Comments on: The serious risk of cyber-grooming. Or not.

By: meski

meski — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:58:19 +0000

Further, I say, so bloody what? Insulating kids from the real world or the virtual world is counterproductive.

By: meski

meski — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:55:28 +0000

Not perfect, hence ‘near zero’ qualifier. And if you turn it off, you are not in the category of “accidentally” seeing it, which is what the report said.

“84% of boys have accidentally seen pornography”

16% are lying, or have deliberately seen it :^)

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:17:54 +0000

@Meski: While not perfect, 'cos no filtering can be perfect, Google's SafeSearch has one flaw: it can just be turned off. So while it'll stop "accidental" naughty imagery, it won't stop the kids turning it off when you're not watching. Google's Tips for Online Safety are as good a start as any, though.

By: meski

meski — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:27:04 +0000

“Accidentally seen pornography” - bet you could reduce that to near zero by turning Google’s safesearch on.

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35892

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:29:04 +0000

@Gail: Indeed, the lack of commentary on the Havard Berkman Center research is surprising, given that media reports of that research indicated that it was thorough.

Also, the Edith Cowan review shows on page 21 how they ranked the research on a scale of 0 = opinion to 4 = peer-reviewed scientific literature, but they don’t show anywhere how they classified each reference into that scheme.

While the Flood & Hamilton research would fall into their “grey literature” categories, it could have been placed anywhere from category 1 to category 3. It would be useful to know where they placed it — particularly as the “84% of boys have accidentally seen pornography” figure is from that report and is one of the headline numbers!

Nor do they indicate whether the age of the research was factored in. Young people’s understanding of online behaviour has certainly changed significantly in that time!

By: Gail

Gail — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:02:41 +0000

Well done getting and article out that quickly

I did have time to read most of the report. It’s a bit tedious and, as you say, the emphasis on the quality of the data was seriously diluted in the summaries. I’m intrigued that the more than 30 pages of references and appendices contain a number of academic works/studies that were relevant but not mentioned in the body of the report. The major omission seems to be any use of the data from the Havard Berkman Center study for the USA Attorneys General, while they include within the body of the work many references to data that was collected in the Jurassic era of the internet age. Usenet data from the early 90s ffs?

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:45:24 +0000

@Gail: The elasped time between me first having the report and filing this story for Crikey was under two hours, so it’s “initial impression” stuff — especially since I haven’t yet compared the report with the original tender.

That said, I did feel that the body of the report had plenty of appropriate warnings about the quality of the data — or lack thereof. However those warnings gradually reduce in severity as the report is condensed into the executive summary, then the departmental summary, then the Ministerial media release.

There’s certainly a lot more confidence in the numbers in the final media release than is justified by the quality of the original research being reviewed. The report makes this clear — but who’ll actually read the report?

By: Gail

Gail — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:22:39 +0000

Evidence based policy? Pig’s bottom! The entire report is cherry picked propaganda.