Droughts and demographics
Topic: Ranting
Apparently, Australia is in the throes of a "man-drought". According to Australian demographer Bernard Salt, the country is short about 20,000 men in their thirties, ostensibly due to migration overseas in pursuit of jobs. New Zealand faces a similar demographic imbalance. I feel like its too bad that the blog author, Has-Been, seems content to settle for jokes about Amazons (in response to the notion that Australian women are going about creating a culture geared toward a single lifestyle) and Australia's history as a penal colony, rather than trying for a deeper discussion of globalization and migration.

Migration is fascinating. Since my classes this semester are generally focused on global-scale issues -- colonialism, globalization, international relations from a feminist perspective -- migration is something of a recurring theme. And it's a theme that I can relate to personally, which makes it that much more interesting. Just this week, my classes have dealt with transnational kinship ties, the various motivating and constraining factors that make women's and men's experiences of migration significantly different, and the aesthetic changes that societies experience due to interactions with migrants. For instance, large scale migration of men may open up opportunities for women, as is implied by Salt when he links the lower number of men in New Zealand to the fact that several national leadership posts are held by women.

Or could it be because he's Australian that Salt thinks that "missing men" has to be the answer to New Zealand's female leadership? Unlike Has-Been states in his follow-up post, I don't think that Australia has "an absence of obvious problems". Mainstream Australian society has similar issues around gender and sexuality equity as those found in American society, which I would argue could contribute to the perception that men would have to be "missing" in order for women to be found in a number of key leadership roles in NZ. The fact that the Australian left feels every bit as alienated from national politics and society as the American left does also seems to be a problem to me. (Explanatory note on the previous link for Americans: "Liberal"= the Liberal Party, which ideologically is more or less equivalent to the Republican Party. This situation has naturally led to much confusion when I forget myself and start talking about small-"l" liberal American politics with Aussies.)

Since I spend my days in the bastion of left-wing sentiment that is a typical postgraduate humanities program, my perceptions may be more than a bit skewed, but it seems to me that plenty of Australians see the situation of Aboriginal peoples, the detention camps for illegal immigrants, and prejudice toward non-white Australians and immigrants as obvious problems. These might not be majority perspectives, but I don't think that they're held by so small a minority as to be dismissed out of hand.

So I'm more than a little bit skeptical of Has-Been's proposal that the Democrats look into the "baby bonus" that the Liberal Party has implemented, although Has-Been does at least couch it in terms of supporting families, rather than posing breeding as a "patriotic duty" as he quotes Peter Costello, a leader of the Liberal Party, as having said. That sort of attitude veers perilously close to raving racism, and given the anxiety in the US about non-white immigration into a society that has been predominantly white, I think that a "baby bonus" could easily be seen (or spun) as a eugenicist policy. The Democratic Party has enough problems without involving itself in that sort of morass.

(Wow. I was going to try to write some sort of conclusion to tie everything together, but that just doesn't seem like its going to be possible without dragging this on for pages. So maybe its best to stop now, before I get any more tangential. Or spin off into a rant about immigration anxiety. Or get any hungrier, because that will just lead to crankiness. Little did the lovely DamselFish know what she was letting everyone in for when she sent me those links!)

Just can't let it go: This story is still bugging me. I've got some stuff on corporations and psychopathic behavior that I'd like to get to, but I keep turning these articles, and my response to them, over and over in my head. I guess I'm feeling like I've barely scratched the surface of the issues involved here: globalization, demographic shifts, migration -- all major issues that I barely understand, but find deeply intriguing. And I suppose that I'm also anxious that I'm painting very shallow picture of certain issues in Australian society. I'm no expert, to be sure, and it's maybe a little too easy to look at a situation here and say, "oh, that's like this in the States", rather than going to the effort of understanding it in its own context. Not to say that drawing those parallels is necessarily invalid, but it does run the risk of obscuring a more complete and locally relevant picture. I have a feeling I'll be coming back later to many of the topics that I've touched on here, because they deserve far more attention than I'm able to give them right now. So I shouldn't harsh on Has-Been too much for skimming over the surface of the issues when I haven't delved into them myself. There's just so much to talk about and so little time right now in which to do it.

Smells like pseudoscience
Topic: Ranting
EE sent me this story today:

Why Men Don't Listen to Women

He really isn't listening to you!
When men and women speak, the human brain processes the sounds of those voices differently, Britain's Mirror and Agence France Presse report of a new study from the U.K.'s University of Sheffield. While most of us actually hear female voices more clearly, men's brains hear women's voices first as music. But it's not music. It's someone giving them a honey-do list. So the brain goes into overdrive trying to analyze what is being said.

Bottom line: Men have to work harder deciphering what women are saying because they use the auditory part of the brain that processes music, not human voices. Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices. It's not the pitch of the woman's voice, but rather the vibration and number of sound waves that cause the problem, notes Discovery News.

But guys have no trouble at all hearing each other because men use a much simpler brain mechanism at the back of the brain to decipher another man's voice and recognize it as speech.

"The female voice is actually more complex than the male voice, due to differences in the size and shape of the vocal cords and larynx between men and women, and also due to women having greater natural 'melody' in their voices. This causes a more complex range of sound frequencies than in a male voice," lead researcher Michael Hunter told The Mirror. "When men hear a male voice they process it in the 'mind's eye.' This is the part of the brain where people compare their experiences to themselves, so the man is comparing his own voice to the new voice."

Here's a really bizarre side effect: These findings help explain why people who suffer hallucinations usually hear male voices. It's just too hard for the brain to create a false feminine voice as accurately as it can create a false masculine voice.

The research findings were published in the journal NeuroImage.

I couldn't believe this story wasn't a hoax. Listening to a female voice is too much work for the male brain because the female voice is so melodious, but other male voices are less complex and therefore simpler to decipher? Can I possibly be reading that correctly? Especially the bit about "Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices"?!? My ass, they're not.*

So I went digging around on the University of Sheffield's website, and found their press release, on the study. There goes the hoax theory, unless it's a really elaborate hoax.

Not having read the NeuroImage article in which the study results were detailed, and not really having the appropriate background, I don't really have grounds to question the design of the study itself, but I would be interested to know how legitimate it really is to make sweeping generalizations about men's brains based on a study conducted on 12 subjects. Is this a statistically significant sample for purposes of experiments on the brain? I have no idea.

I'm also curious about the composition of the group of subjects -- race, class, age, sexual identity -- how diverse was this group? And how diverse were the range of voices they were listening to in the course of the study? To what extent might socialization play a role in how people process voices?

I think that socialization was quite likely overlooked in the assertion in the press release that women's voices are more complex than men's due to the "natural" melody in women's voices. I suspect that the female voice's "natural" melody owes something to socialization, in that its more acceptable for women to utilize their higher register than it is for men to do so. Therefore, women have access to a wider range of expressive vocal tones than men. So the extent of the "naturalness" of the complexity of the female voice is up for debate, in my opinion.

Interestingly, nothing in the press release from the university implies that its difficult for men to listen to women because female voices are more complex. In fact, the press release implies that processing women's voices in the auditory center of the brain may actually render them clearer to men:

"This research could also explain why female voices are considered to be clearer then male voices. This could be linked to the fact that female voices are interpreted in the auditory part of the brain, and are therefore more easily decoded."

Where did the distortion creep in? That's what I find more interesting than the study itself. I would love to have the time and resources to trace the development of this story since 12 July, which is when the press release was posted. In just over a month, the study has evolved from an examination of the way that the male brain processes male and female voices differently into a apologia for husbands who treat their wives' conversations as part of the background noise. If I was doing a classic gender studies degree, I'd be tempted to write my thesis on the process by which that distortion happened, because I bet it would be fascinating.


*Which was essentially the reaction that Liz Ciancone had, except she used more words, and less vulgar ones, because she writes for a proper publication.

Challenge!
Topic: Odds and ends
I got 103 points (without googling any lyrics), thereby winning . . . the right to post this nifty graphic on my blog:



Legwarmers rule. Who can beat me?


(via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

I'm easily amused
Topic: Odds and ends
Especially when I'm tired. Which I pretty much always am lately because my job is kicking my ass. But that's not the point. The point is that this? Is deeply entertaining to me right now.

Censorship or stupidity?
Topic: Ranting
An ABC affiliate in Utah is refusing to air an anti-war ad featuring Cindy Sheehan, which was created by Gold Star Families for Peace to air ahead of Bush's appearance at the VFW convention in Salt Lake City this week (full AP story on Yahoo News here). The station said that the ad was an "inappropriate commercial advertisement for Salt Lake City."

I don't understand the process by which a media outlet arrives at the decision that it's appropriate to censor political expression. Apparently, the station is relying on a very narrow definition of what an "issue" advertisement is -- if the ad does not pertain to a ballot measure, it can be rejected as commercial advertising. Maybe that's a legitimate argument -- I don't know enough about the distinctions between issue ads and commercial ads to comment. But considering that the local CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates are running the ads, why would a TV station want to both reject ad revenue and position itself as the "censorship station"? It just doesn't make sense.

I'm so confused that I don't even know where to start with this. Should I launch into a diatribe against the evils of the mainstream, profit-driven media? Or a rant about the monopolization of broadcast media by conglomerates like Clear Channel (the station's owner, which the station manager says did not influence the decision)? Should I take the opportunity to elaborate on my theory that the cancellation of Sports Night demonstrated that ABC is a tool of Satan and that it therefore follows that everything associated with it is evil?

I think what I find most distasteful about the situation is the cowardly and paternalistic attitude reflected in the station's statements that the ad "could very well be offensive to our community in Utah, which has contributed more than its fair share of fighting soldiers and suffered significant loss of life in this Iraq war"; and that "[t]he viewpoints reflected in the spot are incompatible with our marketplace and will not be well received by our viewers." Shouldn't it be up to the community to view the ad and decide whether or not they find it offensive? Besides, what is there to be afraid of when the other affiliates of major networks have decided to air the ad? The whole situation smacks of some station executive wanting to silence a message he or she disagrees with.

I don't agree with Sheehan's position, personally. I don't think that an immediate withdrawal of the military from Iraq is in the best interests of either the US or Iraq. I think that the US needs to come up with a responsible plan for straightening out the mess in Iraq that includes appropriate plans for withdrawal of troops. No, I don't know what that would involve, exactly, but an immediate withdrawal ain't it. But I'm not going to oppose Sheehan by participating in a smear campaign against her or otherwise attempting to silence her. I support her right to disseminate her message, and I trust that if its a bad idea, people will recognize that and not act on it. Maybe it's totally naive of me, but I don't see that ideas are so dangerous that character assassination and censorship are required to counteract them.

Headline of the week
Topic: Odds and ends
Too bad Douglas Adams isn't around to see this one: Study Details Bar at Center of Milky Way

Fuss
Topic: Ranting
After all that late night fussing over "American Car" and "Your Misfortune", I woke up this morning with "His Truth Is Marching On" stuck in my head.

No, I'm not obsessed, and I can't begin to imagine why you would think such a thing.

Also on the topic of fussing, I've been keeping half an eye on stories related to Cindy Sheehan, because I like it when the right-wing media get their knickers in a twist. The story has recently been getting fairly regular coverage on Uncommon Sense, so keep an eye on that site if you're interested in online reactions to the story. There was also an excellent, outraged post on BARISTA about the machinations of the right-wing anti-Sheehan spin -- follow the links in that story, every one of them is excellent.

Update: Maybe I'm overthinking this, but my immediate reaction on noticing that the story that Sheehan's husband has filed for divorce is front-page news on Yahoo was that this is an attempt to discredit her by playing on the antiquated idea that a husband and wife always present a united front to the world, and by extension, that if a husband withdraws his support, it must mean that the wife is doing something wrong. I don't think that arguing that it's just that she's the celebrity of the moment and is getting the full muck-raking treatment explains it, because I keep coming back to the question of why this is a news-worthy story, and the conclusion that I can't get away from is that it's newsworthy because in somebody's mind, it makes Sheehan look bad. And I'm quite sure that even if that wasn't the thought behind the posting of the story, that's the interpretation it's going to get in certain circles, and just anticipating that response makes me see six shades of red.

I have a problem
Now Playing: Mike Doughty: Haughty Melodic
Topic: Raving
It's 11:45 p.m. I have two chapters and an article to read for Social Impact Assessment tomorrow. And after listening to Haughty Melodic three times, I can't decide whether "American Car" or "Your Misfortune" is going to be my new favorite song that I'll hum under my breath over and over until some poor soul stuck sitting next to me on the tram snaps and tries to strangle me.

I should've known better than to put Haughty Melodic on tonight, but I've never believed in delaying gratification. I've been wanting to hear it since it came out in May, and MGM (current holder of the title "World's Best Brother") was finally able to make that happen. Its the first album I've listened to in years that makes me want to do nothing but lie on the floor and listen to it over and over. Most of my music collection breaks down into categories according to what it's good background music for: studying, housecleaning, retaining my sanity on the morning commute. There might be a couple songs that I'll stop everything to listen to, and replay a couple times, and that will reliably turn up on most every mix CD and playlist I create, but generally, I pop in a CD and go about my business. Haughty Melodic I want to soak in.

Some reviewers seem to think that they would've preferred to see Doughty continue in the vein of Soul Coughing's left-of-center, could've-only-come-out-of-New York sonic experimentation. Myself, much as I loved Soul Coughing, I like Doughty's turn toward a warmer, more traditional sound and more structured songwriting. Even within more conventional song structures, he hasn't lost any of his oddball sense of humor or obvious delight in playing with words. On Smofe + Smang, his 2002 concert recording, he was performing "Grey Ghost" with a "fake word" bridge because he hadn't written lyrics for it yet. Now that he has, they go: "Embracing some hard-luck citizen/ Disgraced like some strange Bob Balaban", which is perfect - obscure, precise, alliterative. The lyrics have always been the draw for me where Doughty's work is concerned, but he's a talented musician as well, and rarely runs into the problem of music and lyrics competing with, instead of enhancing, each other.

It's interesting to compare the songs that evolved from Smofe + Smang to Haughty Melodic. I haven't really followed any other songwriters closely enough to get any sense of the process of working through a song. "Madeleine and Nine" was also in development on Smofe + Smang, and I think I liked it better in it's stripped down, acoustic version. I haven't decided yet whether I prefer the plaintive "Sunkeneyed Girl" on S+S or its upbeat incarnation on HM. I'll resolve that question after I determine whether my soundtrack for the week will involve endless repetitions of the slinky, country-tinged, road-weary rasp of "American Car" or the bright piano, embracing strings, and "life's tough, but its a gorgeous day and none of that nonsense has matter for the next five minutes" atmosphere of "Your Misfortune".

I will admit that I'm outrageously biased where Doughty is concerned (see "Janine" on Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom for the point where any objectivity I had went right out the window), and I guess it's far too late to say that I don't want to oversell Haughty Melodic, but I can't imagine that anyone who likes singer/songwriters and appreciates well-crafted, evocative lyrics, wouldn't find plenty to enjoy in Haughty Melodic.

I feel dirty
Topic: Politics
And all I've been doing is reading about the operations of Congress. Even granted that in this article in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi is utterly and relentlessly cynical about the workings of the US government from the start, when a month of observation of Congressional activity leads him to this conclusion:

I get the strong impression that even the idealists in Congress have learned to accept the body on its own terms. Congress isn't the steady assembly line of consensus policy ideas it's sold as, but a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the Constitution. A largely castrated minority tries, Alamo-style, to slow them down -- but in the end spends most of its time beating calculated retreats and making loose plans to fight another day.

Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But just enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. And who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason.

its not hard to understand what prompted (or perhaps, just reinforced) all the bitterness and disillusionment.

When it comes to goverment, H.L. Mencken almost never got it wrong: "Every decent man [sic] is ashamed of the government he lives under."

(via Metafilter)

Ramble on
Topic: Catching up
My mother goes on vacation, and my page views drop by half. Coincidence, incontrovertible proof that my mother loves me, or am I just starting to bore you all, with the general randomness and the not posting for two weeks?

So, yeah, just three weeks into attempting a regular Friday piece, I drop the ball. Twice. But I have a really good excuse. I was kidnapped last weekend! Twice! Coerced entirely against my will into socializing with the other editorial staff of the postgrad journal I've joined until the wee hours of Saturday morning, and then to get up in the only slightly less wee hours of Saturday morning to spend the day driving around the Yarra Valley wine country with The Three Bears. Its disgraceful, really, the way people around here force me to have fun.

I didn't have my camera with me on Saturday (I'd met up with the Bear farmily intending to go to a farmer's market, have a cup of tea and chat, and go home to loll around pretending to do class work, and the suggestion to get out of the city was very much a spur of the moment one), so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was a gorgeous day and that the Yarra Valley has some really lovely views. Its all hills and vineyards and pasture land, peppered with wineries for the adults, and lots of animals for Little Bear, who was, with the boundless enthusiasm of a not-quite-three-year-old, quite happy to keep us all updated on the various sorts of livestock in the vicinity.

Other highlights of the past week included a temp job at Mama Bear's office (so nice to get a paycheck again), a third place finish in a local pub trivia quiz (a good American/Aussie balance on your team is key to pub quiz success), and a 2-hour visit to the ER on Tuesday night, after the lid of a soup can took a vicious slice out of my finger. (Which, can I just say, is not an injury that increases one's sense of competence in the kitchen. If I can't even cook soup without having some sort of crisis, I have very little incentive to attempt to move on to anything more complicated.) I didn't have to have stitches, just these funny-looking little strips to stick the edges of the cut together. I've had a fair bit of fun trying to figure out how to type without using the middle finger of my right hand, and my note-taking was near non-existent in lectures this week, but otherwise I'm fine, if rather put off soup for the time being.