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Spam Science

Study Finds Value in Email Spam 207

Posted by Zonk from the better-than-the-porky-kind-anyway dept.
Ant writes "According to a LiveScience story, a steady diet of email spam can be good for you. From the article: 'Researchers split a group of more than 2,100 Canadians into two groups. One group got e-mails that promoted healthy lifestyles, the other got none. "These were informative and motivational messages sent weekly for 12 weeks," explained study leader Ron Plotnikoff of the University of Alberta. The e-mails promoted the benefits of a good diet and physical activity. Those who were effectively spammed, as a group, saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning it improved. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Overall BMI rose for the control group, which did not get the emails.'"
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Study Finds Value in Email Spam More

Study Finds Value in Email Spam

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  • "smapped"? (Score:5, Funny)

    by iostream_dot_h ( 824999 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:42PM (#12981957)
    Is "smapping" an activity that my mother would approve of?

    • Re:"smapped"? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by haakondahl ( 893488 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:30PM (#12982171)
      I live in Japan, and you can NOT get away from the boy-band SMAP. So, it would seem an oddly appropriate typo. Perhaps we should stipulate that AUDIO spam is "SMAP". Different from simple noise pollution, this is audio viral marketing, annoying lodge-in-your-brain-and-fester ad jingles (Yamada Denki, anybody?), and heavy rotation TV and radio promotion of otherwise unplayable music.

      • Re:"smapped"? (Score:3, Funny)

        by MochaMan ( 30021 )
        Perhaps we should stipulate that AUDIO spam is "SMAP"

        Second this. Honestly, I think I would rather spend 30 minutes listening to a supermarket "Irrashaimase! Irasshaimase! Reitou shokuhin! Reitou shokuhin!" loop tape than the equivalent amount of SMAP.

        As for Yamada Denki, was just at the Jiyuugaoka store last weekend to pick up a new fan and was reminded why I hadn't been in the last 4 months.

        I hope their pension plan includes therapy and straightjakets for employees who've had to suffer a lifetime
      • Reminds me of that sodding "Crazy Frog".
    • A good berserker rage can lose you a few pounds, and it has the benefit of killing off the people who are sending out this annoying junk. It's one thing to have positive-mental-attitude saccharin sent to you once. A steady diet of it can cause lots of collateral damage, unless you go stop it at the source. There are people who like that sort of thing, and there's a "Successories" catalog just for them. Then there's the rest of us.

      A decade ago the company I was working for started putting out lots of hap

  • So obvious! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:43PM (#12981964)
    You know what else is good?

    If you have a fat wife or fat children, you should tell them they're fat several times a day. And tell them they need to lose weight. And do it in front of company when people visit. And when they're at the dinner table, tell them they don't need seconds when they reach for something, because they're fat.

    And tell your daughter she's ugly, so she'll do something about her face and maybe get some cosmetic surgery. And tell your son how stupid he is every chance you get so he'll be compelled to be an educated man.

    And really, nothing gets a man to be a better husband and father than constantly reminding him what a pathetic, weak, insecure human being he is. Make sure you point out how he doesn't provide for the family the way some men do and that he has a long way to go before he could ever impress you or the children. Also, if you're an in-law, do this often to your son or daughter in-law. They will thank you for it someday, for making them a better human being.

    And it's proven that little girls who play with (perfect bodied) barbies have much better self-images and are much healthier than other girls. And the images on magazines, MTV, movies and television only help to positively reinforce this good self-image throughout a young girl's growth.

    This also works if you're a manager or employer. Make sure to set aside some time each day to ridicule your employees and point out their failures so that they'll do better. Tell them how lazy, stupid, non-productive and wasteful they are.

    There is nothing more helpful and nothing people are more grateful for than having the obvious pointed out and being constantly reminded for it. And if you look at people today, the most successful and well-rounded and happy adults are always the ones that were told what ugly, fat, stupid, lazy failures they are their entire childhood.

    Too bad this doesn't work for the penis extension thing.

    Oh - and by the way, the study says "These were informative and motivational messages sent weekly for 12 weeks". How is that spam?

    • Re:So obvious! (Score:5, Funny)

      by tciny ( 783938 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:48PM (#12981999)
      So does this mean that I'm getting all this viagra spam for a reason? Is sombebody trying to motivate me to get better in bed?

      • Re:So obvious! (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's why you shouldn't give your email account info to your inflatable doll

    • Oh shit! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      Nagging works. We have to hide this from the world, especially females. Hell, this is fuckin' bigger than Roswell.

    • Re:So obvious! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lightspawn ( 155347 )
      Oh - and by the way, the study says "These were informative and motivational messages sent weekly for 12 weeks". How is that spam?

      I'm guessing they didn't opt in, the email headers were forged, they were sent through open relays, and the mails included referral links to sleazy web sites offering related products.
    • Come on people! This person is not being funny! He is being sarcastic. It has been proven that constant bombardment about a person's weaknesses does not have the opposite effect. Always being told you are no good makes you stop trying to be better. Even animals respond to praise better than they respond to kicks and beatings.

      Just adding one funny line at the bottom does not make the whole paragraph funny!

  • It's a reminder, just like attaching a picture of a fat person to the door of your fridge.

  • Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Apathy ( 584315 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:43PM (#12981967)
    Bullshit. Send them a never ending supply of porn and penis enlargement spam and see how many of them are still alive at the end of the study.

  • Not sure quite what part of this is new (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:44PM (#12981971) Homepage Journal
    So they seem to have established that drilling a message home to people through their inbox can sometimes make a point. I really dont know how this is any different to any other repeated advertising/promotion, except that this kind (if sent without the users request) is actually illegal. Surely if someone wants to be reminded all the time about a specific thing, they could just get reminders to flash on the screen, instead of clogging their inbox with these e-mails..
    • Blockquoth the poster:
      Not sure quite what part of this is new
      The spam part. Yes, the fact that their study used spam is irrelevant to their conclusions, but that's what it is, that's why it's reported upon. Maybe if slashdot were around 20 years ago we'd see a similar story entitled "Study finds value in junk faxes".
      • Not sure quite what part of this is new
        The spam part.

        Except if you agreed to receive it, it's not spam, just email. All the newsletters, mailing lists and such I subscribe to improve me in various ways, I hope. But it would be just stupid to call them spam, as apparently the PR flack who sent out this press release did when reaching for a hook to make it sound slightly interesting.

  • Spam + Solicitation != Spam (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Endareth ( 684446 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:44PM (#12981974) Journal
    Surely spam by definition is unsolicited? If you have a group of people choosing to receive it then it's no longer spam. Whatever the intention and results of this study, linking it to spam is simply wrong.

    • Re:Spam + Solicitation != Spam (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MattyDK23 ( 819057 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:57PM (#12982052)
      The article doesn't mention, though, if the members of the spam group were aware of the fact that they were receiving the study's spam -- or if the members of the no-spam group were aware they weren't receiving the study's spam.
      Furthermore, could the spam group differentiate between the genuine spam and the study's opt-in spam?
      It's kind of like a blind test. Sure, you probably signed a waiver saying you're willing to receive extra "spam". But you don't know if you're receiving the extra spam or not, and if you are, you're not aware of which emails are the extra spam.

      • Re:Spam + Solicitation != Spam (Score:4, Interesting)

        by LS ( 57954 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2005 @12:25AM (#12983126) Homepage
        The problem is that depending on the type and amount of spam the person was already receiving, it could easily be clear that the spam was being received from the researchers. Also, knowing that the study has something to do with spam would cause many of the subjects to purposely read the spam, further making this a less realistic study.

        LS
      • They also don't explain by what method the control group got fatter "overall" during the experiment. They didn't receive the health "smap" before and they didn't receive it after. Why would starting an experiment whose purpose they have no idea of cause them to suddenly get fatter?

        By the way, there's a band in Japan who might object to having their name used to refer to opt-in junk email.

    • Re:Spam + Solicitation != Spam (Score:5, Funny)

      by squarefish ( 561836 ) * on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:07PM (#12982085)
      it's not spam, that's just a typo in the description- see, later in the brief it says 'smapped'. it's smap they're getting, not spam.

      someone needs to smap the editors upside the head...

    • Re:Spam + Solicitation != Spam (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TheKidWho ( 705796 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:13PM (#12982101)
      I can see how they did it though(note didn't RTFA)

      1. Get a group of 2,100 people together
      2. Tell them you are doing a 3 month survey of their BMI
      3. Choose a random half of the people to send the emails to, don't tell them it's you sending them though.(kind of stupid not to guess who it's coming from though isn't it?)
      4. Collect Data
    • It's not in the definition unless it's unsolicited pork-shoulder. SPAM is a canned meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation that has entered into folklore. SPAM luncheon meat is also used as an artistic medium in SPAM carving contests.

    • Re:Spam + Solicitation != Spam (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2005 @02:18AM (#12983409) Homepage
      Besides, have you ever received any "health" spam?

      All I get is spam about illegal drugs or medication, genitalia modifications, unfortunate nigerians, porn or how my bank account details got lost again.

      I also wonder as to the content of these spams; was it health tips or true spam advertising dangerous medication, and why did their BMI go down; because they started using illegally obtained or even banned meds?
  • Wait, wait, wait! Based on this study, getting all of the emails for "V1AGRA" and "C1AL1S" will actually improve my libido without actually buying the drugs! Cool!

  • The power of suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 ) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:45PM (#12981982)
    It is not so much the spam itself (though I have to question why they refer to the emails as spam when it seems that they were primarily informational emails), but the constant suggestion to live right and healthily that put the idea into the recipients' heads to do just that.

    It is very similar to the rise in karate school enrollments after a popular martial arts movie like The Karate Kid is released. People take whatever they can from any message and sometimes those messages can lead to action. In this case it was towards weight loss, in others it is towards violence, in others it is towards humanity towards fellow humans.
  • Based on the logic of this article. I'll be leaving now to puckup some "Horney Coeds" and take them to a farm for some "Hot barnyard action".

    Spammers don't send reminders to exercise you morons! They try to get you to buy penis enlargment pills.

  • Not exactly spam (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chatmag ( 646500 ) <editor@chatmag.com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:46PM (#12981986) Homepage Journal
    The emails were informative. I see nowhere in the article that they promoted a product or service.

    If I get an email with no commercial link, or promoting a particular product, its not spam. Spam is UCE, unwanted commercial email.
    • Uhh no.

      MOST UCE is spam, but not all.

      Spam is UBE - Unsolicited Bulk Email.

      Any email that is not Unsolicited, and/or not Bulk, is not spam. Whether it's commercial or not doesn't matter either way.
    • Just because it isn't "commercial" doesn't make it not spam.

      "Friends" and their damn "Fwd:" messages are spam to me. If it is email I didn't ask for and do not want, it's spam.
    • Unsolicited Bulk Email.

  • Ahhh (Score:5, Funny)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:47PM (#12981989) Homepage
    I get it, we just need spammers who encourage us to live healthy lifestyles:

    G_t outside now! Exercise! Stop using y0ur com_uter!

    and shakespear donged a dozen fractal
    nevermind is the people to much building
    for Jill never news to many home funding

    http://wexxx.shasz13.com/fsss/sm11/epl.cgi [shasz13.com]

    Given that the very purpose of spam is often to sell products that are essentially empty promises, I'm going to write this study off as moot.

  • logically... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those who were effectively smapped...

    if
    spam = sending people annoying messages

    then
    smap = sending messages to annoying people?

    it stands to reason.

  • That's not spam at all (Score:5, Funny)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:48PM (#12981996) Homepage Journal
    That's an opt-in mailing list.
    Are we gonna start calling every computer glitch a virus now, too?

    Also, I bet that if the emails had been advertising actual spam, their bodies would have gotten fatter... and saltier.

  • Valued spam (Score:2, Funny)

    by Krankheit ( 830769 )
    Spam is an excellent resource. With spam, you can receive valuable money-saving offers on quality products manufactured by reputable companies like Pfizer. Also, spam is a great way for distressed, generous Nigerians to communicate with Americans to facilitate the transfer of their riches to America.

  • obviously... (Score:3, Funny)

    by andreMA ( 643885 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:49PM (#12982004)
    Those who were effectively smapped, as a group, saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down
    Yes, throwing your monitor through the window in annoyance over spam is good exercise.

  • How appropriate.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deacon ( 40533 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:50PM (#12982010) Journal
    An article about the benefits of spam..

    And I just finished reading the Richard Feynman article on Cargo Cult Science. [huji.ac.il]

    Article Text below as slashdotting prevention:

    Cargo Cult Science

    Richard Feynman

    From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

    During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.

    But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

    Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

    At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

    One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

    I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

    That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

    But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even mor

    • Re:How appropriate.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by antispam_ben ( 591349 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:37PM (#12982617) Journal
      This livescience.com site looks like the Reader's Digest (disparaging comments intended for livescience, apologies to RD which is sometimes enjoyable and doesn't claim to be a science journal) of science websites. What a horrible article, on several levels. I'll say it one more time: Screw this crap.

      But on to the parent post:

      Cargo Cult Science

      Richard Feynman

      From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

      It's been a long time (16+ years) since I read "Surely You're Joking,..." so this was an interesting re-read, especially in light of what I've read since then: Susan Blackmore's "The Adventures of a Parapsychologist," current edition titled "Searching For The Light."

      Blackmore wrote of being the first to get a Master's degree in parapsychology, and what she did along the way to getting it. Her "downfall" was strict adherence to methods Feynman wrote about. She started enthusiastically enough, believing she would be the one to prove the existence of some sort of ESP phenomenon, doing many experiments designed to detect it, but all of them failing. She had colleagues that had successful experiments (showing someething statistically unlikely), but she always found problems and irregularities with their experiments. She was labeled psi-negative.

      What struck me was how these people, even with their motivation to find hard evidence that they thought was "just around the corner," were unable to find it, but they kept on going, because they BELIEVED it was there, in the same sense as a religious believer.

      At the time I had some spurious beliefs brought about by having been around a "good group of people" for a few years. I was already questioning some of these beliefs before I read Blackmore's book, and while reading it my (actually the group's) beliefs fell like a house of cards. I suppose I should be, uh, 'grateful' that I read Blackmore's book.

      Feynman mentions Rhine (click on the parent's "Read the rest of this comment..." link), and Blackmore writes about visiting the USA and meeting him, and she and others had a seance or some such with him. Rhine was defininely the most respected person in parapsychology, making his suggestion of picking only the positive-testing students all the more outrageous.

  • SCREW This! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by antispam_ben ( 591349 )
    My 1997 Mindspring account gets over 100 spams per day. I go through them at about two per second just so see if someone i know, or something I have actually signed up for, is sending something and hasn't gotten my new address. I used to only read the headers and body to see where to report things, but there's too much for me to report it all now.

    Okay, I acually RTGDFA. Screw this crap!

    Those who were effectively smapped, as a group, saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning it improved. BMI i

  • Much spam is de-motivational (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:51PM (#12982022)
    What about spam that is very negative: your too small, your credit is bad, you need pills, your account is about to be canceled...

    I wonder if this makes some spam a health threat.

  • All this 'proves'.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by B747SP ( 179471 ) <slashdot@selfabusedelephant.com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:51PM (#12982025)
    ... is that academics will stoop at nothing in the quest for avoidance of actual work. I work with them day in, day out, and believe you me, I've never seen any group of people work so hard at doing nothing.

    They obtain large government grants on the strength of elaborate proposals that, when passed through a suitably calibrated crap filter, say nothing, then spend the money buying iPods for their kids, and laptops and broadband for their favourite researcher's kid sister. Once the money is gone, they come up with a paper that says "When two houseflies crawl up a wall, it makes no difference to the average vertical speed of either housefly whether his counterpart is standing on his left or his right.", get published in a journal, get a free trip to speak at a conference somewhere, then they go back to square one and start writing up an application for another grant.

    [sarcasm] I can't wait until I've finished my doctorate so I can hop on this gravy train [/sarcasm]

    #disclaimer.not: All examples of corruption in this post are real.

  • Thats just daily health and nutrition advice...

  • Once a week? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Snorpus ( 566772 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @06:53PM (#12982037)
    From the teaser, at least, it sounds like this was one informative email a week, for 12 weeks. Hardly characteristic of the spam that gets (most of us) upset.

    Now what if they sent 5 or 10 a day, every day? Wonder if the test group would be paying attention to the message then.

  • That would explain why I've been feeling so horny lately...
  • Emails sent to a control group to study effects of a particular message hardly qualifies as "Spam". These email weren't unsolicitated.

  • Bogus Article / Bogus Research (Score:5, Insightful)

    by humankind ( 704050 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:06PM (#12982081) Journal
    The article isn't about spam. It's a study of the effects of e-mail-based affirmations. It doesn't take a bunch of goofball researchers to demonstrate that daily affirmations are influential, but what does that have to do with spam? Nothing.

    Spam is universally acknowledged as unsolicited, deceptive, indiscriminate, often illegal and immoral solicitations.

    If they want to do a legitimate study on spam, then use spam, NOT uplifting e-mail messages.

    • The article isn't about spam. It's a study of the effects of e-mail-based affirmations. It doesn't take a bunch of goofball researchers to demonstrate that daily affirmations are influential, but what does that have to do with spam? Nothing.

      You're Good Enough, You're Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like You!

  • Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:12PM (#12982097) Homepage Journal
    This proves that messages that tell people about healthy lifestyles can improve people's health. Unless all of the "make big penis now" and "v1agr4 is teh bomb" and "urgent message from Uganda" and the racist crap from spam worms can somehow be considered "promoting a healthy lifestyle". Spam is the stuff we don't want. Messages promoting healthy lifestyles are what you will get if you subscribe to something that you wanted. At that point it's not unsolicited.
  • Are they implying that all the spam I get about enlarging my penis are actually increasing the size of my penis?

  • Yeah, and (Score:5, Funny)

    by Council ( 514577 ) <rmunroe.gmail@com> on Monday July 04, 2005 @07:15PM (#12982109) Homepage
    Getting punched every morning helps with your constitution. Toughens you up. Let's encourage it.

    At least, I think it helps. I'll do some studies.

  • BMI (Score:2, Interesting)

    by anth ( 2631 )
    According to the couple of BMI charts I saw a few years ago I was overweight, so should excercise more and eat less junk food. Yet I was getting a lot of excercise and eating really well, and was in great shape according to any other measurement (well, apart from being short sighted). Now I don't go to the gym anymore and I'm in the healthy BMI range, but wouldn't do nearly so well on the other measurements.

    So part of the blurb could be rewritten:

    ... saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning

  • Wow, that's great. By the same reasoning, I could conclude that merely *receiving* spam that promises me to "3NLAGRE YUR P3N1S!" etc., my penis will indeed grow. Seems far-fetched? It's basically the same claim.
  • Yeah, I get lots of exercise jumping up and down and screaming abuse at the spammers. On the morning of a major spam attack I'm liable to lose 5 kg, easy.

    However, I'll bet the study didn't check their blood pressure.

  • Did the they use spam obfuscation techniques like 'D0n't e4t fat' or 'You suohd be caaaarreeeful abuot your diet'. Without them I won't call any text as spam, that's like a new World of 'advertisement' communication.
  • The article says their BMI went down, assuming they lost weight, maybe they all just got taller?
  • I've always wanted a 12 inch cock. And now, i can have one and all i gotta do is kill spam assassin.
  • This so called study assumes that you actually read the crap in your inbox. Most of us here would not be affected. How many of you even open something from any person or organization you don't know? Straight to the FTC and then the shitcan from my inbox.
  • If they're right, I should now have a 4'-long and constantly erect wiener, a 50 gallon vat of C!AL!S and V!AGRA, all the FR33 MICROS)FT SOF)TWARE I'll ever need, and be sleeping with hot housewives every evening..

    I call BS on that study.
  • There do exist people in the world (myself being one of them) who have the opposite problem from "The Average American"... I cannot keep enough weight on to stay healthy... If my BMI were to go down, then I probably wouldn't have enough reserve fat to survive from one meal to the next. And before anyone says "Boy I wish I had your problem", no you don't. Trust me. Being constantly on the edge of dangerously underweight is not fun, healthy, good for one's social life, etc. etc. etc. It is a less common

  • sweet! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Daktaklakpak ( 322915 )
    I'm gonna go measure my penis now...maybe it's been getting longer!

  • Pressing "Delete" burns fat! (Score:5, Funny)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:06PM (#12982295) Homepage
    As it turns out, a re-examination of the study reveals that the subjects burned on avarage of 2,000 calories a day by pressing "delete" on all of these messages. In addition to the extra exercise, they were also consuming more time away from food since they were spending all of this time deleting emails. Finally, many subject becames so frustrated with their email that they took up other hobbies and found themselves actually going outside seeking something to do.

  • Don't waste your time RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aztektum ( 170569 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @08:18PM (#12982323)
    Basically it says that the Jedi Mind Trick may work if you are persistent in application.
  • if they take those same test subjects and send half of them with emails talking about getting a longer penis and half of them with nothing, would you find 12 weeks later that the ones receiving emails with longer penis to grow an inch or 2 or even more? /. readers, DONT TRY THIS AT HOME! this study hasn't proven to be safe! you never know what may happen. maybe receiving longer penis emails may actually have the reverse effect and *shivers* 'shrivel' it up!!!
  • Partcipant of the study agreeing to get spam... Is this not obviously a contradiction in terms?
  • They asked for this, ergo it's not spam. Besides, most of the spam I get isn't promoting healthy lifestyles, it's promoting erectile-dysfunction drugs, pornography, and money-making schemes, primarily the Nigerian 419 variety. Never mind the viruses and the chain letters I get from my mom.
  • If I come into the office in the morning and there is a mixture of spam and ham in my inbox, it pisses me off. Getting pissed off is a sure fire way to burn calories (heart rate rises, etc), although probably not so good for you in other ways.

    It works better for me because i'm the one who maintains the company spam filter, so if spam is getting through then i'm the one who'll be doing the tuning.

    Not that i've had to do any tuning in a while though, i get the odd week where some new trick means that some s
  • Shouldn't the control group's BMI remain relatively unchanged? or are they all just Americans?

  • Value? (Score:2)

    by azav ( 469988 )
    These people need to die.

    There is no value in spam, the only value is in obliterating the people who send it.

  • Based upon the abstract (I only skimmed the article), I think there's sufficent evidence to throw out the survey: the control group's BMI INCREASED.

    The control group should remain the same. Based upon the result of the control group increasing, we can conclude that the population should be continuously be getting fatter and fatter ad infinitum.

    The article also failed to mention if the test was double-blinded and such. It fails to mention if the spam was designed to be attractive, or even unsolicited at
  • ... all the way from 1924.

    They knew they were involved. They know they were being monitored. They were participating in yet another replication of the Hawthorne studies http://www.mtsu.edu/~pmccarth/io_hist.htm [mtsu.edu] (halfway down).

    All they needed to know was someone was watching (they signed consent forms) and be told what to do (they received emails).

    Now, redesign it in the form of Stanley Milgram's Harvard experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [wikipedia.org]) and have the emails say "Locate the spam
  • When does my penis get enlarged ?
    After all lots of spam I get suggest that.

  • BMI doesn't measure body fat (Score:5, Informative)

    by taustin ( 171655 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2005 @01:44AM (#12983313) Homepage Journal
    BMI is a ratio of height to weight. It is no, in any way, connected to body fat. That is what makes it pure, unadulterated bullshit. It does not take in to account age, build, or even sex. According to those who preach BMI, a man and a woman of the same height should be the same weight. According to BMI, if you are very muscular, but in such good shape you have 5% body fat, you are overweight.

    That isn't just quackery, it's medically dangerous.
  • Just because their BMI went down, doesn't mean they lost weight. They could have grown.
  • I don't have the hard facts, but this smells a bit of industry-backed propaganda.

    I'm JUST saying.
  • Keep opening and reading spamcrap, and eventually your computer will be so totally locked down as a zombie/virus nexus that your system will lock up, your ISP will cancel your account, and all of the people you have in your email addressbook will hate you and never talk to you again (nor ever open your emails).

    Eventually, you'll HAVE to go outside in the sunlight and get some fresh air, if only to go buy a new computer system.

    = better health!
  • I'll get my penis and breasts enlarged, cum longer, have a lower mortgage, and all the pr0n I ever wanted, and I'll have US $25M in my bank account for that poor person in Nigeria.

    I also won't spend as much time online, since my machine will be so protected by the protection the software that the spam told me about that I won't be able to use it.

    And, of course, I won't have all the weight of that excess money, having invested in all those penny stocks whose value went from pennies to mils (thousandth of a
  • I'm gaining it because I have to sit all day at the computer complaining about all the spam!

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