Library Monkey

NUG NUG

Here's a video by Cascada (I have no clue) in which she does a hoockie dance in a library. The start is very reminiscent of the scene in Party Girl where Mary gets stoned and does the table dance to "If you believe, believe in me" by Chantay Savage (not included on the PG soundtrack).

Well, it's official. Stephen Abrams says it so it must be true: You need a Bloglines account.

Michigan PL Suspends Internet Access After Porn Complaints
LibraryJournal.com
— November 30, 2006

On November 27, after Internet users were known to be persistently looking at pornography on three computer terminal reserved for adults, managers of the Mt. Clemens Public Library in suburban Detroit decided to suspend Internet access until a new policy is devised. "It's been a really difficult situation for us to manage," library director Donald Worrell said. The three terminals are situated in the middle of the library's main space, about 15 feet from the reference desk, and reconfiguring the library would be difficult because it was recently renovated. Around the beginning of November, Worrell said, "People who had never used the library for any other reasons were coming in strictly to access pornography, and in increasing numbers." Staff and patrons complained. "We have families and young children who come in the library. So we don't have a good solution about how to prevent families and young children from seeing these things," he told LJ.

Here is a little disconcerting news from our friends up in Rogers, straight from the NWA Times:

Controversial film to remain on library shelf By Melissa Blakely
The Morning News

ROGERS -- The controversial 1992 film 'Basic Instinct' will remain a part of the collection of between 8,000 and 10,000 videos cataloged in the Rogers Public Library.

But the movie will now have a warning label to inform library patrons of its adult content.

The Rogers Library Board approved three motions Tuesday to keep the film 'Basic Instinct' on the library shelves, label the video case with an adult-content sticker and update the permission waivers that parental guardians must sign for new patrons under the age of 18.

Library patron Nieves Egelkraut asked the Library Board of Trustees in October to remove the film after she randomly checked it out and found it to be sexually graphic and violent.

"I really don't have an opinion on this," said Robert Finch, reference librarian for the Rogers Public Library. "My job is to find the films that have significant cultural impact."

Brice Wagner, a member of the board, suggested a new waiver that would require parental guardians of new patrons younger than age 18 either to allow or deny their child to see films with violence, nudity, sexual and derogatory language. The waiver would not require going backward and grandfathering in current patrons.

Currently, if a parent checks the box to allow a child to check out any material from the library, that means a child is not prevented from checking out any video or book in the library collection based upon a content criteria, said Judy Casey, library director.

Casey said, if a parent gives permission on a child's library card to check out any material, it's not up to the library to interfere with the parent's decision.

One suggestion was to give the film a rating of R because the film is the unrated director's cut, but the library cannot change its rating to an R since the Motion Picture Association of America gave it the NR rating, said Finch.

"I've never been sued by the MPAA, but a friend of mine was sued by the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and it was not a pretty experience," Finch said.

"I'm sure there are other movies out there that are equally graphic. She (Egelkraut) just hasn't picked them up yet," said Marsy Humphrey, Friends of the Library liaison.

The library is now doing more to let patrons know about the adult content films in the collection, said Casey.

Fast Facts

Basic Instinct

* An erotic thriller from 1992.

* Plot Outline: A police detective played by Michael Douglas is in charge of an investigation of a brutal murder in which a beautiful and seductive woman played by Sharon Stone could be involved.

* Grossed:

$118 million in the United States

$353 million Worldwide

* Rentals:

$53,000,000 in United States

* Future Airings: Basic Instinct the edited version will be shown Nov. 27 at 10:15 p.m. and Nov. 28 at 1 p.m. on American Movie Classic cable network.

Source: The Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com

http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2006/11/22/news/112206rzlibrarymovie.txt

I just saw on CNN that:

"About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study."

I find that suprisingly LOW.

The article discusses COPA and Congress' previous attempts to end explicit adult content online before it gets more into this study conducted by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. Stark analyzed the information collected from ISPs and search engine companie when the Justice Department subpoenaed them. And here's a bit of what he found:

"Stark also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.

About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.

But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found."

Except for the overseas porn. But, anyway...

Or, as ITWeek UK likes to think of it: Internet is 99 per cent porn free!

The San Jose Mercury News allegedly has a copy of the report. But they show (on their website) only a few statistics and not any details or excerpts. Disappointing.

I have not found Stark's report yet, but I did find a wealth of backdround information and documents about COPA and at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check it out!

Labels: COPA, EFF, filters, search

I just read a post at Bodarko referring to a great short post about "why blogging is great" at timbl's blog. I had just finished doing a class about Google tricks and had briefly addressed the idea of credibility, verifiability, trust, ranking, linking, etc. And then here comes this timbl guy with a very elegant explanation about social bookmarking and trust.

"People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.

It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable."


Well done, sir. WELL DONE!

He goes on to state that blogging is a great example of "a gently evolving network of pointers of interest." Then he goes on to bemoan that in a recent interview his message was misinterpreted, stressing concerns about blogs and the failures of the Internets.

He continues:
"In fact, it is a really positive time for the web. Startups are launching, and being sold again, academics are excited about new systems and ideas, conferences and camps and wikis and chat channels and are hopping with energy, and every morning demands an excruciating choice of which exciting link to follow first."

I am especially interested in what timbl extrapolates from blogs and FOAF files: a trust infrastructure. How cool is that?

Give a 1000 monkeys 1000 typewriters and eventually you will get a monkey blog.