Category: Entertainment

Posted on

Friday Fanfic: A Piece of the Continent, The Shadow on the King's Roads

Probably a bit more occasional than Sunday Spam, but again, the Kindle does mean I read a bit more of it (AO3 has ePub and MOBI downloads of their fic).

A Piece of the Continent, Hainish Universe: what Genly Ai did after Winter. This is a big act of world-building, and a peaceful story of self- and other-discovery. So, capturing much of the Hainish Cycle’s spirit.

I’ve read it enough times that I have noticed technical problems with the world-building, that has to be a good sign right? (Their reproductive strategy as described makes it impossible to maintain replacement rate. Also, the part with Kiyoshi Dan makes her sound like an old friend, and the vagaries of near-light speed travel make it unlikely to run into them again.)

The Shadow on the King’s Roads, Strange and Norrell: Arabella Strange becomes the chaperon of the Misses Enderwhild of The Ladies of Grace Adieu. It’s nicely in keeping with the tone of JS&MN, and for that matter, with the style of magic in that universe.

Posted on

Sunday Spam: hot banana bread

These are, largely, in reverse order of reading, that is, most recent first. Interesting that that tends to be a thematic ordering too.

Right-wing memes ahoy – “pregnancy is not a disease”

Right wing argument: pregnancy isn’t a disease. Therefore contraception shouldn’t be among funded medical services.
Response: pregnancy is [affiliated with/causes] illness for some women. Therefore contraception should be among funded medical services!

Uh, don’t buy the framing, responders! Says Tiger Beatdown. The end.

7-Year Old Transgender Child Refused Proper Bathroom Visits in School

Child identifies as boy. Parents, doctors and peers recognising child’s gender identity. School superintendent knows better. Unhilarity ensues.

This is what I said a feminist mother looks like:

  • Part One: the questionnaire, demographics, key themes and becoming feminists
  • Part Two: the impact of motherhood on their feminism
  • Part Three: being surprised by motherhood
  • Part Four: defining their feminist parenting
  • Part Five: the difficulties with being a feminist parent

    • This is a summary of a conference presentation Blue Milk gave on her long running 10 questions about your feminist motherhood series. I know that I keep going on about Instapaper, but these were handily divided up into bite-sized blog entries and I was still too lazy to read them before.

    Pink Scare

    A roundup of a series of incidents in which a huge comment storm has been created around a boy dressing as a girl or in girl-marked clothes. Not really novel if you read about this stuff a lot, a good summary either way, particularly the historical context about when and where young children have been expected to be strongly gender-marked.

    What revolution? Why haven’t women pushed harder for caring work to be valued?

    Blue Milk again, on the not-always-perfect marriage of patriarchy and capitalism, summarising Nancy Folbre. Of particular note Higher paid women benefit from their ability to hire low-wage women to provide child care and elder care in the market.
    Film review: “The Help,” a feel-good movie for white people
    The Help has become such a by-word for race fail in my circles that I hadn’t even heard what the basic plot was. Consider this a useful primer: what the plot is, what the problems are. Now you don’t have to see the movie.

    Gaddafi Should Be Tried At The Hague

    Not a surprising opinion for Geoffrey Robertson, but perhaps not everyone has read Crimes Against Humanity. Actually I haven’t read it all the way through either, because I have it in the cheap Penguin edition with teeny tiny writing and a stiff spine, and it’s still too heavy to hold in one hand. Must look into Kindling.

    Anyway, back in to Gaddafi: British Prime Minister David Cameron made a serious mistake this week by insisting that the fate of the Gaddafis should be a matter for the Libyan people. That was the line George Bush took after the capture of Saddam Hussein, as a rhetorical cover so that the death penalty could be imposed on the Iraqi despot by politically manipulated local judges.
    Australians don’t fully understand what is being done in their name

    While we’re in the thematic section marked unsurprising opinions from lawyers active in human rights, Julian Burnside. Why do we do this? What is it about our national character that explains such cruel, illogical behaviour? Simple: the politicians do it for political gain, and most Australians do not fully understand what is being done in their name.

    I’m worried he’s wrong.

    Why Political Coverage is Broken

    Jay Rosen’s keynote address at New News 2011, focussing on the marketing of news to politically interested readers. We’re all insiders, considering how this will play to the voters, as if they aren’t us.

    How the World Failed Haiti

    Well, partly it’s a Wicked Problem (high stakes, one chance to solve it, no good model, no correct solution, no or little ability to fix things after the fact, etc), but one focus of this particular article is that while Bill Clinton himself is potentially a good advocate and ally for Haiti, the people the Clintons tend to hire aren’t so much, perhaps. They tend to be experienced political operatives, not experienced disaster relief workers. (Also, even people specialising in development aren’t the same people who are good at disaster relief.)

    Learning to love my baby

    Jessica Valenti’s daughter was born extremely premature after a traumatic emergency Caesearean following pre-eclampsia and HELLP. She doesn’t think it’s a problem that her feelings towards her daughter were complex and that loving her was scary. She condemns though, factors that made her feel that this made her a terrible person.

    Review: The Red Market by Scott Carney

    The Red Market is the market in bodies, body parts and blood. This is a book review, not the book itself (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers), which goes on the to-read list.

    Posted on

    Sunday Spam: apple and cinnamon risotto

    Apple and cinnamon risotto is one of Matthew Evans’s recipes in The Weekend Cook. I have some quibbles with that book, mostly that if anyone tries to romance me with the things listed under “romantic weekend” their expectations will be dashed, but this sounded ambitiously tasty.

    In other news, I’m enjoying the Instaright Firefox add-on, which adds an address bar button and a right-click menu item for sending a link to Instapaper. Still liking Instapaper just fine except that it will only ever send 20 articles to one’s Kindle, and one day I managed to queue up close to 40 articles.

    It would be kind of cool if Instapaper let me put out Sunday Spam as an instapaper. (I believe the ability to instapaper things to other people is an often requested feature.)

    The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy

    Linked in several places, this is an article about selective reductions (ie, aborting one fetus in a multiple pregnancy) from twins to singleton pregnancies. I’m not really sure why I was so interested in this—I’ve read several articles on reductions over the years and they’re all pretty similar—but I was. Perhaps it’s just that I definitely share the public fascination with twins described in the article.

    Jenny is an asshole, and so, of course, am I

    Infertility blogger Julie of A Little Pregnant shares her thoughts on Two-Minus-One: again nothing ground-breaking, but I enjoy Julie’s blog so have a link.

    Jailhouse phone calls reveal why domestic violence victims recant

    Phone calls between alleged perpetrators of domestic violence and their victims (which were known by the parties involved to be being recorded) show that the typical strategy for getting the victim to recant is getting their sympathy for one’s terrible situation facing trial and jail (rather than, at least in these cases, of threats of more violence).

    Are software patents the “scaffolding of the tech industry”?

    Counter-arguments to pro-software-patent positions, largely stressing that these particular pro-patent positions are concerned with the ability of the first inventor to profit from their invention, rather than with encouraging innovation in general.

    Top 10 Things Breastfeeding Advocates Should Stop Saying

    From earlier this year, includes “formula is poison” and “Moms who use formula don’t love/value their babies as much as moms who breastfeed”. I know people who have been hurt badly by statements this strong, in one case seriously considering giving up all plans for future children because of a failed (and mourned) breastfeeding relationship with her first child.

    HPV: The STD of a New Generation

    I’m pleased to have found Amanda Hess’s current online home again. Here she is on the interesting status of HPV: the STI that so very many people have, with attendant interesting interpretations by everyone from vaccine manufacturers to social conservatives.

    What if Publishers are right about eBook prices?

    Arguing that there’s a strong case that ebook prices will go to $0, and that this would not be a public good. Interesting, undoubtedly highly arguable. (Does not answer the question about why digital music prices haven’t and thereby make the required distinction between the two arguments.)

    You Do Something with Your Hair?: Gender and Presentation in Stillwater

    Gender presentation in Saint’s Row 2 is pretty unrestricted, and the game has gone out of its way to avoid using pronouns to refer to your character.

    Crashing the Tea Party

    David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, argue that their research shows that the Tea Party brand is getting toxic in the US, together with some data showing how closely Tea Party affiliation/identification corresponds with Republican Party membership and belief in a less strong church-state separation. Perhaps not a very exciting article for people who follow US politics more closely than I do.

    11 Percent

    11 percent of housing in the US is unoccupied, s.e. smith writes. In addition to the good of housing people, wouldn’t fixing this housing up stimulate demand in construction?

    Posted on

    The secret to terrible tech writing

    At which point, the topic became that wankiest theme of all bad tech writing (imo): “How can I use this to optimize myself?”

    Catherine, on Terri’s Geek Feminism post about the Wired article The Advantage Of Dual-Identities (A Case Study of Nabokov)

    This has a parallel in parenting studies too, “how can I use this to optimise my child?” This is definitely the most annoying undercurrent of the Life at 1, Life at 3, Life at 5 series for me, on which see more at Hoyden: breastfeeding, obesity, disability, general discussion.

    Posted on

    Life at 1, 3, 5: general discussion

    This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

    Background: this post is about the Life series that just finished airing on the ABC and which is affiliated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Life at 1, Life at 3 and Life at 5 are available on ABC iView for a little while longer for those with Australian IPs and to whom it is accessible.

    Now that I’ve done the specific posts, does anyone have thoughts about the Life series in general? Here’s a few thoughts on individual scenes:

    • In Life at 1 I love the super-serious newborn shot of Shine looking out at the world grouchily.
    • Jara’na was awesome in Life at 3, it was a real shame there was so much focus on his separation anxiety rather than his inventive play and sense of the dramatic.
    • My favourite Life at 5 scenes were both from the Marshmallow Test. One was Anastasia looking directly into the camera and popping the single marshmallow straight in her mouth for immediate gratification, and the other was Shine delicately stepping around the room, not looking at the marshmallow. (Actually, Wyatt was pretty cute too, testing himself by putting his mouth around it but not lifting it from the plate!)

    On the series as a whole:

    • I wish we could see more of the eleven children meeting each other, which they have clearly done several times now, but it’s only been shown for the purposes of very brief cut shots of birthday parties and racing through parks. As the series goes on age-peer relationships will grow in importance, it would make sense, although it wouldn’t be totally representative of their social interactions, to begin to show them interacting with each other.
    • Judging from the birthdates of the children on the website, they’re the six year old cohort this year. It sounded as if there are definitely plans for Life at 7 to film next year and presumably air in 2013, and the print version of the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that the film-makers would like to go through the teenage years, although they don’t have funding yet and perhaps would plan less frequent updates. (Perhaps only one or two during high school.) I think the series would be improved if they could go out to three or four episodes from Life at 7 onwards.

    Speaking of more content, I haven’t gone through the website‘s content, anything good there?

    And a conversation about introversion/extroversion from comments:

    blue milk:

    But there is much to feel concerned about, even in this small segment you have highlighted here, and I found others when I was watching the series too, like the ways in which introverted babies versus extroverted babies were discussed in terms of their performance during some of those classic experiments about attachment and seperation.

    Me:

    But on that subject I was also rather surprised by the interpretation of the separation experiments. I was under the impression that they were usually interpreted the other way around; that a child should show distress at separation from their primary carer, not that a approx 12mo child should be able to cope with that. (Both “shoulds” have their problems!) But Ben’s separation anxiety, and the anxiety Jara’na develops later as a toddler, are both portrayed as extremely worrying.

    We view my own son as moderately extroverted, and his reaction would have been more anxious than any of those shown except Ben’s.

    They said something at some point about all personality types being valuable, and my husband (who is extremely introverted) said something like “just because a personality type exists, doesn’t make it valuable!” The show doesn’t really back up this claim with a discussion of the values of introversion, or for that matter of caution about carer separation or strangers! The only Life at 1 claim about introversion is that it exists, basically.

    There’s also been talk on Twitter at #lifeat5.

    Feel free to use comments here to address any aspect of the series.

    See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 1: breastfeeding, Life at 3: obesity, Life at 1, 3, 5: disability

    Posted on

    Life at 1, 3, 5: disability

    This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

    Background: this post is about the Life series that just finished airing on the ABC and which is affiliated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Life at 1, Life at 3 and Life at 5 are available on ABC iView for a little while longer for those with Australian IPs and to whom it is accessible.

    It’s not uniformly positive, but I was a bit more impressed with the handling of disability on Life than I was of breastfeeding or obesity. It’s quite possible I’m not as sensitised though.

    As one would expect statistically, when you select eleven families and follow them for four years, there are several families with members who have illnesses or disability. Sofia’s father Anthony was treated for lymphoma just prior to Life at 1, so that’s only briefly treated and shown in a few still shots of baby Sofia visiting Anthony in hospital. Anthony is shown in hospital again briefly in Life at 5, receiving test results after a false recurrence scare. But the families who have members with disabilities during the series most prominently are Loulou’s and Daniel’s.

    Daniel is the second child of Rodney and Kathryn, and in Life at 1 he is shown visiting his brother Jamie in hospital. Jamie was about three at the time and had a brain injury recently acquired in a near-drowning. He was almost always shown in Life at 1 and Life at 3 seated in a slightly reclined wheelchair, with little or no limb movement shown (in Life at 1 he is also shown in Kathryn’s arms in a couple of scenes, and once in bed with Daniel touching him). In Life at 3 he was described as also experiencing high levels of chronic pain, and at the end of the episode, there is a second segment returning to Daniel’s family for Jamie’s funeral (which was filmed and broadcast), as Jamie had died of pneumonia aged four and a half.

    I was pleased that the circumstances of Jamie’s accident weren’t dwelt on very much (other than the fact that it occurred in a backyard pool, no details of the accident are given), it would have seemed trite to insert a long pool safety lesson. At least to me, the narration seemed generally to portray Jamie as a person in a family as did Jamie’s parents, although Rodney has a piece to camera in Life at 1 in which he discusses avoiding Jamie.

    The main concern in Life at 1 with the treatment of Jamie was, to me, the extent of “what about Daniel?” about the portrayal. There’s quite a bit of “what about [child]?” in the discussion of the families generally. In this case it’s playing into a cultural narrative of concern about a disabled child focussing mainly on their abled sibling. The family themselves express some similar concerns, Rodney and Daniel’s grandmother more than Kathryn.

    Kathryn is herself disabled, with a vision impairment. This is treated fairly neutrally: there are small sequences in Life at 1 showing her dressing Daniel by feel:

    [Kathryn is pulling a red t-shirt over Daniel’s head.]

    Narrator: Daniel will not only have to adapt to life with a disabled brother. His mother is completely blind in one eye.

    Kathryn: Where’s your head?

    Narrator: Over the past two months a cataract has formed on Kathryn’s good eye. Her sight is now extremely limited.

    Kathryn: I can see but most of it is feel. Most of it’s my hands, knowing what to grab.

    In Life at 5 she is shown teaching Daniel to help her with crossing roads and with bus travel. As is shown a little in the segment above, it’s again almost entirely considered in light of Daniel: is it a good challenge for his development, or too stressful?

    Life at 3 Part One also describes disability. Both of Loulou’s parents have had depressive illness between Life at 1 and Life at 3, Louise’s is described as having grief following from miscarriages after Loulou’s birth and then post-natal depression and Shannon’s as an acute episode in a chronic condition related to a motorcycle injury.

    There’s a moment of problematic framing in the discussion of Louise’s depression, in which a decision about medication is framed as the “brave” choice:

    [A close-up of a cake being cut is shown.]

    Narrator: By the time Loulou was one, Louise had been assessed for post-natal depression.

    [Louise is shown in front of the cake, look around at adults attending Loulou’s birthday party.]

    Louise: Everyone for cake? Yes?

    Narrator: She was borderline, and the doctors recommended medication. But Louise bravely tried to soldier on and said no to the drugs.

    Later, after Loulou begins childcare:

    Narrator: The depth of her anxiety made it clear Louise needed help. She took her doctor’s advice and went on to anti-depressants. By the time Loulou turned two, Louise was back on track and emotionally stable.

    Shannon’s acute depression episode occurred shortly after, and the narration leaves that alone more so that Shannon can himself consider the impact of his illness, although again at least the portion shown is largely “what about Loulou?”:

    [Shannon, a pale-skinned man with close-cropped dark hair is shown speaking to camera inside a brick walled building with light coming in through the windows and surrounded by vehicle parts, where earlier he has been working on a motorbike.]

    Shannon: That was a big step for me. “You have a mental illness, a depressive mental illness, that you will need to deal with and be conscious of and shield your daughter and your partner and and anyone else who could be collatoral damage from for the rest of your life.” That was tough. That was really tough.

    What did you think? I think this could have been worse with either a more tragic air or the Fighting Fat episode’s constant refrain of “risk” but that this is still a particularly problematic area for the show to be keeping its tight focus on the particular impact on the abled child when talking about family members with disabilities.

    See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 1: breastfeeding, Life at 3: obesity

    Posted on

    Life at 3: obesity

    This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

    Background: this post is about the Life series currently airing on the ABC and affiliated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, specifically the episode Life at 3, Part One: Fighting Fat. It is presently available in full on iView for those with Australian IPs and to whom it is accessible.

    Ooo boy. It probably wasn’t ever going to be good, was it?

    Let’s start with the basics:

    Headless fatties. (Recalling that headlessness is a major obesity risk factor!). Headless fatties are shown at:

    • 3:06–3:44: Camera pans horizontally past a blurred very slightly rounded pale-skinned bare abdomen, a blurred shape that might be a pale upper arm outside a black sleeveless top, a second pale abdomen with arms crossed at the top of it, a fatter pale abdomen with (probably male?) breast tissue resting on it, and then cuts to two presumed women’s bodies shown neck to knee and wearing black bra and panties. Both women are pale skinned and one is fatter than the other. They spin around simultaneously from presenting their front to the camera to presenting their back. There is a close-up of them joining hands, some of their upper leg and buttock flesh is in the shot. The camera cuts to a male torso like the fatter one shown previously, and he turns around too, showing his torso from every angle.
    • 32:24–32:50: a brown-skinned fat male torso in black underpants spins to face the camera. It shifts its weight over each leg and spins again. It is joined by a pale slightly rounded woman’s torso in black bra and underpants, a pale fat man’s torso (probably the one from the previous sequence) and a second pale, fatter woman’s torso. They turn simultaneously to have their backs to the camera. The nearest torso, that of the pale man, shows some buttock cleavage.

    Headless fatties. CHECK.

    [Stephen Zubrick, Chair, Advisory Group, Longitudinal Study of Australian Children appears, as he does throughout the series, in a headshot, looking slightly to the left of camera. He is a late middle-age pale-skinned man with short dark hair.]

    Stephen Zubrick: Our data is showing us that one in four toddlers is overweight or obese.

    The Life series doesn’t push back much on the science at any point. For example, in Life at One, saliva cortisol samples were taken from the babies and it was assumed without proof that high cortisol equalled a stressed individual baby. Now, I have no medical/biological background at all, but I do have an experimental background, and I spent the whole time mentally screaming “is that a valid assumption? or does cortisol correlate with stress only across a population?” And in fact they had to back away from the automatic interpretation when Joshua, who they didn’t seem to want to interpret as stressed, had very high cortisol. Perhaps… he was just sick! Likewise, the limits of the psychological tests they run on the children in terms of cultural assumptions, edge cases, controls, error margins are never discussed. Obviously there’s a limit to the extent to which this can be done in a TV episode, but in general I wish the series was less “the experts have worked their magic! this child is fat/stressed/extroverted/determined! The end!”

    And so, it’s no surprise to find out that this is how obesity is treated. How is obesity in toddlers measured? How strong is the link with childhood or adult obesity? How strong is the link between those and adult disease? And, most elementary to me, how many children are supposed to be overweight or obese? Measures of ‘healthy’ weight are often population based, where the top X% of weight, or BMI, or weight-for-height is defined as overweight, but yet, it is by definition expected that X% of people will be found in that top X%. I’d definitely like to be convinced that their measure of “overweight or obese” does not define overweight to be the top 25% of the population somehow.

    There’s fairly standard fatphobic language about food: “good”, “bad”, and some tsking at the parents for using what the show’s writers seem to consider a euphemism, “treat food”. Then there’s this odd little sequence:

    [Visuals of Ben and a sibling eating.]

    Narrator: When we asked parents why they introduced their child to treat food the most common reason given is to reward them for good behaviour.

    [Visuals of Daniel eating from a yoghurt container while his mother Kathryn watches.]

    Kathryn: Finished?

    Daniel: No!

    [Visuals of Wyatt eating a sandwich at a table and looking at his father Glen.]

    Narrator: But for our parents [note, here they seem to mean “the parents featured in the documentary”, not “the parents of the viewers”], unhealthy treat food was hardly ever offered up as a reward.

    [Headshots of individual parents.]

    Kylie [mother of Ben]: Aw crap I can’t even remember what we were given. [Rolls eyes.] Probably Vegemite sandwiches.

    Michelle [mother of Jara’na]: Yeah we didn’t sort of get a lot of rewards when we were kids. There was too many of us.

    Paul [father of Ben]: I don’t think there actually was a lot of time I did actually get a reward for doing anything good or anything like that. I kinda just had to do it.

    Bernadette [mother of Sofia]: I think I got to stay up late and watch TV with my Dad as a reward! [laughs]

    Steffi [mother of Joshua]: Maybe go to the park. Maybe go to the zoo. Or maybe my mother make me a new dress.

    Kathryn [mother of Daniel]: My reward was actual praise. I didn’t get any food or anything like that. So once in a while you’d get, I’d get maybe a treat, but much of it was just mainly praise.

    Narrator: Over one generation we are seeing a massive cultural change in the way we use and view food. Unfortunately, this shift has coincided with a dramatic reduction in how much physical activity our children do.

    The statement about physical activity appears to be driven by the study’s data, but it seems that the “food was never used as a reward in 1975” hypothesis was one the writers came up with themselves based on interviewing parents of three year olds about how they believe they were rewarded as, say, eight year olds (since they mostly won’t remember being three). Aggravating in a series that is supposed to be informed by the study.

    Another problem with this episode is a structural problem with the entire series. There are two episodes for each age group, each loosely focused around a specific issue. Life at 3’s two episodes are Fighting Fat and Bad Behaviour. Each of the children is allocated to an episode and their development and family situation is partly discussed for its own sake and partly discussed with relevance to the topic at hand.

    For Fighting Fat this means that the primary interest in each of the toddlers it focuses on is “will it make them fat?”

    So we have Joshua, who is among other things a toddler, of Chinese ethnicity, a younger brother, the child of an immigrant mother and the child of a father who downsized his career for his family and wants a low-pressure environment for his children. What’s the most interesting thing about Joshua at age three? Apparently that children of recent immigrants might get fat.

    We have Ben, who is among other things a toddler, of unmentioned ethnicity (the cultural identity of most of the pale-skinned children is unremarked on), a survivor of a quintuplet pregnancy and a premature and very low weight birth, a brother to his quintuplet siblings and an older sibling. What’s the most interesting thing about Ben at age three? Apparently that children with low birth weights might get fat.

    We have Shine, who is among other things a toddler, of unmentioned ethnicity (in Life at 5 her father meets his birth family, who are Irish), a child living in poverty, a youngest sibling in a larger family, and the biological child of an adoptee. What’s the most interesting thing about Shine at three? Apparently that children in poorer families might get fat.

    It probably had to happen in some form. Could you get a childhood study funded right now that didn’t have a major obesity focus? But the television treatment is very uncritical, and moreover appropriates several potentially interesting standalone stories.

    See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 1: breastfeeding, Life at 1, 3, 5: disability, Life at 1, 3, 5: general discussion.

    Posted on

    Life at 1: breastfeeding

    This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

    The longitudinal television program Life at 5, following from Life at 1 and Life at 3, is now showing. This is a series of programs following the development of eleven children, returning to them at intervals. It’s associated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children: the parents of the eleven take the survey and the producers of the television program use the survey to inform the documentary, at least loosely, and experts in child development comment on the children.

    If anyone who reach ABC iView (location locked to Australian residents) wants to catch up, and it’s accessible to you, Life at 1 and Life at 3 are currently available, as is part one of Life at 5. Presumably the second part will go up this week after it airs on Tuesday.

    The whole thing has my Hoyden antenna up a bit, so I am going to post a few discussions of some of the aspects of the show I was less impressed by.

    Today: breastfeeding.

    Feeding choices and necessities are not discussed for most children in Life at 1 (in which individual children seem to range in age from birth to about 15 months old, rather than all being 12 months), which would be the only episode where the Australian breastfeeding numbers suggest we’d be likely to meet a breastfeeding dyad in a sample of eleven children.

    The major exception is Loulou, the child resulting from an IVF pregnancy of Louise, a mother in her forties who the narrator says has been trying to have children for ten years. Louise has a negative breastfeeding experience. (Transcript from Life at 1, Part One, this transcript begins at 24 minutes 28 seconds in.)

    [Large black dogs approach a locked screen door from the outside.]

    Woman’s voice: OK.

    [Cut to a close up of a pale skinned newborn with closed eyes and a protruding tongue, rooting. Part of a breast appears in the shot held in a adult hand wearing a ring. The nipple, areola and surrounding area are moved towards the baby.]

    Woman’s voice: Come on. Come on darling.

    [The hand moves the breast around, teasing the newborn. The shot cuts to Louise, a pale skinned woman with light brown hair. Louise is wearing a pink top, and has lifted it up to expose her left breast. Her right hand is supporting the head and neck of Loulou, a pale skinned light haired newborn clothed in green, in the cradle hold near her left breast. Her left hand is holding her breast and squeezing it just above and below the areola. Her posture in general, and her left arm in particular, look tense, and her facial expression is concerned and determined.]

    Narrator: Louise has been told that in the early weeks of life breastfeeding is the most important experience that a mother can give her newborn baby.

    [Louise teases Loulou with the nipple, but Loulou does not latch.]

    Voiceover by Melissa Wake: breast milk is tailored for human babies, it’s tailored for their maximum cognitive growth…

    [Cut to Melissa Wake, a pale-skinned woman with light curly hair, in a studio speaking to the camera calmly and authoriatively. The screen identifies her as “Assoc. Professor Melissa Wake, Paediatric Consultant, Longitudinal Study of Australian Children”.]

    Melissa Wake: … so growing their intelligence, it contains immune substances so it protects against infection, it’s believed to protect against conditions such as asthma…

    [Cut to a high shot of Louise and Loulou. Louise is continuing to tease Loulou with her nipple.]

    Melissa Wake: … so you’re giving your baby the best start to life you can if you can breastfeed them for a substantial time.

    Louise: [sigh, sounding as if she is either exasperated or in pain. She addresses Loulou, who is grunting, in an upset but not angry-seeming way.] We haven’t been having a good time have we?

    [Cut to a close up of Loulou’s face. Her eyes are opening and closing and she is grunting and crying softly. She moves her head from side to side and then seems to be attempting to latch.]

    Louise: I know we’re both learning this thing. It’s so hard.

    Narrator: In the first six months of life the recommendation is that breastmilk is the only food that should be given to a baby and it should be part of a baby’s diet until they’re at least twelve months old.

    [The scene changes. It is a large white walled and floor room filled with colourful children’s toys. Many of all the eleven children are in the room with most or all of the parents. They are largely playing and talking cheerfully. Brief close ups of various faces are mixed with the wide group shot. The sound of chatter is heard indistinctly.]

    But it seems we’re ignoring this advice. When the ten thousand mothers in the study were asked how long they breastfed ten percent said they didn’t breastfeed at all and another twenty percent had stopped before their baby was even three months old. So why are women struggling with the most fundamental task of motherhood?

    [Head shots of individual mothers of some of the other ten children are seen.]

    Kathy [mother of Anastasija]: I wasn’t producing enough and she was still screaming for food.

    Kathryn [mother of Daniel]: I stopped breastfeeding because my milk ran out.

    Steffi [mother of Joshua]: I think it’s… not enough food.

    Kim [mother of Declan]: My milk… virtually dried up at three months.

    Tamara [mother of Wyatt]: I didn’t breastfeed at all because I wouldn’t have time in the day to do it if I went back to school.

    [Louise is shown pushing a pram up to a building. Loulou is asleep in the pram. Louise’s footsteps echo as the narrator speaks.]

    Narrator: Louise knows that breastfeeding will establish the strongest bond between mother and daughter, that it will stimulate growth and intelligence. Her goal is to breastfeed Loulou for at least a year, but after only three weeks she’s on the verge of giving up.

    [Cut back to the original scene with Louise wearing a pink top. She is leaning Loulou over her shoulder.]

    Louise [crying]: I feel a bit like a failure. A sense of failing. With this. [It’s/Is] really big and I really don’t want to.

    [A pale skinned late middle-aged woman approaches a door labelled “Day Stay Clinic” and enters. From here on, this woman, who isn’t introduced by name or given a title, is called Nursing Coach in this transcript. The scene changes to Nursing Coach and Louise in a dim room. Nursing Coach is standing facing Louise, who is seated holding Loulou in a cradle hold. Nursing Coach is moving Loulou with her hands.]

    Nursing Coach: [unclear] Now see what happens there. So her [unclear] is free to move

    Louise [voiceover]: If she got sick or ill in some way I seriously think I would blame myself because I couldn’t breastfeed her and maybe that’s why

    [A third woman is observing Louise and Nursing Coach from about one metre to Louise’s side. She is not introduced and does not speak in any part of this segment. Nursing Coach moves Loulou into position and she latches onto Louise’s breast.]

    Louise: [gasp and grimace of agony]

    Nursing Coach: Now, have you got your toes curled?

    Louise: Yes.

    Nursing Coach: OK, does it still hurt?

    Louise: Yes, yes it does.

    [Nursing Coach begins to touch Loulou and Louise’s breast, seemingly trying to show her how to break the latch.]

    Nursing Coach: OK we need to take her off. So you need to get this thumb…

    Louise: But I can’t, I’m just stuck.

    Nursing Coach: Let her go, let her go, let her go, let her back. OK, finger in there somewhere. Now finger in that somewhere, to push that jaw so she…

    [Loulou’s latch is broken and Louise rolls her eyes.]

    Narrator: Loulou is not attaching properly to the breast. Louise’s nipples are cracked and sore. The pain is excruciating.

    [Nursing Coach again moves Loulou into position, and while it’s not totally clear what is happenin, appears to jerk Loulou forward to encourage a latch.]

    Louise: [yell of pain]

    Nursing Coach: Uh uh uh uh uh. [To Loulou, lifting her up and away from Louise] Up you come.

    [Loulou is crying loudly and frantically. Louise puts her own face in her hands for a moment.]

    [Another latch is shown.]

    Nursing Coach: Good. Now. Just relax your fingers if you can.

    Louise: [gasp of pain] Come on darling.

    [Cut to Louise’s partner and Loulou’s father Shannon, who is driving and speaking to a camera in the front passenger seat. Neither Louise nor Loulou seems to be in the vehicle.]

    Shannon: I think there’s a little bit of post natal depression happening. I think it’s… it’s a whole new adventure that neither of us have ever experienced before. Louise likes to be in in control of things even though she’ll debate that with me. Um, and this is something that she can’t control. A child… I must admit that I was ignorant. I thought here is breast, here is child, put child on breast, job’s done. But I never knew that it’s not all like that for many women.

    Nursing Coach: Want to try the other side?

    [Loulou is shown latching.]

    Louise: [extended cry of pain]

    [The camera pans back. Louise is arching her back with pain.]

    Nursing Coach: [exasperated voice] What do you need to do now Louise?

    Louise: Remove her.

    Nursing Coach: Take her off. Quick sticks! Your fingers! Quick sticks!

    [Loulou cries.]

    Nursing Coach: Enough.

    [Louise stands and cuddles screaming Loulou.]

    Narrator: Louise struggled with breastfeeding for six more days.

    [The scene cuts to Loulou sleeping in a cot.]

    Narrator: The dream for a nurturing and intimate experience with her baby is shattered.

    [The camera pans to a single couch, in which Louise is sleeping under a cotton blanket marked “PROPERTY OF [text hidden]” and the cuts back to Loulou, now awake and calm in the cot]

    Narrator: For Louise, it feels like she’s failed Loulou in the first weeks of life. Time will tell if the enormous expectations that Louise heaps on herself will play a role in shaping the personality of her daughter.

    Watching this was upsetting for me. I had a painful start to breastfeeding that became very upsetting. In my case, my son’s latch was judged good and his weight gain indicated that his consumption was fine, so I was advised to wait out the pain. It disappeared when he was about 14 days old. But there were definitely moments that I did the equivalent of sitting in his room wrapped in a blanket feeling like I sucked as a mother. I reacted very badly to the exasperated “Quick sticks!” sequence in particular. It was hard not to see it as some kind of punishment: if you can’t breastfeed well, you will be trapped in a room with no natural light and a breastfeeding coach who will eventually get pretty sick of your whining.

    There are of course reasons why this portrayal of breastfeeding might have ended up being negative. It’s possible that the intention was that Louise, who seems to have been cast as the late-life IVF mother with high expectations who wants everything perfect for Loulou (a problematic framing in itself) was the mother whose breastfeeding story they’d decided to tell, and it happened to turn out badly.

    I certainly don’t say that Louise’s story shouldn’t be told: it looks terrible and she grieved for the loss of the breastfeeding relationship. It’s one of the ways breastfeeding can turn out. But it wasn’t contextualised with much successful breastfeeding. The only other child mentioned or shown breastfeeding in Life at 1 is Shine, who is seen latching once soon after her birth. (Shine and Loulou are the only babies seen as newborns, other than Ben, who was delivered at 28 weeks with his quintuplet siblings and who is shown as a newborn only in a couple of still shots from his lengthy NICU stay.) Later, in Life at 3 Shine’s parents mention in passing that “boobie” is her favourite word, so it can be presumed she was breastfed as a toddler, but she isn’t shown nursing, and that snippet is in the context of the obesity episode. (We’ll come to it.) That’s not a lot of airtime compared to the “I didn’t have enough milk” sequence above.

    The show as a whole is generally more observational than it is directly educational, so it is not a surprise that they do not offer breastfeeding resources on air (eg, the ABA hotline, or mentions of lactation consultants and how to find them); the series doesn’t, say, talk about how to find help when it addresses poverty either. There’s a very small set of breastfeeding links on the ABC website. But considering the amount of time that is spent having the experts interpret footage of experiments being run on the children (things like how they interact with a new toy, or a stranger), it would have seemed reasonable to have Melissa Wake or another paediatric or lactation expert push back a little bit about why breastfeeding isn’t as common as they recommend. As it stands, the portrayal is of breastfeeding failure being the usual case, and of long term milk supply problems being typical.

    Update: Y points out in comments that there are Life at 2 videos on the website, and if you view Shine’s video you will see some discussion of baby led weaning, breastfeeding on demand and footage of toddler Shine nursing.

    See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 3: obesity, Life at 1, 3, 5: disability, Life at 1, 3, 5: general discussion

    Posted on

    linux.conf.au 2011: lightning talk take homes

    As usual some rather important things went on in the lightning talks.

    Rusty Russell got irritated at Geoff Huston’s “IPocalypse” keynote (which argued that the last minute no-options-left switch to IPv6 runs the risk of IPv6 being outcompeted by a closed solution) and he got coding. The result is a CCAN module (so, C code) to support simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 connections, thus not penalising either. He’ll fix the dependency’s licence shortly. It might not work perfectly yet.

    Donna Benjamin is trying to raise $7500 to get The National Library of Australia to digitise The Dawn, Louisa Lawson’s journal for women from the nineteenth century.

    In intellectual property news (specifically, anti-stronger IP news) Kim Weatherall wants us to worry about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which Australia will likely ratify, the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement, which it would be really great to oppose, the impending result of the Federal Court appeal in the iiNet case, which iiNet may lose, and even if they don’t there will probably be legislative “three strikes” discussion about copyright violation.

    Posted on

    30 Day book meme, 5: a book you hate

    Day 5 of the 30 day book meme: a book or series you hate.

    What? I’m supposed to choose just one?

    Hi, I’m Mary and I hate books and movies like other people breathe. (That is, loudly, endlessly and especially so on public transport.)

    I could, for example, tell you about Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver in which it turns out that the interesting enough characters of Cryptonomicon are actually projections of their exceedingly similar distant male line ancestors into the present. Plus beautiful women cryptographer something something something OH GODS IT’S A MIRACLE THE SPINE OF THE BOOK IS STILL INTACT. Or much of Isaac Asimov’s Elijah Bailey/Gladia Delmarre series. (I don’t like R. Daneel that much either, by the way.) Or, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. For starters, that sounds like a ghost answering the phone. Sort of The Ring with phones. Hello, now you’re going to die! Secondly, Roger Ebert has just seen Part 1 of the movie, and he writes: … and key actions seem to be alarmingly taking place off-screen. They do indeed Roger, they do indeed.

    But, I do have a favourite hated book of all time. It’s Colony, by Rob Grant. Andrew loves Red Dwarf and found the novels quite reasonable, so picked up this solo effort set in a different universe.

    I’m just going to go ahead and spoil this. You don’t want to read it.

    Here’s the setup. There’s a guy who owes people some money, people who are “repossess your soul for the salt mines” kind of people that you don’t want to owe money to. This bit is irritating already, as frankly Our Hero is pretty bland, cowardly and self-pitying, and there’s no sign that we’re supposed to do anything other than wholly identify with him. Then, there’s a brief spark of false interestingness. Our hero is in desperate straits and is approached by someone clearly shady who would like to swap identities with him, and allow our hero to depart the entire planet on a settler colony ship. Safe as houses. Our hero pulls this off and boards the ship, finding people and conditions there greatly to his liking, only to discover that the shady one is a political eugenicist, opposed by nearly everyone else selected for the mission, particularly the decent ones.

    What will our hero do? Why was Mr Shady so keen to swap places? Should he confess to the swap, which would appear to be the safer path if he can truly convince the other colonists? Or is there something going on here that he doesn’t know about? That sounds likely doesn’t it! Perhaps he will discover just enough to learn that it’s safer to play along, but continue to alienate everyone else with every moment they continue to believe he is Shady. Gosh, what a predicament!

    But never fear! Rob Grant knows how to extricate our hero! There is a disaster aboard ship, and our hero wakes up seven generations later, when there are considerably more pressing problems, like the fact that the people who distrusted him have been replaced by disordered descendants of themselves, reduced to caricatures by inbreeding. Hilarity ensues, or does if you are Rob Grant, who clearly finds “average person at sea among humorous caricatures” hilarious. (His later book Incompetence is marginally better, but more or less on the same theme there. Why did I read that? I think curiosity to see if he could repeat this feat of coming up with a mildly interesting scenario and then sabotaging it so completely.) As best I recall, Mr Shady and whatever his reasons were for swapping identities are never so much as mentioned again. I actually can’t remember if I finished this though.

    If you see this book, burn it.