Sophianotloren

Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following in her Food Babe Army. The recent subject of profiles and interviews in the New York Times, the New York Post and New York Magazine, Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She's also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by "breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life." She and her army are out to change the world.

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After an unauthorized sculpture bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was installed under cover of darkness in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park on Monday morning, it didn’t take long for authorities to remove it. But last night emboldened members of the Illuminator Art Collective, known for their projector-aided activism, shone a ghostly version of the short-lived monument onto the pedestal where it briefly stood.

“We were inspired by the artists from the night before, and felt that though the police might remove the statue, the spirit of Edward Snowden and the conversation he created still exist,” artist Grayson Earle, a member of the Illuminator crew, told Hyperallergic. “The site wasn’t being monitored at all, much to our surprise. And there was only one person who saw us there. He was wearing an ARMY shirt and asked if it was Edward Snowden, then said ‘he’s a hero’ and walked away.”

The light projection intervention, aided by a strategically deployed cloud of smoke, briefly gave the impression that the Snowden bust had been reinstated. The ephemeral action was directly inspired by the anonymous artists behind the renegade sculpture, who told Animal: “We hope this inspires [visitors] to reflect upon the responsibility we all bear to ensure our liberties exist long into the future.” And inspire it did.

“Our feeling is that while the State may remove any material artifacts that speak in defiance against incumbent authoritarianism, the acts of resistance remain in the public consciousness,” the Illuminator Art Collective wrote on its blog. “And it is in sharing that act of defiance that hope resides.”

On April 7, 2000, the Workers’ Rights Consortium formed at a New York conference. This apparel industry monitoring organization developed in response to the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s and still exists today, trying to bring attention in the United States to the plight of foreign workers making apparel for our colleges and universities.

By the 1990s, almost all American textile production had moved overseas, largely to Latin America and Asia. The conditions in these factories were little changed from what workers in the United States had dealt with a century earlier. Moving from the northeast to the South to Mexico to Central America to Asia has been part of a long-term strategy by the apparel companies to find new workers to exploit and not have to improve working conditions or acquiesce to unions. Also in the 1990s, stories began appearing in the American media about the terrible working conditions in these sweatshops. Most famous were stories about Nike and the clothing line branded by TV host Kathie Lee Gifford. College students began campaigns to improve these conditions as they applied to the production of university licensed apparel.

Central to this movement was United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Formed in July 1998 by students at 30 campuses, USAS began providing a national organization for all these anti-sweatshop movements on American campuses. USAS members began conducting fact-finding tours, visiting Dominican Republic sweatshops making baseball hats for colleges where young women earned $40 in a 56-hour week. The movement continued to grow through that fall, with new chapters opening at campuses across the United States. Universities refused to sign any code of conduct with the exception of Duke University. Instead, schools sought to avoid responsibility through the Collegiate Licensing Corporation, a corporate front that claimed to monitor apparel industry conditions. It created a CLC code that forced no responsibility onto universities. This intended to make a claim that the schools cared, but it only made the anti-sweatshop activists more determined. Protests and sit-ins grew at schools around the country by 1999. Schools continued trying to cover themselves, now joining the Fair Labor Association, another corporate front group that provided only voluntary guidelines for schools.

Through this campaign, the students gained the support of the United Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE formed in 1985 as a merger of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU). Both of these unions were decimated by 1985 from the outsourcing of their jobs overseas. UNITE hoped that combining forces would help marshal resources to fight this, although the job losses continued. Facing the end of the union, UNITE quickly saw the growing sweatshop movement as useful allies in the war against the exploitation of apparel workers that these unions had fought since the beginning of the century. UNITE offered professional assistance, funds, and training to the burgeoning sweatshop movement. The AFL-CIO also chipped in, giving USAS $40,000 in 1999-2000.

In April 2000, activists met in New York City in order to develop strategies to help hold universities to anti-sweatshop pledges. It created the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent labor monitoring organization dedicated to the ethical sourcing of clothing for colleges and universities. It is supposed to define standards, conduct independent external monitoring, and force contracting companies to disclose wages, hours, and working conditions, with an independent agency to determine violations of the code. It places reports of factory inspections online that you can peruse.

The WRC developed connections with labor unions and NGOs in the nations where clothing production took place. It based its investigations on complaints it heard from the workers and affiliated agencies on the ground. It took that information, conducted investigations, and sought to press university administrations on its findings to ensure their contractors were complying with the agreed upon codes. In January 2001, the WRC took on its first case. Workers at a factory in Atlixco, Mexico complained that their employer, the Korean operator Kukdong, which had contracts from Nike and Reebok, used child labor, subjected workers to verbal harassment and physical violence, fed workers spoiled food in the company cafeteria, did not provide mandated maternity leave, and illegally fired workers. In other words, standard treatment of workers in the global apparel industry that continues today. Within a week, the WRC was in the factory and interviewing workers. It filed a report and began to pressure university administrations. This all led to Nike and Reebok forcing Kukdong to rehire the fired workers, improve the cafeteria food, increase wages, and recognize the factory’s independent union (an important point considering the corrupt official Mexican unions).

This early victory provided the WRC needed legitimacy. At that time, the WRC had the support of 44 universities. Ultimately, the WRC provided much needed American attention on apparel sweatshops, but the reality is that there is not a whole lot the WRC can do to force a fundamental transformation of the entire industry. So long as students were actively forcing change, they could create some real victories for workers. But the fundamentals of the global apparel system require government action to force real changes. Simply put, the WRC even at its height had no conceivable way to monitor conditions at the thousands of sweatshops scattered around the world. No independent monitoring organization will ever have those resources.

The WRC was never able to get the U.S. government to take the issue seriously enough to force its corporations to make changes or to pass laws that would create enforceable standards for outsourced production imported back into the United States. Instead, the free trade mania continues in this nation that encourages the exploitation of the world’s workers by American corporations for cheap goods that we can buy without knowing anything about the conditions of production. Despite all this work by the anti-sweatshop movement, a WRC/Center for American Progress report from 2013 showed that real wages for apparel workers around the world fell between 2001 and 2011.

After 9/11, the sweatshop movement faded from prominence in young activist communities, with opposing the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, and other actions of the Bush administration taking precedence. Yet the movement remained relatively strong at some campuses and has been rekindled to some extent in recent years, partially through events like the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh that killed over 1100 workers again drawing the attention of young Americans. Today, the WRC has 180 college and university affiliates, as well as 6 high schools. This affiliation, which includes the University of Rhode Island, can often be pretty loose. URI has no real anti-sweatshop movement and while the university is aware of it, to my knowledge anyway, there’s no real active movement on these issues coming from my school.

This is the 141st post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

One of the more promising avenues that postmodernism explored was to seek out the nether regions that modernism forgot. The art of non-Western cultures, artisanal practices not deemed high-brow, or obscure artistic tangents lost to the history books were all grist for the pomo mill. This imaginative possibility for retelling art history sometimes crosses my mind when wandering through the big New York City art museums. I’ll have a yearning to crack open a permanent collection to see the unfamiliar; works that could be on display but for whatever reason curators omit, or paintings that have been stowed away, left languishing in warehouse X.

This sort of reevaluation was indelible to the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement of the 1970s which sought to elevate the maligned status of craft and the applied arts. A few years ago the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers revisited the art of P&D’s main practitioners and it was enlightening to see how potent a strategy this was and the variety of approaches the artists took. Joyce Kozloff, one of the founding members of P&D, has been working in this vein for decades and her new work, on view in Chelsea, looks better than ever, even as it embraces digital possibilities. Meanwhile, down on the Lower East Side, it is easy to imagine Kozloff has a kindred spirit in Zoe Pettijohn Schade, an artist a generation apart who is invigorating the P&D tradition with an intensity uniquely her own.

Kozloff’s and Pettijohn Schade’s works are meticulously fashioned and formally extravagant, even as they imbue formalism with global and feminist politics. Despite the ravishing beauty of their paintings, there are underlying themes of death and warfare and the contradictions of world history. They fuse high and low, the serious and frivolous, terror and joy, and appreciate absurdist juxtapositions involving pop culture and the pitfalls of civilization. Both artists work in a painstakingly detailed manner that is complex and labor intensive with many small, repetitive bits. And both utilize textile and lace patterns strung on a triangular or isometric grid with motifs often breaking free from a uniform design.

Kozloff’s new paintings at DC Moore Gallery bring together the hybridized Islamic stars she invented during the ’70s with the maps and cartography that have occupied her for the last few decades. She combines the two bodies of work into newly fashioned pieces that are large and expansive, filling the bright gallery space. One such piece, “If I Were a Botanist: the Journey” (2014), measures over 30 feet long, demonstrating the potential in revisiting the stars which were initially conceptualized as pages in books. Although the star patterns are very apparent, they have been disrupted with varying degrees of shape and scale shifts and are covered with collaged bits — figures, maps, and words recycled from earlier works. When you stand back and take in the room, there is an easy fusion of high and low sources. What looks like stained glass cathedral windows morph into spirographs and dreamcatchers then into Moroccan and Islamic tiles and finally into crocheted quilts and doilies.

As with Pettijohn Schade’s work, Kozloff’s paintings compound all sorts of source material into a flat surface. The effect is like looking through the shifting bits and colored pieces of a kaleidoscope that has its lens cast across the globe as different cultures turn and fall in front of us. I thought of Christopher Columbus trying to justify a round vs. flat world as Kozloff visually sources images from assorted epochs that compete for different versions of the truth. This conceit of how knowledge morphs and devolves is not only intellectually compelling, it is a nifty device for creative riffing. “The Tempest” (2014) with its main motif of an eighteenth-century Chinese World map manages to be both cosmic and autobiographical. There’s a white landmass surrounded by gray ocean waves, gnarly tributaries with sailers and ships at sea, and soldiers, animals, and ancient cartographers occupying earth. Parallels of Kozloff’s own meditations and travels materialize by way of eccentric and colorful swatches (the artist’s outtakes and trial proofs) and collections of tchotchke globes stuck all over the surface.

Pettijohn Schade’s work at Kai Matsumiya Gallery couldn’t look any more different. Mostly small in scale, her gouache paintings are exactingly rendered and the intimate gallery space is reverently lit to allow close scrutiny of brushstroke and technique.

Pettijohn Schade has been researching the tradition of French textile painting that dates back to the 1700s, the often anonymous gouache paintings of designs that would serve as prototypes for woven cloth. She spent time at the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris drawing copies of this work into a sketch book, a process that allowed her to deeply absorb the structure and application of these patterns. The scholarship and verisimilitude of the project are impressive. An obscure tradition with very few examples in public collections, Kai Matsumiya has managed to obtain several examples of these works from The Design Library in Hudson where they can be viewed in a back room alongside Pettijohn Schade’s work.

Inspired by these strange yet surprisingly modern designs, Pettijohn Schade layers several sets of patterned motifs one on top of the other. She often begins with what looks like candy-colored spin art or straw-blown swirls and then overlays this with crowds of monkeys, skulls, statuary, gravestones, arrows, clouds, feathers, or gunmen. The human and animal subjects are in somber gray and brown tones set against the pastel pinks, greens, and blues of the more symbolic objects. As she places one set of motifs atop another, there are imperfections here and there — a figure reversed, broken, or negated; even though the compositions are tightly controlled there are misregistrations, skips, and bleeds. Looking closely, the artist delineates volumes with vertical streaks that articulate light and shadow, a method that allows her to meld and integrate disparate subjects as they reticulate and break apart.

Pettijohn Schade’s work brings to mind Henry James’s novella “The Figure in the Carpet” and the suggestion of a secret structure or meaning underlying a given work of art. In the same way the subconscious combines real events and repressed desires, her works build in associative power as we look through layers and come back to the surface; the latticework harnesses cultural histories, dreamworlds, and signs that appear as talismans or omens. Through her careful analysis of the substructures of patterns, the artist plays with metaphors and amps up the synergy between very different images mingling in an optical field.

In learning about Kozloff and Pettijohn-Schade, it is refreshing to hear how, in different ways, they have bucked the system. Pettijohn Schade in an interview mentioned how she has routinely ignored the advice “to scale up and simplify the detail level of my work.” And, Kozloff, in the catalog for her current show, discusses her education in reductive, hard-edged abstraction, choosing instead to look outward “at the traditional arts of women and people from other cultures.” Both artists have rejected the all-in-one quick read of much contemporary art, preferring instead to work within fields of glittering maximalism. The difference being that while Kozloff’s large works envelope the body, Pettijohn Schade’s draw the viewer in for total absorption. Both artists, without proselytizing, have managed to assert the relevance of pattern and craft simply through the example of their own powerful art.

Joyce Kozloff: Maps + Patterns continues at DC Moore Gallery (535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through April 25. Zoe Pettijohn Schade: Crowds continues at Kai Matsumiya Gallery (153 1/2 Stanton Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 9.

ridingwithstrangers:

Architectural Density in Hong Kong

With seven million people, Hong Kong is the 4th most densely populated places in the world. However, plain numbers never tell the full story. In his ‘Architecture of Density’ photo series, German photographer Michael Wolf explores the jaw-dropping urban landscapes of Hong Kong. He rids his photographs of any context, removing any sky or horizon line from the frame and flattening the space until it becomes a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer’s eye. Infinite and haunting.

Editor’s Note: Co-signed.

Social Media Induced Depression? Is that a real thing?

Good question. Let me Google that for you. Yes, yes it is. I think most of us have experienced it in some form or another. It has to do with the anxiety people feel while being away from social media or general feelings of despair brought on while using social media.

The problem I have with social media is that it isn’t enriching. I feel responsibility to wish people happy birthdays, like their posts, and attend their events. And, of course, it can inspire feelings of jealousy. I could live with those side effects if social media also enriched my life in some way. But it’s rare that Facebook turns me on to a great article that is relevant to my interests or leads to any inspiration.

For me and a lot of people I know, there’s a much better way to fill your empty moments than to hop on a social media app. It’s reading. I don’t always have the time or energy to open up a book. The great thing about RSS feeds is that they take up little time, much like social media, but are endless sources of enriching and inspirational information. You can get smarter and better informed even if you only have 5 minutes to spare. With The Old Reader, there are social elements too. But instead of Happy Birthdays or photos of myself at the beach, we’re sharing posts that enrich our lives. 

So the best way I know to defeat social media-induced depression is to forego that visit to Facebook and spend a few minutes with your favorite blogger. Mine is probably Kottke, or Daring Fireball. Who’s yours?

fencehopping: Giant balloon popping in slow motion.

Photo by Paul Schraub

Husband and wife team Paul DeSomma and Marsha Blaker translate their oceanic inspirations directly into their collaborative glass sculptures, frozen glass waves caught mid-crash and appearing to spray surf from the contained vessels. The works exist as seamless gradients, dark blues circling the base while white froth circles the top of the pieces crafted from molten glass.

Although the couple works collaboratively on the vases, they also adhere to individual practices. Blaker focused on the textures and colors found within detailed marine environments while DeSomma’s work emphasizes the clarity and form of colorless and transparent glass.

The couple met at the esteemed Pilchuck Glass School in 1989, marrying shortly after and opening their studio in Live Oak, California in 2001. Together the couple is known internationally for their glass and ceramic work. (via Creative Boom and Amusing Planet)

Photo by Paul Schraub

Photo by Paul Schraub

Photo by Paul Schraub

Photo courtesy Laughing Dog Gallery

Photo courtesy Laughing Dog Gallery

Photo courtesy Laughing Dog Gallery

Photo by Russell Johnson

Photo by Russell Johnson

News: John Oliver aired a surprise interview with Edward Snowden.

Lithium-ion batteries have been a boon for the modern world -- they've replaced the heavier, single-use alkaline type in everything from wristwatches to jumbo jets. Unfortunately, these rechargeable cells are already struggling to keep up with our ev...

We hope you weren't counting on the Twin Peaks reboot to liven up your TV viewing next year -- you're probably going to be disappointed. Original series director David Lynch is pulling out of Showtime's revival because he feels there's "not enough mo...

(photo by argueswhendrunk)

“He’s taking a criminology course. When he got back we jokingly pointed it out to him and he got bright red when he realized the page he left it on.” - mcdngr

I know people who have been SWATted. You can find them on every part of the political spectrum. They range from gamers to political commentators.

They're all damned lucky to be alive, as are their family members and pets.

Calling an armed law enforcement response to someone's house is attempted murder.

Perhaps you think that's hyperbole. It isn't. People — innocents, unarmed people, bystanders, even cops themselves — get killed in police armed responses. We talk about excessive force by police all the time. But don't listen to us. Just listen to the news, and the names. Jose Guerena, shot to death as he tried to defend his family in a raid that yielded no drugs. Aiyana Jones, 7, shot to death by a SWAT team as she slept in her bed. Salvatore J. Culosi Jr., accidentally shot in the chest with a .45 during a SWAT raid. Bounkham Phonesavanh, called "Bou Bou" by his family, critically burned by a flash-bang thrown into his crib — into his goddamned crib — by a SWAT team during a raid. Krystal Barrows, shot in the head during a raid by a cop who didn't even realize he had fired his gun. Autumn Mae Steele, shot to death by a police officer responding to a domestic violence call (he was aiming at her dog). Alberto Sepulveda, 11, shot in the back with a shotgun as he lay prone on his floor during a SWAT raid. James Jensen Jr., a SWAT officer, shot by his partner and friend ruing a raid. I could do this all day. The list goes on and on.

Some of this bloodbath is because of poor training, reckless tactics, and a sick law enforcement culture. But some is inherent in the situation. If you send people with weapons, worried for their lives and the lives of innocents, into a high-stress situation where they don't know what's going on or who is on the scene, sooner or later people are going to die.

Swatters are indifferent to that result at best, and hope for it at worst.

Unfortunately, though SWATting is increasingly common, the law hasn't caught up with it. California recently passed an anemic anti-SWAT statute that makes SWATting a misdemeanor unless someone actually gets hurt:

148.3. (a) Any individual who reports, or causes any report to be
made, to any city, county, city and county, or state department,
district, agency, division, commission, or board, that an "emergency"
exists, knowing that the report is false, is guilty of a misdemeanor
and upon conviction thereof shall be punishable by imprisonment in a
county jail for a period not exceeding one year, or by a fine not
exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that imprisonment
and fine.

(b) Any individual who reports, or causes any report to be made,
to any city, county, city and county, or state department, district,
agency, division, commission, or board, that an "emergency" exists,
who knows that the report is false, and who knows or should know that
the response to the report is likely to cause death or great bodily
injury, and great bodily injury or death is sustained by any person
as a result of the false report, is guilty of a felony and upon
conviction thereof shall be punishable by imprisonment pursuant to
subdivision (h) of Section 1170, or by a fine of not more than ten
thousand dollars ($10,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.

That's ridiculous. Sending armed people to someone's house would be felony conduct even in a perfect world where police raids weren't dangerous. But we don't live in that world, as the cases above show. In our world, sending police to someone's house to respond to a false report of violence is depraved indifference to human life.

This is unacceptable.

I propose that the law be amended as follows:

THE 2015 ANTI-SWATTING ACT

California Penal Code Section 148.3 is amended as follows:

The following preamble is added:

The California Legislature finds that the practice of "SWATting" — maliciously submitting false reports to send an armed police response to a home or business — presents a grave danger to the health and safety of both citizens and law enforcement.

Section (a) is stricken, and the following new section (a) is added:

(a) Any individual who reports, or causes any report to be made, to any city, county, city and county, or state department, district, agency, division, commission, or board, that an "emergency" exists, knowing that the report is false, shall be punished as follows:

(1) In the event the false report contains no indication that the emergency involves weapons or the threat of violence, the individual is guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail for a period not exceeding one year, or by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.

(2) In the event the false report contains any indication that the emergency involves weapons or the threat of violence, the individual is guilty of a felony and upon conviction shall be punished by imprisonment in state prison for two, three, or four years, and a fine of not more than $25,000, or both.

(3) As used herein, the phrase "indication that the emergency involves weapons or the threat of violence" includes but is not limited to reference to weapons, reference to past or future assaults, references to past or planned violence, references to explosives, references to contemplated suicide.

Section (b) is stricken, and the following new section (b) is added:

(b) Any individual who reports, or causes any report to be made, to any city, county, city and county, or state department, district,
agency, division, commission, or board, that an "emergency" exists, who knows that the report is false, resulting in property damage, injury, or death, is guilty of a felony and shall be punished as follows:

(1) In the event of property damage, by imprisonment in state prison for three, four, or five years, and a fine of not more than $30,000, or both.

(2) In the event of bodily injury, by imprisonment in state prison for four, five, or six years, and a fine of not more than $40,000, or both.

(3) In the event of great bodily injury, by imprisonment in state prison for seven, nine, or eleven years, and a fine of not more than $50,000, or both.

(4) In the event of death, by imprisonment by a term of life imprisonment, 25 years to life, or 15 years to life, and a fine of $75,000, or both.

You may think that those years in prison are fairly low. I've attempted to harmonize them rationally with existing California law. (For instance, voluntary manslaughter carries terms of 3, 6, or 11 years.) SWATting exposes the target, innocent bystanders, and law enforcement to the serious risk of harm, and is more serious than mere recklessness, but the punishments probably shouldn't exceed deliberate direct infliction of similar harm. At a minimum, though, this is a crime that should carry felony consequences. A misdemeanor is insufficient for deterrent, punishment, or incapacitation, and federal prosecutions are too rare.

Amend the California Penal Code To Make SWATting A Felony © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

prettyyiinpunkk:

skindeeptales:

Double mastectomy floral tattoo

“The response to this piece is incredible. Tattooing is a beautiful and absolutely viable option for concealing or altering scars. When coupled with an artist you’ve researched and feel connected to… taking the reigns and regaining some sort of control can be empowering. There is healing in this!” ( David Allen )

by David Allen - Pioneer Studios - Chicago

This is so beyond beautiful and awesome.

Supermarket | Bath, England, UK

(I and my seven-year-old son are shopping for a birthday present for a girl in his class. She’s asked for dressing up clothes or accessories so we get a wand, tiara, and jewellery. I also have our regular shopping in the trolley. We get to the tills and there’s at least a three person queue at each till. We join a queue and have waited a couple of minutes when my son puts the tiara on and waves the wand.)

Son: *in a “posh” voice* “I’m the Queen and I say this line should move faster!”

(I and a few others smile at his playfulness when a man in line at the next till yells at me.)

Man: “You can’t let your son do that. If he turns into a f****t it’ll be your fault.”

(Everyone stops and stares at him in horror whilst the cashiers call for a manager.)

Son: “What’s a f****t?”

Me: “It’s a nasty word that only nasty people use so you mustn’t say it.”

Man: “It means gay, kid.”

Son: “What’s gay?”

Man: “It means you’re bad and going to Hell for being evil.”

Me: “It’s when a man loves a man and a lady loves a lady.”

Son: “Oh, like Uncle James and Uncle Ian?”

Me: “Yep, just like Uncle James and Uncle Ian. They’re not bad, are they?”

(My brother is a paediatric oncologist and his partner is a paediatric nurse. We’ve tried to explain what cancer is and how my brother and his partner make children feel better when they’re poorly.)

Son: “My uncles make children better when they have poorly blood and poorly bones. If you make them go to Hell that means you want the children to be poorly.”

(The manager and a security guard turn up but my son looks this man in the eye and holds his stare.)

Son: “Do you want the children to be poorly? Do you want them to be sick and have to go to Heaven?”

(Everyone is now staring at my son. The man has gone red and is looking around.)

Manager: “Sir, I believe you’ve just been outwitted by a child. You should leave now and keep your disgusting views to yourself and out of my shop.”

(The manager offered to pay for our shopping but I declined. He did, however, offer my son a toy. He chose a dress for his friend’s present.)

Related:
God Loves Little Girls Who Stand Up For Others

by Rachel Allison

At the end of February, Fox Sports released a new set of advertisements for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Marking the 100-day countdown to the summer tournament, the new video commercial consoles fans of last year’s men’s World Cup with the prospect of renewed American sports victory.

Those disappointed last year, whether in the U.S.’ eventual loss or merely in the conclusion of the tournament itself, can now pull out their jerseys and face paint once again. Redemption is at hand!

The hashtag #scoretosettle solidifies the supposed continuity between the men’s and women’s World Cups, suggesting that America’s reputation in sport is defended equally within both tournaments.

On the one hand, appeals to national pride have proven to be a highly effective strategy for bringing attention to the women’s game. During the 2011 Women’s World Cup I was conducting dissertation research with one women’s professional soccer team. My study involved participant observation as an unpaid staff member with the team, in-depth interviews with owners, employees, fans, and media personnel, and the collection of print, electronic, and social media coverage of the team and league. I vividly remember the noise and excitement of our first sold-out crowd of the season immediately following the end of the Women’s World Cup. Many fans bought tickets knowing there was standing room only!

Unfortunately, however, this attention was short lived, with the stadium half empty a few weeks later. What remained afterward was the continued challenge of garnering investment into the careers of the top women players in the world and the failure of the league in early 2012. And this rollercoaster of fan and media attention was not unique to 2011. In a 2006 article Sean Brown describes how nationalism was partially responsible for the unprecedented media, corporate, and fan enthusiasm for the 1999 Women’s World Cup. Yet the support gained via U.S. pride waned post-tournament, failing to translate into success for the first attempt at a women’s professional league.

So despite the purported equal ability of the men’s and women’s teams to contribute to national pride in a World Cup year, in most respects American women’s soccer struggles to find its footing. And in fact women’s soccer often received inequitable treatment from the very types of organizations now deploying the rhetoric of national pride to boost support.

While a television deal with Fox Sports to air 16 of this summer’s games live is a major coup, women’s sports writ large continue to suffer a lack of mainstream mass media coverage. For instance, a longitudinal study of ESPN’s Sports Center found that under 2% of airtime was devoted to women’s sports in 2009, a slight decrease since 1999. Only 3 U.S. print journalists attended a media session prior to the U.S.’ match against Brazil in the 2011 Women’s World Cup.

In women’s soccer, perhaps nowhere is unequal treatment more evident than in the fight for equitable field conditions for the Women’s World Cup on the part of elite players. FIFA and the Canadian Women’s Soccer Association’s refusal to create grass fields for the tournament, a routine investment for the men’s World Cup, is nothing less than blatant mistreatment. This unequal treatment is entirely unwarranted, particularly given the American women’s record of success in international play.

Studies of gender inequality in sport have focused on the important role that ideologies play in justifying and naturalizing disparate treatment for men and women’s sports. For instance, the almost nonexistent amount of mainstream media coverage that women’s sports receive is often justified through essentialist ideologies suggesting women’s physical inferiority to men or related interest ideologies that presume low levels of fan interest in women’s play. The Tucker Center at the University of Minnesota’s #heresproof campaign does a fantastic job of debunking these myths.

Nationalism may also contribute ideological support to inequality when its deployment reinforces a popular story of women’s triumph in sport, masking more complicated, and inequitable, realities. As Giardina and Metz write in their study of women’s soccer, “The “success” – socially, culturally, politically, and/or economic – of the WNBA, WUSA, Women’s Tennis Association, and female athletes in general allows the American public to engage in self-congratulatory rhetoric vis-à-vis the state of women’s athletics” (111).

While the upcoming Women’s World Cup is certainly an event to be celebrated, let’s not congratulate ourselves just yet. Fox Sports’ new advertising campaign may drum up short-term support from those soccer fans for whom the women’s team is rarely on their radar. Still, the very nationalist fervor evoked by the #scoretosettle campaign denies and obscures the unequal treatment the women’s game routinely receives on the part of sport, corporate, and media organizations.

For women’s soccer there is certainly a #scoretosettle. But the biggest battles may lie off the field.

Rachel Allison is assistant professor in sociology at Mississippi State University.  Her most recent research project is an ethnographic study of U.S. women’s professional soccer.

 

Filed under: Media & Communications, Politics/State/Nationalism, Sport/Leisure

savedbythe-bellhooks:

Source: Communion: the Female Search For Love by bell hooks

Here's a brief article in Science that a lot of us should keep a copy of. Plenty of journalists and investors should do the same. It's a summary of what sort of questions get asked of data sets, and the differences between them. There are six broad data analysis categories:

1. Descriptive. This is the simplest case, where you're just summarizing a data set and describing the totals in it.

2. Exploratory. The next step - you search through the descriptive analysis looking for trends or relationships, with which to develop new hypotheses. No guarantees, of course - you'll have to confirm these with more work.

3. Inferential. This one looks at an exploratory treatment and tried to determine whether those trends are likely to hold up. As the authors say, this is probably the most common statistical workup in the literature - better than randome chance, or not? But it can't tell you why something is happening, of course.

4. Predictive. An inferential study is necessarily done on a large sample (well, it had better be, at any rate, if you're going to infer with much confidence). A predictive analysis uses some subset of the data to predict how individual cases will go. The example from drug development would be the use of biomarkers to predict whether a given patient in a trial will respond to some new investigational drug.

5. Causal. At this level, you're trying to see what the magnitude of changes are across the system when you start changing things - what often gets called the "tone" of the system. What are the most important variables, and what has little effect on the outcome?

6. Mechanistic. With the information at the causal level available, now you can really get down to the nuts and bolts. Change A causes effect B, through this detailed mechanism. We don't see this as much with anything involving biology - there always seem to be exceptions. This is more the realm of engineering and physics, although a lot of time and money is going into trying to change that.

It's only at the causal and mechanistic levels that you can start doing detailed modeling with confidence. That's where everyone would like to be with computational binding predictions, but we don't understand them well enough yet. And think how far we have to go to get predictive toxicology to those levels! We can do that sort of thing on a small scale - for example, saying that a compound that (say) inhibits angiotensin-converting enzyme, to this degree, and with that average half-life in vivo, will be expected to lower X% of a random population's members blood pressure by at least Y%. That's after decades of experience and data-gathering, keep in mind.

But that's not aeronautical engineering. Those folks don't tell you that wing design A will provide at least so much lift on a certain percentage of the airframes it gets bolted on to. Nope, those folks get to build their airframes to the same exact specifications, not just take whatever shows up at the factory needing wings, and those airframe/wing combinations had better perform within some very tight tolerances or something has gone seriously wrong. This is just another way of stating the "built by humans" difference I was talking about the other day.

So some of that data analysis hierarchy above is, well, aspirational for those of us doing drug research. The authors of the Science article are well aware of this themselves, saying that "Outside of engineering, mechanistic data analysis is extremely challenging and rarely achievable.". But that level is where many people expect science to be, most of the time, which leads to a lot of frustration: "Look, is this pill going to help me or not?" We should remember where we are on the scale and try to work our way up.

One of the most commonly-used pesticides in the world was recently declared a probable cause of cancer—but that doesn't mean what you think, and here are some stick figures to explain it to you.

This video by Andrew Maynard of the University of Michigan's Risk Science Center explains what exactly the word "probably" means in that context (it has a specific definition). It doesn't mean that the substance is a carcinogen and it will probably give you cancer; it means that it's probably a carcinogen that may or may not ever give anyone cancer. If that's confusing, don't worry; the stick figures will make it all clear.

Once you've watched that video, consider checking out the others from Risk Bites, including whether BPA is harmful, whether cell phones are frying your brain, and whether or not it's dangerous to eat green potato chips.

What Does "Probably Cause Cancer" Actually Mean? | Risk Bites

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Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker all about health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here.

Yes, it's back -- after a two-year upgrade program, CERN's Large Hadron Collider is once again operational. Scientists are only firing collision-free proton beams right now to test the new system, but they'll ramp up over the next few months to the p...

4gifs:

Acting. [video]

likeafieldmouse:

Lukasz Wierzbowski

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Those are the real underlying issues that need to be addressed in any comprehensive discussion of the extraordinary increase in the cost of higher education in America over the past half century.

I argue here that purported cuts in legislative funding of American higher ed have ultimately little to do with that increase, in large part because these “cuts” are, subject to some exceptions and caveats, mostly imaginary.

Data

How do these rates of tuition increase correlate with legislative appropriations for higher ed?

It’s quite an interpretive challenge to translate these numbers into the claim, made universally by higher ed administrators, that fifty or more years of practically continual tuition rate hikes have been caused by cuts in public subsidies.

Now it’s true that a crucial factor in all this has been a sharp rise in the relative percentage of young Americans going to college:

Because of the big increase in higher ed enrollment, legislative subsidies per student, which climbed at a very rapid clip from the 1960s through the 1980s, have been basically flat for the past 25 years:

Yet tuition grew rapidly in real terms when subsidies per student were increasing, and continued to grow when per capita subsidies flattened out.

Note that, as I pointed out recently, the money flooding into higher ed over the past several decades actually correlates with a decrease in the average salary being paid to college and university faculty. Full-time faculty salaries have barely risen since 1970, while the percentage of faculty who are part-time (and therefore much lower paid) has increased enormously:

Obviously, the standard narrative that tuition has increased as a response to “declining” public subsidies is at best a gross oversimplification of a much more complicated story. I’ll discuss that story in another post.

its time for the tantrum hole

Artist Janusz Grünspek, based in Kleve, Germany, brings 3D line drawings of everyday objects into the physical world using dowels and glue. Read the rest

More birds.