent you from seeing Bennett Haselton's shit on the main page or an of the "older" pages ( http://slashdot.org/?page=1 [slashdot.org] ).
http://pastebin.com/RWCxT0jJ [pastebin.com] (Make sure you're redirecting beta to the real site.)
It just shits through the DOM looking for the shitty firehose/article/content structure and
Re:finally (Score:4, Insightful)
If you successfully hid this post from yourself, I have to ask, how is it you're here now telling others how to also hide it?
Re:Most people don't object to public breast feedi (Score:5, Interesting)
nah, it's a cultural thing. I've found in my travels at least half the world really doesn't give a shit if a woman breastfeeds in public. Would you rather listen to an angry hungry baby?
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You are funny and ignorant. You will not "control" a months old baby. Half the world does not have the money to waste on the "tech" you mention.
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If your child is too young to control itself out in public, I'd rather you not bring it out in public at all.
Me, me, me, me, me. It's all about me.
Re:Most people don't object to public breast feedi (Score:5, Interesting)
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual! They have been sexualized in much of our modern cultures but they are not intrinsically so.
One of the things that always amazes me about breastfeeding is how much more uptight our modern western culture is about it than our Victorian Era ancestors were. But today it's perfectly normal to see advertising that is overtly sexual, and almost pornographic in nature, plastered everywhere selling almost anything. Heaven forbid that a Mother feeds her child the highest quality food possible in a natural way, where someone else might see. How about we campaign for people eating disgusting things like fast food burgers and fries go do that in private somewhere?
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One of the things that always amazes me about breastfeeding is how much more uptight our modern western culture is about it than our Victorian Era ancestors were. But today it's perfectly normal to see advertising that is overtly sexual, and almost pornographic in nature, plastered everywhere selling almost anything.
The opinion widely held in the USA and UK seems to be that it's nipples that cause the downfall of society, but other than that it's ok. In Europe they seem a bit less nipple-averse.
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That's a provably false statement: a shirtless man does not cause the downfall of society. Yet, he has nipples.
Dogs and cats have nipples. Those, also do not cause the downfall of society.
Krusty the Klown has a superfluous third nipple (a trope borrowed from Goldfinger) ... again, no downfall of society. Yet you'd think if two are bad, three must be the sign of end-times, right?
This comes from purita
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Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual! They have been sexualized in much of our modern cultures but they are not intrinsically so.
I'm pretty sure all dimorphism in the human species is intrinsically sexual. Cultures can choose to draw lines wherever they wish.
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a male might find most parts of a woman's body as sexual. get over it.
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Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual!
Except that they play a fundamental role in sexual reproduction.
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When humans evolved to walk upright, they needed a full frontal display. You would approach a woman from the front, and require something to strongly indicate sexual maturity. Most animals walking on all fours do not naturally expose their breasts prominently, and their breasts remain small to the point that sexing of various animals requires examination of the genitals (and you can see a dog's big nuts hanging down from behind, so you can imagine how cursory of a glance this requires). Many animals also
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Your dumb is showing. Breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction. They are sexual.
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Many people have babies, fewer breastfeed. You must be using a new definition of the word "fundamental".
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Yeah, my dick is inherently functional too. I piss with it. But I'm pretty sure women wouldn't be cool with me whipping it out and pissing in public whenever I felt like it.
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Two words:
Rosie and Roxanne
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Re:I'm all for exposed tits (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of a scene from the show 'Friends'. There is a woman breastfeeding her baby and it is making Joey uncomfortable. Ross says, "This is the most beautiful, natural thing in the world. " Joey replies, "Yeah, but there's a baby sucking on it."
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And neither one includes an Asian woman. RACISM!
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This and geekhack are like the last BIG places where nerds can still be nerds without explaining themselves about the lack of women, blacks or x-men in our community
Stick to lurking, you racist, misogynist fuckbag.