not only that, but this: A little humor from the folks at the Journal of Economic Perspectives. OK, they don’t mean it has humor. Their article “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?”<http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf>is a serious work looking at the various socioeconomic factors driving pornography consumption or as they say:
For economists, the adult entertainment industry offers several aspects of interest. On the production side, for example, the adult entertainment industry has repeatedly proven to be among the first to adopt new imaging technologies. For example, Johnson (1996) concludes that adult videos spurred early purchases of home video cassette recorders. More recently, as studios evaluated competing high-definition DVD formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray, at least some studios chose Blu-ray upon observing that adult studios favored that format (Mearian, 2006). Looking back, adult entertainment was an early adopter of a wide variety of image-related technologies—including ancient sculpture (Diver, 2005), the book (Moulton, 2000), and the photograph (Loth, 1961). Still, it’s not hard to find humor in the reams of data contained in the report. The top state in Internet porn subscriptions per broadband user: Utah. Numbers two and three: Alaska and Mississippi. Those are really red states consuming all that porn. OK, Hawaii comes in at number four, but then comes Oklahoma, Arkansas, North Dakota and Louisiana. See any pattern there? Maybe those blue state folks are just better at finding free porn. Still, you have to love this observation Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in “blue” states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the “red” states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism. See Ms. Spitzer, it wasn’t Elliot’s fault! He was a blue state governor! Other fun facts: - Higher incomes have higher percentages of porn subscriptions - Younger populations have higher percentages of porn subscriptions (duh) - Areas with higher marriage and divorce rates have fewer subscriptions (?!) - College degrees mean more subscriptions, but grad degrees mean less. - The more urban the area, the more subscriptions (so how did Utah and Alaska get in there??) - States where people say they believe in statements like “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” have dramatically higher percentages of subscriptions per 1000 broadband users. (We’re taking +3.6% here on a sample where the average is in the mid 2’s) Before I get too carried away here, the researcher did find that states with straight marriage amendments were not different than those without, states with sodomy laws were likewise no different than those without and, On the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patterns show a remarkable consistency: all but eleven states have between two and three subscribers to this service per thousand broadband households, and all but four have between 1.5 and 3.5. With interest in online adult entertainment relatively constant across regions, there’s little sign of a major divide. Thanks to the folks at NewScientist.com<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680>for bringing this report to my attention and did I mention that Utah and Alaska were over 5%? --------------------------- New report finds workers too busy on net to work. Nearly half of web traffic that passes through corporate infrastructure is not related to work activities, according to a new study. The research carried out by web security firm ScanSafe<http://www.scansafe.com/>found that 49 per cent of traffic that employees generated concerned mostly gambling, music downloads, porn and people checking their webmail. The authors of the report said that of traffic blocked by the company's filtering service, 14 per cent were for advertising and promotion, 12 per cent were to online chat sites and instant messaging applications. The company also found that blocks to gambling sites were up 22 per cent on last year's figures. "Beyond the negative impact on productivity, uncontrolled use of the web can have serious and costly consequences for businesses of all sizes including exposure to legal liability, disclosure of confidential information, breaches of compliance requirements and unnecessary bandwidth consumption," said Dan Nadir, product strategy vice president at ScanSafe. ------------- *Young men 'download illegal porn'* By Kim Griggs In Wellington, New Zealand *Forget the dirty old man in a grubby raincoat thumbing through a dog-eared girlie magazine.* [image: Computer with images of porn] Pornographic images are traded via the web These days it is likely to be internet-savvy young men, living at home with their parents who are trading illegal pornography, says a report. The New Zealand study, the final version of which is due to be released at the end of the month, provides an insight into the type of person downloading illegal porn and violent images. "Most commentary on the internet revolves around this idea that young people could be seduced by a person and taken away and horrible things could be done to them," says Angela Carr, the report's leading author. "The fact is that young people could be the horrible pervy internet people," Ms Carr told BBC News Online. In 1996, New Zealand established the Censorship Compliance Unit. These specialists are part of New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs. They enforce New Zealand's censorship legislation, which deems illegal the possession or trade in such material as sexual images of children and young people, images of torture, bestiality and necrophilia. Now the purveyors of illegal pornography have moved into the virtual world, so too has this unit that hunts them down. *Child porn* The study profiled 106 people who have been investigated by the Censorship Compliance Unit. The bulk of the people profiled in the Department of Internal Affairs study were identified via the internet. * What is worrying is that their internet-based exploration has led them to subject matter involving largely deviant activities at a time when they are most likely to be influenced by the message it conveys * Department of Internal Affairs study In the study, the offenders were overwhelmingly male (only one was a woman), mostly Caucasian, likely to be middle class and adept at using the internet. Virtually all of the offenders (99) had collected child pornography. But other types of material were collected as well. Seventeen had images of sexual violence, 27 had scat images, 32 bestiality, and 14 had images of torture. Two had images of necrophilia. The offenders' ages, at the time they were investigated, ranged from 14 to 67 with the average age being 30. But almost a quarter of the offenders were aged less than 20 years. Almost a third of the offenders were students and a third lived at home with their parents or grandparents. The most common age of offending in the study's sample was 17. The secondary school students in the study tended to be a sexually curious group, often living out of town, with few local alternatives for sexual exploration. "What is worrying is that their internet-based exploration has led them to subject matter involving largely deviant activities at a time when they are most likely to be influenced by the message it conveys," the study says. Students studying for degrees were most likely to be city dwellers but were also likely to be loners. "An apparent lack of other social interaction suggests that social isolation may also be a factor in the development of their interest in objectionable material," the study suggests. Younger censorship offenders tended to be treated more leniently, the study points out. "Inspectors and judicators frequently treat offences committed by young people as less serious than those committed by adults. "Clearly, the literature also shows that most adolescent sexual offenders do not persist beyond adolescence, however, some do," the study says. *Net connection* Apprehending offenders in the virtual realm is easier than detecting a physical offence, says Angela Carr. "It's easier to prove that they were trading in objectionable material than it is that they offended against a three-year-old," she says. [image: Internet user] * People don't tend to suspect young people of doing this. You get a young, attractive, virile 25-year-old man. Nobody's going to look at them and suspect them * Angela Carr, researcher "So if we can pick them up in this medium, we can get them early or at least get them, and try and provide some sort of treatment or intervention," she says. Any intervention for younger offenders should be tailored for their age, suggests Ms Carr. "Putting them into the criminal justice system may do more harm than good in terms of stigmatising and labelling them and bringing them into increased contact with other offenders." After the 33 students identified in the study, the next biggest group was the information technology industry and white collar/administrative positions. "These individuals may have a higher likelihood of internet involvement purely because the technology is more familiar to them, and a greater part of their lives, than for the general population," says the study. "However, the fact that no women were identified in the sample ... suggests that this factor is also insufficient in terms of explaining offending," the study says. The department cautions against using the findings of the study to make a causal link between viewing child pornography and offending against children, but does say its findings suggest an association between the two. Even though the majority of offenders in the study did not have a criminal history, the number of those who had committed sexual offences was greater than in the general population. *At risk* And offenders' interest in their 'subjects' was often more than voyeuristic. [image: Police tracking down offenders] Study suggests link between viewing child porn and offending Some of the offenders had access to young children, either though their work or though voluntary activities such as soccer coaching and babysitting. Similar links also occurred where offenders were interested in other types of objectionable images. One offender, who possessed necrophilic images, was professionally involved with funeral directors. Another, who had images of bestiality, worked with animals. The diversity of the offenders would make it a mistake to merely swap one stereotype for another, says Angela Carr, formerly with Internal Affairs but now employed as a university researcher in Australia. But she also says there needs to be social recognition that young people may not only be at risk from the internet but could be offending online. "People don't tend to suspect young people of doing this. You get a young, attractive, virile 25-year-old man. Nobody's going to look at them and suspect them," says Ms Carr. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WebTV Dawgs/Dittos" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/WebTV-Pals -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
