A program called cGrid took center stage at a hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Thursday — the latest in a series of meetings convened by the committee to examine possible solutions to online music piracy on college campuses.
The software, originally known as Icarus, was designed about three years ago by computing officials at the University of Florida. But now a company called Red Lambda has developed cGrid for commercial release, and record-company executives are bullish about the program: After all, it can automatically kick students off the Internet if they are caught connecting to peer-to-peer networks.
Some college officials say cGrid isn’t yet ready for prime time, either because it could block some legitimate peer-to-peer transactions or because it doesn’t catch enough music pirates. But Gregory J. Marchwinski, president and chief executive officer of Red Lambda, argued at the hearing that the software posed no threat to academic freedom. And he said that cGrid could stop students from swapping songs on “darknets” — underground local networks that are not connected to the wider Web. (Some students at Florida have said they use darknets to get around the software’s filtering system.)
Cary H. Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, used the hearing to encourage college officials to “strongly consider” trying cGrid. But the higher-education representatives on hand were reluctant to give the program a full-throated endorsement.
John C. Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, said many colleges consider antipiracy tools like cGrid to be prohibitively expensive. And he all but begged lawmakers to refrain from putting too much pressure on campus administrators, saying he knew of “no sector that has put more time, money, and effort into combating illegal file sharing than has higher education.”
To drive home his point, Mr. Vaughn listed several new steps colleges were taking to fight song swapping without resorting to network-filtering tools. A new college consortium will work with technology companies to design academe-friendly antipiracy tools, he said, and campus lawyers and IT officials will help recording-industry officials tweak the RIAA’s orientation video about copyright infringement.
But those efforts left some lawmakers unsatisfied. Deep into the hearing’s question-and-answer session, Rep. Ric Keller, a Republican from Florida, sounded an ominous note. Accusing colleges of using academic freedom and privacy as “excuses” to avoid purchasing software like cGrid, he issued a pointed (if unspecific) warning: “I would say the hammer’s coming.” —Brock Read
12 Responses to ‘The Hammer’s Coming’
Neuroskeptic - March 15, 2012 at 5:53 am
“One might argue that the two young psychologists are not responsible for jokey press reports. But they are not blameless.”
No-one is blameless, as Jesus himself taught us. However in these kind of cases I think it’s pretty facile to say “the researchers are also to blame”. So someone said “Technology changes words, and by association languages. It’s an important thing to look at.”? That’s about the most ambigious statement anyone could say when asked for a quote about their research. It doesn’t say anything (it could mean, technology changes language in the sense that we now have words like LOL and blog, which is uncontroversial, or it could mean anything else.)
It shouldn’t, therefore, have been quoted in the news articles – by any journalist worth their salt – and it’s not why the articles were bad.
grward - March 15, 2012 at 8:36 am
The worst I saw was in the Metro, a free tabloid in Britain:
“SEX is depressing—but only if you use your left hand,” they began.
“Typing letters with your left hand conveys more negative emotions than
typing with your right, British and U.S. scientists say.”
I agree that their explanation is silly, but that introductory sentence…brilliant!
dank48 - March 15, 2012 at 8:49 am
It is depressing to read the watered-down, sugar-coated, generally garbled versions of research in the popular press, but with so much of the writers’ attention focused on Kardashians and so many of their readers apparently being, heaven help us, Kardashians manques, what can we expect? Understanding scientific research is hard work, and it requires a modicum of intelligence, training, and experience. So does recognizing junk science for what it is. And of course the internet lets bologna like this reach a worldwide audience with the speed of stupidity.
The nonsense spread like, uh, BS on the internet. Indeed, it was and is BS on the internet. It took a couple millennia to lay Aristotelian proto-science’s more egregious errors to rest. It’s taken, what, a couple of weeks to let the hot air out of this brick balloon? So Jasmin and Casasanto have probably not laid the foundation of brilliant careers, a number of “science writers” have moved on to the next misinterpretation, and some of us have had a more or less mean-spirited giggle at their expense.
For all their flaws and defects, liberal democracy, a free press, and the internet do a pretty fair job. There will always be slovenly researchers, there will always be witless research incompetently performed, and there will always be fools ready to believe the next catchy if implausible story to come along. Let us hope there will always be people more interested in the truth than in notoriety who are willing to describe the Emperor’s wardrobe accurately in public.
russhunt - March 15, 2012 at 10:13 am
Surely the “peer review” process of the journal has to take some blame here. Reporters are credulous, yes — but what they believe, since they’re never in a position to replicate (or fail to replicate) results, has to be dependent in large part on the reputation of scientific journals for doing their homework. Clearly, the first question ought to be, how did this balderdash get into Psychonomics Bulletin and Review?
biobabbler - March 15, 2012 at 10:45 am
I noticed this sentence: “Overall, there was a significant positive relationship between RSA and valence in ANEW, SPANEW, and DANEW combined, according to a linear regression…”
That means, unless I’m mistaken, the sample size for that test is about 3,000. I remember from statistics in college that if your sample size is “too large” (around 5,000) you can find significant differences easily where none whatsoever exists. So, wondering if, among the other design issues, n=3,000 is another factor that made the “significant” results attainable.
Of course there’s always the difference between a significant result and a meaningful one. =)
pauletteb - March 15, 2012 at 11:55 am
These self-proclaimed “researchers” must ascribe to the late “psychic” Jean Dixon’s school of ambiguity. Cast your prediction net broad enough, you’ll eventually catch something.
cwinton - March 15, 2012 at 2:08 pm
It has proven to be a great mistake that we chose the term “statistically significant” for representing the outcome of statistical analysis, which has been repeatedly confused with what people (including some with credentials) generally consider the word significant to imply.
11182967 - March 15, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Right on–or write on–about the misuse of “statistically significant,” but what’s to be done when a term with a technical meaning is captured by the press and the public, redefined through misunderstanding, and then so widely used in its new, public, misdefinition that the original definition is lost–and often has no ready replacement term at hand. A good example is the popular use of “negative feedback” to mean a negative response rather than an absence of feedback as originally intended. Another minor illustration is the interpretation of the “X” in “Generation X” as being the letter third from the end of the alphabet (and thus precipitating references to “Generation Y” before they became the “millenials”) rather than, as initially intended, to be the Roman numeral for 10 (Gen X was a fancy way of talking about the tenth generation of Americans around the time of the Bicentennial).
The latter example is fairly trivial, but the first example is the source of all sorts of mischief. So many differing research results have been called “statistically significant” that the term has come to be a laughingstock, and genuinely important research results–on global warming, the safety of immunizations, etc.–are discounted in part because we don’t have the language in the public sphere to differentiate between what’s important and what isn’t. This is a significant fomr of the debasement of the language which is (Orwell would point out) in no small part probably intentional, but it’s made way too easy by the fact that even–perhaps especially–”science journalists” can’t get the words right either.
bioemeritus09 - March 15, 2012 at 3:02 pm
All science reporters for print, electronic, and video media should be required to first learn what science is. One of the best ways is to acquaint oneself with what it isn’t by reading Richard Feynman’s address on “cargo cult science” (http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf) and looking at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg.
What they will find out is that most science you hear or read about is nonsense. This is true for most psychology, some ecology, almost all nutrition, much drug testing, and much, much more. Why? A little thing called a control!
Try to find a control in most science you read about. Ain’t there, is it? What you find is poorly applied statistics that mean nothing without a control to which you can compare the experimental. So, not only do the reporters have no idea of what science is, unfortunately, neither do the researchers nor the journal editors and referees. A good rule of thumb is if you first heard about it on TV or in the newspaper, it’s probably b—s—. And, if you haven’t read and evaluated the primary publication yourself, don’t rely on anyone’s opinion.
jffoster - March 16, 2012 at 8:32 am
Agreed. I always had in the classes I taught where we had to use and learn to evaluate statistical devices to devote considerable time and care to examine with the students the technical notion of statistical significance.
trisuit - March 17, 2012 at 11:55 am
Bioemeritus, your casual impressions about this and that field may not be worth so much (and what could they really be based on?).
It is becoming increasingly clear that the replicability of a lot of basic biomedical research is woefully low:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590.html
By contrast, in those areas of experimental pschology I am most familiar with, a high degree of reproducibility is actually the rule–people regularly reproduce each other’s effect in order to follow up on them, and only very rarely do they have any trouble duplicating the findings.
jbdonovan - March 19, 2012 at 2:22 pm
The science may be flawed, but please do not paint all “science writers” with the same brush. I’m willing to bet that the person who wrote the Metro story and the others with shocker headlines was NOT a science writer, but rather a general reporter, young, inexperienced and trying to please his/her editors. Science writers–like those who belong to the National Association of Science Writers and write for “real” science publications like Science News or Scientific American or for the science pages of respected newspapers and general interest magazines–would never take such a claim at face value. They would investigate its validity, including the methodology used by the researchers, and get independent, objective and knowledgeable people in the field to evaluate it. They might or might not write a story at all, but if they did, it would be balanced, quoting those who question the findings as well as those who embrace them. Please don’t confuse careless reporting about science with real science writing.