Subject: Re: [Asrg] Re: "ham" is ridiculous -was- Re: False Positive

From: Brad Spencer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 09:39:53 -0600

At 04:06 PM 4/3/2003 +0100, you wrote:

>"Ham" was used by almost every single presenter at the MIT conference. 
>It's a recent term, but it's very much in use. Language changes, welcome 
>to the world :-)

The presenters at MIT aren't a full sample (by a long way) of the anti-spam 
community.  There is more to stopping spam than using filters.  (I'm also 
disinclined to watch the entire session just to check the assertion that 
"almost every single presenter" used the term but I doubt it.  If many 
presenters used it my suspicion is that they're all from the same small group.)

Youll is right.  Adding that word ("ham") to the vocabulary creates one 
more thing to explain where the explanation does nothing to increase useful 
awareness - it only describes what a small band desires.  There's a task 
here - why complicate that by adding useless vocabulary changes?  It's made 
worse by the fact that the vocabulary change reduces the information 
content of statements made using that vocabulary.  "spam" and "not-spam" 
can be seen to be completely disjoint categories defined on a single 
criterion.  "Spam" and "ham" carry no such clarity.  Yes, if you pound over 
and over on saying "ham" means "not spam" then the content is the 
same.  That requires pounding over and over on a definition.  Who has the time?

It's not a good enough usage to be worth the trouble.

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From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 08:28:18 -0800

> >"Ham" was used by almost every single presenter at the MIT 
> >conference. It's a recent term, but it's very much in use. Language 
> >changes, welcome to the world :-)

And almost every speaker was also choosen to support paul Graham's
claim that its all about Bayesian filtering. It was not an unbiased
sample, nor was it a particularly usefull sample.

I thought the term ham was irritating at the time. In particular
ham has pretty bad associations for at least two major world faiths
so it seems somewhat odd to use that categorization. It is also
tiresome to have people mumbling into microphones two words that
are chosen because they sound almost alike to mean opposite things.

Imagine what happens when you get a native French speaker:

"our algorithm correctly identified 90% of zee 'am and 95% of 
'zee 'am"

It is bad enough getting americans to say the word herbs properly
but there is no H sound in French.

The problem with the MIT conference was that most presentations were
glib. I don't intend to use the term 'ham' and I would suggest other's
avoid it if they want to be taken seriously. If we produce documents
in this group and they use that term others will think less of them
because of that. So why do it?

		Phill