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Trumpets and sexism

Mon, 06/27/2011 - 4:21pm | selguy

About eleven months ago,  this forum discussed sexism in the local jazz scene.   These discussions can be found by clicking  below on page 5 of this forum's previous discussions.     An AP news story (in today's News-Gazette on page A-5)  reports that the Swedish Science Council had granted an $80,000 post doctoral fellowship to  analyze "the trumpet as a symbol of gender."      On wonders  what Jeff Helgason, our community's most gifited trumpet player (whose political views are very left of center) would think of this?

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alabaster jones 71 wrote on July 02, 2011 at 10:07 am
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Correction: this forum did

Correction: this forum did not discuss sexism in the local jazz scene. You made a few unfounded, absurd allegations and everyone who read them laughed at you and then we moved on.

selguy wrote on July 12, 2011 at 7:07 pm

Actually, there were two

Actually, there were two threads: (i) Sexism an the Iron Post in Urbana, which had 34 posts, and (ii) Sexism at Mike and Molly's in Champaign which had 29 posts. A review of the postings opposing the initial theses certainly were convincing that the individual posters personally held no sexist views, but they did not refute the existence of institutional or cultural sexism

alabaster jones 71 wrote on July 14, 2011 at 8:07 pm
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Institutional and cultural

Institutional and cultural sexism obviously exist. However, a particular bar not featuring as many female jazz musicians as you might prefer is not sexism. Did you inquire with the bars in question whether or not female jazz musicians asked to play at those bars and were turned down? If not, I think your accusations are slanderous (perhaps not in the legal sense, but in the colloquial sense). May I ask if a single person has agreed with these accusations you've made regarding sexism or even sincerely taken them seriously? Certainly that isn't airtight proof that you're wrong, but still, why do you think that be?

selguy wrote on July 17, 2011 at 5:07 pm

"Did you inquire with the

"Did you inquire with the bars in question whether or not female jazz musicians asked to play at those bars and were turned down?" Your question incorrectly assumes that the bars were involved in the selection of the players. All posters on the threads in question concur that the bars had no role in selecting the players

"May I ask if a single person has agreed with these accusations you've made regarding sexism or even sincerely taken them seriously?" Yes you may

"Certainly that isn't airtight proof that you're wrong, but still, why do you think that be?"
I can only speculate what you are referring to as "that"
If my speculation is correct, then you'll find the answer in reviewing the lives of Coperncus, Galileo and John Snow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow_(physician)

Oliver wrote on June 28, 2011 at 2:06 am

I hope whatever spectrum Mr.

I hope whatever spectrum Mr. Helgason is in, that he'd sum up this non-issue issue with "Oh, brother!".
Regards,

and off the subject to Mr. Foreman: why does the CAPTCHA have to be so UNclear??? I can easily read our 26 letters, and even all the digits AND punctuation, but, not easily if it is literally BLURRED!! (or run together in a SPLOTCH!!)

John Foreman wrote on July 12, 2011 at 11:07 am
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Oliver, I've wondered the

Oliver,

I've wondered the same thing myself. I often have to revolve through two or three options to find one I can read. Surely automatic spammers are not that hard to stop. Your note is my impetus to look into it. Thanks.

John

Rich Lawson wrote on July 12, 2011 at 4:07 pm

Oliver, John Foreman asked me

Oliver,

John Foreman asked me about the CAPTCHA on our website, so I put together some information about it that you might find helpful.

Before we enabled CAPTCHA for forum and story comments, we were seeing quite a bit of spam. Spammers learned that many websites only implement spam protection for account creation. They have started paying individuals small sums of money for each account that they successfully create. Once an account is created, the spammer can then use scripts to automatically generate spam through comments when there is no spam prevention required to post them.

To combat this problem, we implemented CAPTCHA on forum and story comments, and we've blocked 64,635 submissions so far. Some of these come from people having difficulty bypassing the spam prevention, but many of these would have ended up as spam comments.

Unfortunately, there isn't anything we can do about an individual image served through our CAPTCHA. We use reCAPTCHA (http://www.google.com/recaptcha) for spam prevention, and this is usually considered to be the best tool available for this purpose. It is automatically updated when vulnerabilities are found, includes features to improve accessibility, and even helps to digitize old documents.

Even though this tool is robust, spammers have found ways to bypass the protection at various points in time, and then updates are published to reCAPTCHA to address the failure. In January, for example, there was quite a bit of talk about this online:

http://www.allspammedup.com/2011/01/google-recaptcha-cracked/

There are other CAPTCHA mechanisms available such as ASIRRA (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asirra/), but all have their drawbacks, and there are quite a few that do not work very well at all. As spammers and object recognition become more sophisticated, there is a serious danger that CAPTCHA mechanisms will become ineffective in the future.

You might also be interested to know that we use a service called Mollom (http://mollom.com/). This actually analyzes the content of submissions for spam, similarly to how a junk filter works on e-mail. Unfortunately, the service so far has been unreliable, with down time and other issues, but as this and other services like it improve, we may be able to remove CAPTCHA from the process of posting entirely.