That’s not my position at all. I am saying, properly understood, they add to our understanding. Purposely misrepresented, they are dishonest propaganda.

What you have done, Joe, is the equivalent of saying, “Wow, he was going 130 M.P.H.” when the measurement was actually 130 feet per minute. Then, when people say, “Wait a minute, that was feet per minute, not M.P.H.,” you have the audacity to say, “Oh, you are just trying to explain it away because 130 M.P.H is just so shocking, isn’t it?”

And the fact remains that customers still can view hard core porn and even child porn using our taxpayer dollars. Minors still can view these sites in the public libraries of a city that claims to be family friendly. People can still be accidentally exposed to these sites when certain customers visit them in the libraries. And we have not made our best efforts to reverse these conditions. We have not made a good faith effort.

Joe wants the stats to say something that they don’t say. Joe wants to eliminate computers in the library rather than let one site that he doesn’t like slip through. Joe wants to impose his world-view of what’s acceptable on everyone in GSO and he’ll use stats or whatever comes next to impose it.

I think that’s politely known as censorship, which appears to be OK if Joe agrees with it. There are impolite words to use for the same thing, but this is a family blog.

(Let’s remember that it was mostly the anti-filter camp that was demanding these statistics. They got ‘em.)

Instead, we also base our conclusions on the fact that incident reports continue to show a problem; and on the likelihood that these incident reports understate the true magnitude of the problem. We base our conclusions on common sense, in part.

The anti-filter camp can attempt to diminish the value of these statistics, after having demanded them, but the problem at the library persists because the Neerman solution is inadequate.

No, we “relativists & nihilists,” aka “people knowledgeable about terminology in our business, are trying to make you understand that unless you understand the data, you can’t draw correct or sound conclusions from it.

Joe then wrote, “But is is very clear to me that a significant number of library patrons are attempting to access porn, and that some are probably successful.”

That’s an incorrect conclusion based on mis-reading data that Joe apparently doesn’t understand.

No more than I would attempt to diagnose a patient’s illness (Joe can do that), Joe shouldn’t be in the habit of drawing conclusions from log files, hits/visit stats and who’s viewing what without having studied it. He wants his conclusion so he gets it, facts don’t matter.

I just wonder what some of the above might have written about anonymous sources had the controversy been about the GPD and not the GPL.

According to documentation from Cymphonix, with the updated firmware in place, the number of hits reported by GPL may actually be showing a much more accurate indicator of web surfing activity than they think.