Year: 2013

Divided government is getting more common:

Democracies everywhere—from the oldest and most mature, to the youngest and least institutionalized—are showing a surprising common feature: It is increasingly rare that a presidential candidate trounces his opponent. Elections won by a landslide are endangered species. They still happen occasionally, but the prevalent trend is that wherever free and fair elections take place, the margins of victory are shrinking. Increasingly, elections are won by a hair.

Today, polarized and fragmented electorates are the norm, and their votes offer no clear mandate or dominant position to any party or candidate. This is why so many countries are governed by complex, cumbersome, and unstable coalitions formed by political groups whose members often have little in common and in some extreme cases are even bitter rivals.

As I have noted elsewhere, in 2012, among the 34 members of the “rich nations club,” the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, only four featured a government that also had an absolute majority in parliament. In India, 35 parties shared seats in the 2009 election; no party has won an absolute majority since 1984. In fact, absolute majorities are globally on the wane. In electoral democracies, minority parties have won on average more than 50 percent of the seats in parliament throughout the postwar period; in 2008, minority parties controlled 55 percent of seats on average. But even in countries that are not deemed democracies, minority parties are increasing their clout. In those countries, minority parties held fewer than 10 percent of seats three decades ago; now their average share has risen to nearly 30 percent.

Scarface finally gets the laugh track it deserves:

A reader writes:

Regarding your canned laughter thread; it’s likely that only those who live in California’s Central Valley will remember that Fresno, the mini-series starring Carol Burnett, was aired twice, originally in 1986 without a laugh track and again in 1989 with canned laughter “added so that the audience would know Fresno was supposed to be funny”, as mentioned on Wikipedia. I remember the talk at the time was that the original broadcast was too dry and people outside Central California didn’t realize it was a parody of Dallas and meant to be funny. I thought it was hilarious as originally aired and felt uneasy about the added laughter in the 1989 version, since it was obviously not filmed in front of a studio audience. The entire four-and-a-quarter hours without the laugh track is here. (You might enjoy a young Gregory Harrison as Torch, since he didn’t wear a shirt in any scene.)

Another:

Apparently when they were taping Seinfeld (an actual, honest-to-goodness funny show), they ran in to a related problem: too much laughter.

As the series progressed, the scripts began to fill more and more of the 22 minutes (later episodes of the show omit Jerry’s lead-in stand-up bits) and were precise enough they couldn’t afford much time for laughter. Apparently, according to the DVD, Larry David was especially annoyed when the audience would laugh too much – or cheer Kramer upon his first appearance, which went on for more than a season – and therefore take up his valuable comedy time. (Of course, Larry David gets annoyed at pretty much everything.)

Another:

The problem of canned laughter extends well past TV sitcoms. A few years ago my wife and I took in the revival of “Promises, Promises” with Kristen Chenowith and Sean Hayes on Broadway, and the audience was the worst audience I’ve ever seen. They too laughed at nearly every line, conditioned to do so by years of TV viewing. My suspicion is that the TV stars in the cast, Hayes and Chenowith, attracted a TV-familiar audience who believed that they were part of the show.

The worst moment, however, was when Hayes’s character discovers that Chenowith, with whom he has been in love, is having an affair with his boss. The audience collectively gasped. It’s not a subtle moment in the production. The affair has been building to this point and anyone paying attention, or anyone who has seen earlier productions, knows what is going on and what’s about to happen. Yet the audience seemed to be stunned by the revelation.

It was like sitting in the movie theater with the cliched woman yelling at the actors on screen not to go into the basement.

Ann Friedman finds that more and more professionals, especially women, are falling prey to it:

We’re all familiar with the gut-level feeling you get when you know you’ve cheated. It often follows specific, concrete acts, like peeking at a classmate’s answers on a test or sleeping with someone who isn’t your boyfriend. The gut-level experience of impostor syndrome is something slightly different—a nervous undercurrent that runs through your day-to-day experience, unacknowledged, only to crop up in salary negotiations or in small phrases like, “It might just be me but….” or “Not sure I know what I’m talking about….”…

Experts note that impostor syndrome thrives when competition is intense and there are few mentors to provide a reality check—which seems to be a pretty apt description of the post-recession American economy. Women—who, despite slow progress in some fields, are increasingly dominant in the professional world—are far more likely than men to suffer from imposter syndrome. Many experts have posited that this is one reason for the so-called “ambition gap.” It’s not that women don’t want to succeed, it’s that, despite their education and experience, they’ve internalized messages about their lack of qualification. This is also true in the earliest stages of a professional career, when the difference between a polite rejection and a modest salary is mostly luck and connections, it can be hard to tell yourself that you earned this entry-level job and that you were qualified above and beyond all of those other applicants.

Inspired by the “silent” child patients of Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, researchers have developed a technology called Biomusic, which “translates real-time autonomic nervous system signals including heart and breathing rates and skin temperature, into musical sounds”:

Biomusic sounds something like avant-garde electronic music. Generated using a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), it has an ethereal, other-worldly quality. An underlying drumbeat represents heart rate. Skin conductivity—which varies with sweating—controls pitch. Respiration rate dictates the musical articulation and phrasing. The melody and chords are smooth and flowing through the breath, and soften towards the end of the breath.

In the first minute of monitoring, the system takes a baseline reading and assigns the average to middle C. So, every instance of Biomusic begins with the same pitch and moves up or down from there. The overall key signature is determined by skin temperature, which changes gradually about 15 seconds after an emotional or physiological stimulus. States of stress, with fast and jagged breathing, sound different than states of relaxation, when the breath is slow and smooth. …

To see what would happen, [engineer and musician Stefanie] Blain-Moraes and her team recruited a number of residents, caregivers and family members to listen to Biomusic over the course of four visits. They were interviewed before and after the sessions. The results were positive. [Twelve-year-old patient] Thomas’ father said that the music he heard felt like a manifestation of his son’s personality: “it makes me think of the lively boy before.” Changes in Thomas’ biomusic also seemed to express a response to his presence. “When I was at the door, the sound was softer,” he said. “When I was there [at the bedside] it was longer and louder. I think Thomas knows that there is a presence of a loved one.”

(Audio: A clip from SoundCloud user chazmatazz, who used a biomechanical simulator to generate sound based on muscle activation and fiber length for 76 muscles in the legs while walking.)

Cara Parks explores how changes to our environment affect our sleep patterns:

The term jet lag was coined in about 1966; before that, a slow boat across the Atlantic or a horse ride across Asia allowed humans to adjust gradually to their new surroundings (internal clocks can adjust by approximately one hour per day). External or environmental cues to our internal clocks are called zeitgebers, German for time-givers. These factors include temperature and, most importantly, light: the most important sign for early humans on when to hunt and when to lie low came from the sun. … Our clocks reside within us; external cues sync them to the exterior world, keeping us from shifting further from the solar cycle every day. We experience jet lag because of this internal time ticking away as the sun rises and sets. ‘Whatever the exact period is for the body clock,’ an article in 2007 on jet lag in the medical journal The Lancet stated, ‘its timing needs to be adjusted to the solar day.’ That is why jet lag is known medically as desynchronosis. The traveller has become temporally untethered from her surroundings.

Meanwhile, in a review of Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Erwin Montgomery and Christine Baumgarthuber recount an anecdote about the necessity of sleep:

Irritability, depression, emotional volatility, and, eventually, hallucinations plague the insomniac. Charles Lindbergh experienced the gritty discomfort of sleep deprivation during his first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927.

His 33 hours without sleep brought him nearer to disaster than did any mechanical malfunction or patch of rough weather. The night before his pre-dawn departure, Lindbergh was anxious. He slept fitfully, later recalling in his memoir that he grabbed two, maybe three hours rest before reporting to Roosevelt Field, his place of departure. Warm inside his flight jacket and lulled by the dull hum of his plane’s engines and an empty expanse of blue sky, Lindbergh felt an irresistible drowsiness come over him only few hours after takeoff. “My eyes feel dry and hard as stones,” he recorded in his flight log. “Keeping them open is like holding arms outstretched without support.” He complained of having little control over his body, and said his mind “clicks on and off, as though attached to an electric switch with which some outside forced is tampering.” He knew that to surrender to his drowsiness, even for an instant, would spell disaster, but his body had its own ideas: “[It] argues dully that nothing, nothing life can attain, is quite so desirable as sleep.”

Previous Dish on sleep research here, here, and here.

Vice covers Japan’s “relationship replacement services”:

According to Abigail Haworth, the country isn’t getting much real romance as of late:

The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact”. More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

Carl Scott throws some cold water:

[T]he late wunderkind Japanese-translator blogger Ampontan (Bill Sakovich) utterly debunked one of the three studies the Guardian story relies upon, the one making the particular claim that 45% of women aged 16-24 (and a quarter of the men) “were not interested in or despised sexual contact,” when these claims first surfaced a couple years ago. Here’s the money graf:

In other words, the Internet was agog over a report that 22 males and 38 females aged 16-19 said either that they had no interest in sex or despised it. When the Huffington Post spun this story as “a third of the nation’s youth” disliking sex, they were basing it on the response of 60 self-selected people. The HuffPo also thinks 38 girls is a “whopping” number.

Yes, another survey the Guardian article links to is much better than that, with a sample near 10,000, but as far as I can tell by skimming the report, it deals with fairly different questions, while as a whole it supports the overall trend reported of less effort being put into pursuing love relationships and marriages.

Katy Waldman is fascinated by Japan’s falling marriage and fertility rates, which have more solid data to back them up:

The article tries to put Japan in a larger context: “Across urban Asia, Europe and America,” Haworth writes, “people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise.” But the sense of romantic futility and disillusionment in Japan feels distinct.

Trapped by outdated gender roles and crunched for both time and money, the young people in the story seem to be throwing up their hands in surrender. It would be one thing—new, but not tragic—if all the virtual wonderlands and stimulating careers and electric urban pastimes were diverting attention away from couplehood and even sex. But, at least in this article, the ebbing of human intimacy seems to come from a place of disenchantment and frustration. I can’t make this historical husband-wife arrangement thing work, so I’m giving up altogether.

Fisher focuses on the economic consequences of Japan’s demographic decline:

[T]his is more than a story about Japan and its cultural quirks: It’s a story about the global economy. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, a crucial link in global trade and a significant factor everyone else’s economic well-being. It owns almost as much U.S. debt as does China. It’s a top trading partner of the U.S., China and lots of other countries. The Japanese economy is in serious enough trouble that it could set the rest of us back. And the biggest source of that trouble is demographic: Japanese people aren’t having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy. One big reason they’re having fewer kids is that they’re not as interested in dating or marrying one another, in part because they’re less interested in sex.

Keating wants us to stop picking on Japan: