Month: May 2011

photo sharing via mobile phones likely to grow

Camera data for flickr show that camera-phone users who upload photos to flickr upload about 7 photos per day at the median rate across different camera-phone models.  More capable smartphones have higher photo uploading frequencies.  For example, the photo upload frequencies among iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 users are 7.0, 9.7, and 11.1 per day, respectively.[1]  The highest photo uploading frequency among devices with 100 or more active users on flickr is the HTC Evo 4G.  Its users upload 12.6 photos to flickr per day. The Evo 4G is a highly capable smartphone released in June, 2010.  It has a 4.3 inch (diagonally measured) screen with 480×800 pixel resolution, a front-facing camera for video calls, and an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with dual-LED flashes and a variety of camera exposure controls for photos.  That’s industry-leading technology.  Evo 4G owners seem to be putting it to frequent photo use.

The flickr photo upload frequencies for camera phones are roughly comparable to the U.S. average of 13 mobile calls per day per mobile phone user.  flickr photo uploaders are likely to be more technically savy and web-engaged than a representative sample from the whole population of mobile phone users.  In addition, voice call frequencies depend on ill-specified accounting rules for uncompleted calls and calls reaching voice mail services.  Nonetheless, the data suggests that for some share of mobile phone users, photo sharing is an activity with frequency roughly comparable to voice calls.

Looking at the data by camera technology aggregates, camera-phone photo uploading frequencies are only about half that for DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras.  DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras are less oriented to ordinary communication among family and friends than are camera-phones. The former also generally have less capable photo communication capabilities than the latter.  One can reasonable expect that in the future camera-phone users will have higher photo sharing frequencies than roughly comparable DSLR and point-and-shoot camera users.[2]

Unlike traditional wireline phones, mobile phones enable communication via voice, text, and vision.  Text messaging exceeded voice calls in frequency in mid-2007 in the U.S. Photo sharing via phone is becoming quite popular.  Video calling technologies are also developing rapidly.  The value advantage of mobile phones over traditional wireline phones is much broader than just mobility.

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Data:  flickr camera data on Needle.  The Needle dataset is loosely coupled to flickr, continually acquires data, and allows anyone to query the data.  Tools like Needle welcome everyone to the technological frontier of an open, real-time web of data.

Notes:

[1] Calculations based on data from May 5 to 15, 2011.  These and other figures above may change slightly as Needle acquires data for subsequent dates and automatically updates the calculated statistics.

[2] The characteristics of DSLR and point-and-shoot camera users are likely to differ from the characteristics of camera-phone users.  Camera-phone users are also a much larger population.  Users characteristics undoubtedly will affect frequency of photo uploading. The point is that camera-phones are more oriented toward photo communication than are DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras.

motherhood & sexism in Turner v. Rogers & forced financial fatherhood

The parties’ briefs in the currently pending U.S. Supreme Court case Turner v. Rogers contrast sharply in motherhood statements and fatherhood statements.  The petitioner’s brief includes only one instance of a word beginning with mother, and only two instances of a word beginning with father.  The respondents’ brief, in contrast, includes twenty-two instances of words beginning with mother, and twenty-seven instances of words beginning with father.[*]  What explains this stark contrast?

The parties’ respective presentations of the questions before the U.S. Supreme Court point to reasons for the contrasting use of motherhood and fatherhood statements.  The petitioner declares the substantial question in Turner v. Rogers to be this:

Whether the Supreme Court of South Carolina erred in holding—in conflict with twenty-two federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort—that an indigent defendant has no constitutional right to appointed counsel at a civil contempt proceeding that results in his incarceration.

That question is obviously tendentiously phrased with respect to the relevant law.  Advocates commonly present tendentious questions to highly intelligent judges.  Highly intelligent judges, like any other living person, feel sentiment and have emotions that cannot be separated biologically from logic and reason.  Hence advocates seek to prompt favorable sentiments and emotions.

The respondents pursued a much different sentimental strategy.  The respondents declare the substantial question in Turner v. Rogers to be this:

In a mother’s pro se action to enforce a child-support order, does the father have a categorical Sixth or Fourteenth Amendment right to appointed counsel before he can be confined for a limited time for civil contempt?

The respondents present the question as a battle between mother and father. The respondents’ strategy is reasonable because sentiment favors motherhood.

The U.S. financial child-support system formally serves custodial parents, both mothers and fathers.  The respondents’ sentimental strategy reveals the underlying reality.  The respondents’ brief describes in a heading one aspect of the financial child-support system:

Mothers’, Children’s, and the Government’s Interests in Fair, Effective Child-Support Enforcement Would Be Disserved by Appointing Counsel for All Nonpaying Fathers

The child-support system in reality serves narrow financial interests of mothers, children, and the government.  It shows little regard for men’s interests.  Even just with respect to men’s obvious interest in not being incarcerated, the child-support system can’t even be bothered to collect systematic, accurate statistics on the number of persons (mainly men) it keeps in jails or prisons.  The respondents’ brief pairs with the above heading a heading about fathers’ interests, alone and narrowly confined:

Fathers’ Interests Are Adequately Protected by Straightforward Family Court Procedures

Sex inequalities in child custody and child support are about an order of magnitude larger than widely discussed sex inequalities in the labor force. Straightforward family court procedures pass as adequate only because the former sex inequalities have generated relatively little public discussion and policy concern.

The respondents’ brief exploits to an extraordinary extent the child-support system’s firmly rooted, stereotype-based beliefs about the allocation of family responsibilities.  For example, the respondents’ brief declares:

A mother has a “commanding” interest in the custody and care of her child. Lassiter, 452 U.S. at 27.

Here’s what the Supreme Court’s decision in Lassiter states at the cited point:

A parent’s interest in the accuracy and justice of the decision to terminate his or her parental status is, therefore, a commanding one.

The respondents’ brief rephrased the Court’s statement in Lassiter to make it into a motherhood statement.  The respondents’ citation also excised the context of terminating a person’s parental status.  Incarcerating a person in effect terminates a person’s acting parental status for the period of incarceration.  When the parent is a father, the commanding interest in parental status isn’t even served with legal counsel.  That shows the power of motherhood statements.

mom, we love you!

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Note:

[*] These counts exclude instances in the appendices to the respondents’ brief. The respondents’ motherhood and fatherhood totals include two and seven instances, respectively, where the relevant word is in the title of a cited work or in a quotation from a cited work. One instance of mother and no instance of father is similarly situated in the petitioner’s brief.  Because the brief writer chooses articles to cite and text to quote, the total number best reflects use of motherhood and fatherhood statements.  Under either accounting, the respondents’ brief includes an order of magnitude more motherhood and fatherhood statements than does the petitioner’s brief.

telco services opposite Internet services

For about two months, Verizon has been telling callers to its weather information number (202 936-1212) that, beginning June 1, 2011, Verizon will no longer offer time of day and weather services.  Just before this message began being announced, Verizon’s weather information service simply stopped for a day or two.  Currently Verizon weather spokespersons state twice that the service is being discontinued before going on to read the weather forecast.  My sense, merely as an attentive, record-keeping Verizon residential customer, is that Verizon wants to make sure that its customers who call its weather information number clearly understand that Verizon is discontinuing that service.

My Verizon bill dated May 6, 2011, states that Verizon is reducing my local directory assistance call allowance.  Here’s the specific bill language:

Effective June 4, 2011, the directly dialed Local Directory Assistance call allowance will change from 2 calls per monthly billing period to 1 call.  For each call above the 1 call allowance, you will be billed $0.95.  With each call to Directory Assistance you can request 2 listings.

In the mid-1970, local telephone companies’ directory assistance call allowances were typically 5 calls.  Additional calls cost 10 or 20 cents per call.  Since the mid-1970s, directory assistance call allowances have shrunk and directory assistance call prices, in inflation-adjusted terms, have risen by a factor of two or three.

Internet-oriented companies seek to provide a variety of information services.  Internet-oriented companies have embraced free services and fremium business models.  Internet-oriented companies have generated considerable value by providing free services.  Free services enable them to gather information about customers interests and needs.  With that information, the company can target to those customers advertisements for paid products that addressing the customer’s specific interests and needs.

Verizon’s discontinuing time of day and weather services and reducing directory assistance allowances are unlike what most Internet service companies are doing.  Time of day and weather voice information lines, in particular, should have very low cost to a local telephone company.  Those information services should provide valuable information about customers’ interests and behavior patterns.  Why Verizon is moving away from such businesses isn’t clear.

differences between having sex and fathering a child

In opposing the Cert Petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in Turner v. Rogers, the respondents stated as facts:

Petitioner Michael Turner fathered B.L.P., the daughter of respondent Rebecca L. Rogers (née Price), in 1995, when petitioner was 18 and Rogers was 16. The pair drifted apart soon after B.L.P.’s birth in 1996.[1]

These statements equate “fathered” to having sex of reproductive type, where retrospectively a particular chain of contingent events allegedly followed from that sex act.  While sex and procreation must be linked according to authoritative doctrinal statements of Catholic Church leaders, most persons don’t believe that such doctrine should be binding on everyone under U.S. law.  Most persons consider sexual intercourse to be private conduct that they have liberty to choose without state-imposed burdens, obstacles, or punishments. Nonetheless, differences between having sex and fathering a child are not recognized in important legal actions, including in legal proceedings that keep on any given day about 45,000 men like Michael Turner in jails and prisons for sex-payment arrears.[2]

Having sex is much more prevalent among teenagers than is fathering a child.  In the U.S. today, the share of males ages 18 and 19 who have ever had oral, vaginal, or anal sex with a female are 70%, 66%, and 17%, respectively.  The share of males ages 18 and 19 who have ever engaged in oral or anal sex with a male is 4%.[3]  Only sex of reproductive type — heterosexual vaginal intercourse — is sex that, with a particular ensuing chain of contingent events, can lead to fathering a child.

Unlike females, males are subject to uncertainty about whether their sex act of reproductive type contributed sperm to a specific pregnancy.  DNA testing can establish beyond a reasonable doubt whether a particular male contributed sperm to a specific pregnancy. However, public policies and procedures discourages males from acquiring highly certain knowledge about their biological relation to a particular pregnancy.  Teen males are particularly unlikely to surmount obstacles, including lack of knowledge, shaming, and intimidation, that constrain males from acquiring this knowledge.  In the U.S. as a whole, men falsely believe themselves to be the biological father for roughly 5% of children. Among females ages 15 to 17 who had sex in the past year, 43% had sex with more than one male.[4]  The facts that a male had sex of reproductive type with a female and the female gave birth to a child approximately nine months later is not sufficient to establish a biological connection. Turner may not in fact be the biological father of B.L.P., even though he ignorantly acknowledged paternity in response to official misrepresentation of facts.

Many teenage males have sex of reproductive type without wanting to father a child and without actually fathering a child.  Not only have 66% of males ages 18 and 19 had sex of reproductive type, 43% had such sex in the past three months, and 19% had such sex four or more times in the past four weeks.[6] In the U.S. today, a male who does not want to be a father can legally use contraceptives to lessen the probability that he will fertilize an embryo.  Among the 29% of males ages 15-19 who had sex of reproductive type in the past three months, 93% had sex with some form of contraception.[7]  The share of males who state that they have a biological child is 1.9% for males ages 15-19 and less than 4.7% for males ages 18 and 19.[8]  Many teenage males have sex of reproductive type, in addition to sex of other types, many times.  Few teenage males father a child.

After decades of bitter, extensive public disputes about abortion, everyone should understand that contraceptives alone do not eliminate the problem of unwanted pregnancies and unplanned parenthood.  A male who fertilizes an embryo does not father a child when the relevant female chooses to have an abortion.  Among 16-year-old females in the U.S. in 2007, abortions amounted to 43% of live births.[9]  Price, as a 16-year-old female, chose not to have an abortion.  If Price had chosen to have an abortion, South Carolina would not have imposed weekly sex-payment obligations on Turner.  In that sense of legal fatherhood, Turner would not have fathered a child.

To most persons, fathering a child has no relation to being subject to weekly, state-imposed payments.  Fathers wake their children, dress their children, feed their children, play with their children, comfort their children, put their children to sleep, and wake them up.  Fathers change their childrens’ diapers, they wipe their running noses, and they teach their children and discipline their children.  These important acts of love and care are much different from having the resources and the disposition to comply with weekly, state-imposed payments. They are also much different from having sex.

Michael Turner and Rebecca Price had sex of reproductive type.  That act is not the same as fathering a child.  In the U.S. today, having sex of reproductive type is the basis for men being incarcerated, without even the benefit of counsel.  In a state that did not legally impose Catholic sexual morality on men, having sex of reproductive type would not be labeled fathering in a legal document before the Supreme Court.

 

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Notes:

[1] Turner v. Rogers, Respondents’ Brief in Opposition to Petition for Writ of Certiorari, p. 6.  Emphasis added.

[2] The figure of 45,000 men is based on an estimated 50,000 persons in jail or prison for child-support arrears, and assumes that the sex ratio of persons incarcerated for child-support arrears is the same as the sex ratio for child-support awards, which is eight women receiving a child-support award per man receiving one.

[3] Chandra et al. (2011) Table 6 (data from 2006-8).

[4] Calculated from data in Chandra et al. (2011) Table 1 (data from 2006-8).

[6] Abma, Martinez, and Copen (2010) Tables 4, 5 (data from 2006-8)

[7] Abma, Martinez, and Copen (2010) Tables 4, 15 (data from 2006-8).

[8] Martinez et al. (2006) Table 1 (data from 2002; no more recent figures available).  The ceiling for males ages 18-19 is calculated from the figure for males ages 15-19 under the assumption that all the men that had a biological child had their first child at ages 18 or 19.

[9] Pazol (2011) Table 5.

References:

Abma, Joyce C., Martinez, Gladys, Copen, Casey E. Teenagers in the United States: Sexual activity, contraceptive use, and childbearing, National Survey of Family Growth 2006–2008. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 23(30). 2010.

Chandra, Anjani, Mosher, William D, Copen, Casey, and Sionean Catlainn. Sexual behavior, sexual attraction, and sexual identity in the United States: Data from the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth. National health statistics reports; no 36. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2011.

Martinez, Gladys M., Chandra, Anjani, Abma, Joyce C., Jones, Jo, and Mosher, William D. Fertility, contraception, and fatherhood: Data on men and women from Cycle 6 (2002) of the National Survey of Family Growth. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 23(26). 2006.

Pazol, Karen et. al. Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2007. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), February 25, 2011 / 60(ss01);1-39.

Turner v. Rogers, U.S. Supreme Court, Docket 10-10, argued Mar. 23, 2011.