Letter submitted to the New York Times regarding Peter Lewis' article (7/3/95) on the Rimm pornography study.
I am a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. I'd like to offer a correction in response to the piece by Peter Lewis on the Martin Rimm pornography study that appeared in the July 3rd Business Day section.
Lewis writes that Mr. Rimm is "now a researcher for Carnegie Mellon in computer science". This is misleading. Mr. Rimm is not now, and never has been a member of the Computer Science Department. As Mr. Lewis notes, he was an undergraduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. That department is part of the engineering school, not the School of Computer Science. I don't know who is employing him now, but it is not any department within the School of Computer Science.
I have looked at the Rimm study. It is a mixture of interesting anecdotes, unsupported assertions, shoddy statistics, and trashy sensationalism. I do not like seeing my department even remotely linked to it.
One more point you may find interesting: the imminent appearance of the Rimm study was used by the CMU administration last November to justify a campus-wide ban on sexually explicit Usenet binary groups. The student protest against the ban was covered in the November 21, 1994 issue of Time by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, the author of this week's Cyberporn article. So Rimm's work has already led to at least one instance of electronic censorship even before the study was published. You can read all about this embarassing event on the CMU Censorship web page:
David S. Touretzky, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
CMU Computer Science Department