I remember Marty Rimm from when we were in New College together. He's been making waves lately.
Marty published a controversial study about pornography on the internet.
The study was featured in a sensationalistic cover story in Time Magazine.
Senators have cited the study on the Senate floor.
Marty was recently interviewed on Nightline. I missed it, but i've been told that he's shaved his beard.
Hotwired has covered Time's irresponsible reporting.
Academics have refuted the study's findings on a number of grounds.
Last November, Marty was involved in a censorship battle at Carnegie Mellon.
Before this Marty has also published a novel about atlantic city, and a separate book about publishing pornography.
Back in high school, Marty had published a survey criticizing teenage gambling in Atlantic City.
Just last week, i was thinking about how i should start gathering information about censorship and place it on the net. Marty has given me the perfect place to start.
I talked on the phone the other day with a journalist named Brock Meeks who is tracking this story. He has been engaged in an surreal email exchange with Marty. He's also discovered that while publishing an academic article warning of the dangers of pornography, Marty was at the same time helping the pornographers promulgate their wares! There's more here that i can possibly summarize. Check out the whole enchilada.
I just read Mike Godwin's essay in the August Wired magazine. I'm sure he wrote it before the Time magazine story came out, but i think he really put his finger on things. His says the fears about porn and bomb manuals on the internet are manifestations of a general fear of real democracy. People may take control of this technology and use it to say and show things we don't approved of! It also threatens to make the media obsolete, or at least that's many in the media are afraid of. They want to believe that the net is dangerous. It's interesting to note that Mike is also the guy who debated Marty on the Nightline show.
I've been getting calls from other reporters who want to talk to me about Marty. I've added a link to my statement about him. What do they think i can tell them? I haven't been in contact with him for ten years.
Time magazine published an update to their story where they cast doubts about Marty's study but they don't say anything about any poor judgment they may have exercised.
Mike Godwin has been all over the place with this story. His latest missive tells us that he's discovered that the author of the legal footnotes to Marty's study is also the editor to the Georgetown Law Review and an anti-porn activist. This explains why that journal decided to print Marty's study. Marty really knows how to play this game, doesn't he?
Rimm's Index organizes some interesting information about this study in the style of Harper's Index.
Apparently alt.internet.media-coverage has been actively following this story. I just found an excellent collection of posts and other links.
Marty wrote a fawning and turgid letter to Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse as an introduction to his book on marketing pornography. "Despite countless deprivations and temptations, I have examined this topic with great diligence," he says. "I very deliberately omitted from that study [the one published in the Georgetown Review] most of the data which would be especially useful to a man such as yourself." Don't neglect to check out this letter. It's the most bizarre element of this story yet.
The latest wrinkle is that Marty may have yet another ethical problem with his study. He allegedly searched student accounts at Carnegie Mellon to determine who read what newsgroups. This raises two concerns. First, he may not have had the informed consent of his test subjects. Second, he may have violated the computer security policy of the university.
Pathfinder publishes articles for Time and several other periodicals on the web. They've published a directory to their articles, plus links to others around the net relating to this story. This appears to be updated daily.
Yesterday the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published an article about Marty. The news is that Marty has been dropped from the list of people to testify before congress. They also mention that he has hired a lawyer.
It has recently come to light that Marty closely modelled his study on an unpublished study by Michael Mehta and Dwaine Plaza without citing their research. Presumably Carenegie Mellon will also now have to weigh charges of plagiarism.
Bradley Rhodes has published an interesting collection of critiques and count-critiques. He's taken other people's documents and added hotlinks to their claims and criticisms so that you can check them out for yourself as you read them. I got a little dizzy following the links, but it is an interesting project.
The biggest news over the past month is that Carnegie Mellon officially charged a committee of inquiry to investigate the allegations on unethical and improper research in Marty's original study. They have 120 days to report their conclusions.
A collection of letters between Marty Rimm and Seth Finkelstein was recently made public. Seth is an anti-censorship activist at MIT. The correspondence really gives a good picture of how Marty operates.
A New York Times editorial refers to Marty's study as "unreliable" and the Time magazine article as "credulous."
The New Yorker reported on this story in their Aug 7 issue. A set of book reviews on the first amendment and cyberspace by Jeffrey Rosen opens with Marty's story. My favorite lines were "Then the story grew wonderfully bizarre" -- introducing Marty's background -- and "The unmasking of Marty Rimm was entertaining, but ..." -- introducing an examination of how such a lack-luster study received such attention.
I just spoke with another Journalist. Zachary Margulis is working on an article for Wired. I was surprised to learn that he hadn't vistited my web site and was in fact reluctant to check it out. He was unsure whether he could get to it from America Online and told me it wasn't really his "M.O." I don't know how a journalist can understand this story without being able to do research on the web.