Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous

From the anals of the BPS aka British Psychological Society's latest research digest -  Pop music is getting sadder and more emotionally ambiguous with noteworthy points below:

Have you heard older generations lamenting the way pop songs don't sound like they used to? There's a sense that the hits from yesteryear had an innocence and feel-good quality that's missing from today's pop offerings. Now Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve have confirmed what many suspected - pop music over the last five decades has grown progressively more sad-sounding and emotionally ambiguous.

.......Happy sounding songs are typically of fast tempo in major mode, whilst sad songs are slow and in minor. Songs can also be emotionally ambiguous, having a tempo that's fast in minor, or vice versa.

Schellenberg and von Scheve found that the proportion of songs recorded in minor-mode has increased, doubling over the last fifty years. The proportion of slow tempo hits has also increased linearly, reaching a peak in the 90s. There's also been a decrease in unambiguously happy-sounding songs and an increase in emotionally ambiguous songs. The findings complement an analysis of pop lyrics from 1980-2007, published last year, that found a drop over time in references to social interactions and positive emotions, but an increase in angry and anti-social words.

Guernica - September awesomeness

The latest issue of Guernica Mag landed in my in-box yesterday and below are the links I enjoyed:

1) Women in Power and Politics - Sonia Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi have overcome tragic and arduous pasts to emerge as leaders of India and Burma. What’s next for these two historic icons? http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/women-in-power-and-politics/

2) Making Faces - Two potters keep an unusual art alive in South Carolina. http://www.guernicamag.com/features/making-faces/

3) Reporting Poverty - Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor.
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/reporting-poverty/

In her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo turns her attention to India and the residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum in the shadows of the city’s airport and luxury hotels. Of Annawadi’s three thousand residents, few have full-time employment. Most sleep in homes of nailed-together scrap metal, plywood, and plastic tarpaulin; some sleep outside. Many children are forced to work instead of attend school. The dwelling’s eastern edge borders a vast pool of sewage.

Amid Annawadi’s grinding poverty lives Abdul, a teenager who supports his family of eleven by selling scraps of trash. Boo chronicles the struggle of Abdul and other families to get out of poverty by whatever means available: corruption, education, work (NGOs, tellingly, never enter the picture). Their lives illustrate what poverty can wrought on the underclass of a developing country, but Boo never reduces them to case studies. She depicts the residents’ relationships, squabbles, opportunities, and misfortunes with eloquence and detail. In its specificity, Behind the Beautiful Forevers tells a larger story about India’s rapid growth in the global economy, and the people the country is leaving behind. Boo spoke with me over the phone from her mother’s house in Virginia.

—Emily Brennan for Guernica

Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?

Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.

It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.

A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos.

And the best quote:

There’s a moment I describe in the book when Abdul starts talking about what a life is, says something like, “Even a dog has a life. Even if my mother keeps beating me, even if that moment was my entire life, that’s a life.”

4) Robert Reich: It’s Inequality, Stupid - Income inequality is a pressing issue, but you wouldn't know it from watching the RNC in Tampa.
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/robert-reich-its-inequality-stupid/

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top–among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people–and the steady decline of the great American middle class. 


Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.


Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return. 


The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

5) Brandon Lingle: Queen’s Creek - Back from Iraq, a veteran meditates on the past, present, and future of American warfare, and the small creek in Virginia where they all flow together.
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/brandon-lingle-queens-creek/

The hazy sky, commingled with swamp stench and car exhaust, yanks my mind back to Baghdad. On a certain level I savor the smell of the primordial mud riding the November breeze as our discussion slides toward Mesopotamia. He completed his second Iraq tour a few weeks before I returned from my first, during the death throes of the nine-year odyssey.
“This tour was a joke compared to the first,” he says. “Last time we could shoot back.”
I nod in the dark.
In the past, American forces would fire back on the spots where insurgents launched rockets or mortars toward our bases. More often than not, the bad guys didn’t stick around to watch. Cobbled launchers of scrap iron, batteries, and washing machine timers lobbed their weapons automatically. The U.S. barrage that followed could sometimes kill innocents and destroy their neighborhoods. As Operation Iraqi Freedom shifted toward New Dawn, and Americans left Iraqi cities, the policy shifted too, and we stopped shooting back.
“It doesn’t add up,” he says. “What good is an artillery unit that can’t fire back?”
I begin to think that it’s a good thing his unit wasn’t pummeling neighboring Iraqis, and then I’m ambushed by the reality: it’s much easier to think that way when you’re safe at home on a brisk autumn night.
“Makes about as much sense as carrying unloaded weapons in a warzone,” I say. “Some soldiers didn’t even have their own ammo. The bosses were more afraid of our own guys. Accidental discharge.”
......
The prospect of endless days of mental, physical, and emotional trials excites him. He hopes to eventually deploy to Afghanistan, or maybe Iraq again.
“We talked, drank tea, and got lots of people hurt and killed.” Some worked to keep the war going, riding around the country on helicopters and selling weapons to Iraqis.
“Can we keep 50,000 troops in Iraq, please? 25,000? 10,000? 5,000? How about 150?.” A pause. “I killed a sixteen-year-old boy,” he says. “Our battalion’s only kill this deployment.”
I stare at his shadow on the dock, and I feel a stab of fall air through my damp t-shirt.
“Outside Kirkuk. Got pinned down by someone taking pot shots,” he says. “We figured out where the shooter was, and the lieutenant colonel froze. He was nearly crying. Lying on the ground. Ordered me to take the shooter out. So, I did. Just a barefoot kid with a rusty AK. He fell in a drainage ditch. I remember the muddy water flowing over his feet.”
Like the vast majority of service members, I’ve never fired a weapon in combat let alone killed anyone. I think about how I’d have reacted.
“Damn dude,” I say. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Maybe I accomplished something while I was over there.”

Friday Cephalopod: Superhero of the sea

Friday Cephalopod: Superhero of the sea

I think its sorta sad-funny that my first thought upon seeing this amazing creature of the sea was, "hmm, I wonder how it would taste." In my defense, I was eating a really yummy melt in your mouth seafood biryani with baby octupus & squid at that time.

Thousands of People in India Die During Drug Trials

Dr Mercola's article today was an eyeopener: Shocking Secret: 2,061 Clinical Trial-Related Deaths and the summary is below:

• Data from the Drug Controller-General of India revealed that more than 2,000 people in India died as a result of serious adverse events (SAEs) caused during drug trials from 2008-2011; only 22 cases, about 1 percent, received any compensation -- which was a paltry average of about $4,800 per family

• Drug companies often target poor, uneducated populations in India and other developing countries to participate in drug trials, where offers of $400 per study earn volunteers far more than the average pay rate of 50 cents a day

In 2010, the government of India called a halt to trials of the Hu­man Papilloma Virus (HPV) vac­cine Gardasil. This came about because of a civil society-led investigation, which highlighted serious ethical violations for clinical research and informed consent rights of study participants or their legal guardians – and followed reports that six of the young participants had died, and more than 120 girls suffered severe adverse reactions, including:

• Stomach disorders

• Epilepsy

• Headaches

• Early menarche

Unfortunately, reports suggested the deaths occurred because the girls either committed suicide (by poisoning) or drowned – despite reports by parents to the contrary.3 This is, sadly, but one example of deaths occurring during drug trials.

Earlier this year, the Argentinean Federation of Health Professionals accused GlaxoSmithKline of misleading participants and pressuring impoverished, disadvantaged families into enrolling their children in clinical trials of the experimental Synflorix pediatric pneumonia vaccine.

Fourteen of the children participating in the experimental vaccine trial died.

Beautiful Quote about mothers

I recently finished reading a book called Emily and Einstein. It's a fairly decent beach read sort of book, but the following quote made an impression on me. When I came across that particular sentence while I was reading the book, it literally had me stopping in my tracks and I had to re-read it a couple of times. Made me think of the ducklings following their mother at the Peadbody Hotels.  Enjoy!

"We are all imprinted by our mothers, that imprint luring us in like a friend or sometimes an enemy, causing us to become a carbon copy or a determinedly made original. We either embrace or reject, though the luckiest among us never realize there is an imprint at all."

Go & buy this book! STAT!

I just finished reading the e-ARC version of Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and what a grand book it is! I was reading it in the doctor's waiting room and trying to stifle my giggles as Ivan tumbled from once crises de nerfs to the next. Thank God Baen Books has e-ARCs - I dont think I could have waited till the book was published.

Nordstron Innovation Lab

Nordstron Innovation Lab
So a real smart, well thought out post from Rory Ford landed in my in-box earlier this week via the Gov2.0Australia Google list serve. The post had a link to his blog and being naturally curious, I went snooping and found a post he had written about this really cool shopping/marketing thingy done by Nordstrom Innovation Labs. Basically the Innovation Lab hijacked a real Nordstrom's store in Seattle for a week and in real time created an Ipad app for customers who wanted to buy sunglasses. Reminded me a little bit of NYC's Improv Everywhere.

I would think the next step would be to make a TV spot about this, set to some cool music, cause just watching the case study on youtube, makes me want to go and shop at Nordstrom's!

My Resume vs My Brother's

My Resume in Wordle - August 2012

My Brother's Resume in Wordle - August 2012

Some interesting articles at The Economist

1) Foreigners in China To flee or not to flee?

Read this with interest. Some interesting points:

IT MAY not count as an exodus. Indeed, it doesn’t even satisfy that hoary old journalistic definition of a trend: three examples.Separately, a pair of expatriates long based in China have written heartfelt accounts of their decisions to leave the country. And though few in number, they have attracted a great deal of heartfelt attention from many other “old China hands”, as foreigners who have chosen to make their lives, careers and homes here sometimes like to call themselves......In one of the recent expatriate accounts, an American film-maker, editor and blogger named Charlie Custer said most of his reasons were personal—and that none of them had to do with ugly threats he’d received since entering into a nasty public feud with a prominent Chinese television personality, Yang Rui. However Mr Custer did acknowledge feeling distress over China’s lack of a free press and rule of law. And he mentioned that his past couple of years had been not only “depressing” and “soul-crushing”, but also “occasionally terrifying”. However he cited as bigger problems air pollution and food safety. These were the most important factors behind his decision to leave Beijing, after a four-year stay. “I like breathing,” and “eating also is fun,” he wrote in pithy summary.
An essay by Mark Kitto, a Briton who first came to China as a student in 1986, ventured into more thought-provoking realms. After living here for the past 16 years as a businessman, Mr Kitto decided he’d had enough. Some of his motivations match those of the wealthy Chinese who choose to leave. He cited concerns that “the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm” but added that the “one overriding reason I must leave China” is the need to give his children a decent education.Other aspects of Mr Kitto’s experience might only make sense to a foreigner, and a disillusioned one at that. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream,” he wrote.Upon returning to China in the mid-1990s, after a post-graduate period spent away, he noted a widespread difference since the time of his student days. An air of optimism remained, but then he also detected “a distinct whiff of commerce in place of community”. Mr Kitto bemoaned China’s shift from a traditional family culture to a “me” culture, and its rush toward materialism and conspicuous consumption.Mr Kitto also wrote that he wanted, in a certain sense, to “become Chinese.” He acknowledges that this was never possible—but not that he was naive to think it might be. Eventually he came to find that his “desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider” was not attainable. 

2) So Mitt? What do you believe? (Economist is against Romney)

All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr Romney could win an Olympic medal in it (see article). And that is a pity, because this newspaper finds much to like in the history of this uncharismatic but dogged man, from his obvious business acumen to the way he worked across the political aisle as governor to get health reform passed and the state budget deficit down. We share many of his views about the excessive growth of regulation and of the state in general in America, and the effect that this has on investment, productivity and growth. After four years of soaring oratory and intermittent reforms, why not bring in a more businesslike figure who might start fixing the problems with America’s finances?
But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, Part 1, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, Part 1, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

h/t to Chris Blattman for this. If you are interested in Economic History and a Labor Market book discussion using Malcolm X's Biography as a starting point, I urge you to read the original blog post by Bryan Caplan of the The Library of Economics and Liberty Blog. (PS - I am thinking of subscribing to this too, but its another blog then and I am so time-poor!)

Three links I liked at NYMAG/ Vulture

1) Premium Rush movie review

I liked the below para. It perfectly captures what I felt about driving/walking in NYC!

Gordon-Levitt’s Wilee does have a life philosophy, but it’s nothing terribly complex. “Can’t work in an office,” he says in voice-over while evading numerous, potentially deadly obstacles. “Can’t stop … Don’t want to either … When I see a guy in a gray business suit … my balls shrivel up.” Zooming through red lights and teeming crosswalks, he is exactly the kind of biker to whom we yell, “We have a walk sign, asshole!” But being as we’re seeing the world through his eyes, we think, “Out of the way, assholes!” I must say that this cuts to the heart of New Yorkers’ moral relativism: On bikes, they think, “Asshole pedestrians!” and “Asshole drivers!” In cars, they think, “Asshole pedestrians!” and “Asshole bikers!” On foot, they think, “Asshole bikers!” and “Asshole drivers!” (Wherever they are, of course, they think, “Asshole critics!”) 

2) Mike Birbiglia - Sleepwalk with Me

Another great show - took mum & dad along with me (got cheap tickets thank to Nancy Khuu). I walked out of the theatre 1.5 hrs later, in a daze, just magically carried aloft, dream-walking after being mesmerized by Mike Birbiglia's comedy. In short, need to see the movie and highly recommend it! Plus it has Ira Glass.

Speaking of Ira Glass, pic of mum and me in NYC, when we had 4th row tickets to see "This American Life."

3) August: Osage County

This was hands down the BEST "serious" play I saw on Broadway, during my 2 years at NYU. As a side note, the BEST comedy play I saw was The Norman Conquests (x4 times).

I liked August: Osage County so much, saw it twice - once with John Uppill and then with my mother. This was a sacrifice b/c even with NYU student discount, I paid $70 for the cheap seats vs $25 for The Norman Chronicles.

Cant wait to see the movie, esp with the awesome cast attached (Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis). I reckon Meryl Streep has my heart after seeing her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady - utter sublime!

Write your own academic sentence

Why-Oh-Why did I not have this resource when I was enrolled in Grad School? Link here: Too lazy to write it yourself? Let the Virtual Academic do it for you

DIY that I wish I knew how to do

More teachers need to be like this: How one teacher built a computer lab for free

Sikhism, America & Gun Violence

This is meandering, but compulsively readable and her point about gun violence, is one that def needs to be made: Better Aim (A short essay by Maura Fitzgerald)

A Nifty Little LinkedIn Tool

Thanks to Donna Serdula of LinkedIn Makeover. Get yours here: http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/network

Robots amok!

5 embarrassing robot faux pas

Click on link above - its got a little bit for everyone's inner geek from an awesome pic of Data (Star Trek) going berserker to Star Wars (on you goof C-3PO!)

Why I am back.

So, I am fed up of Facebook (FB). I hate the new timeline look and miss the old simplicity of how clear and concise the look of FB used to be. However for yonks, FB was a depository of my fave links. These were links that I did not always want to bookmark, but I did want to share them with friends and/ or just have a place to store them, so that I could refer back if I wanted to. But now, I just cant find anything on FB and seeing as I have a blog, I think this will be where I store my fave links.

Excited

So - cant believe I have two comments! Okay, so Fi found my Blog.. tht still leaves Dave :)

I am so excited about mum coming to visit me! I read all these amazing blogs that are witty, erudite and I marvel at how amazing and intersting other people's lives are. At the same time its a bit scary.. take today for example. I was getting my regular dose of Sepia and found this article - http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003289.html and I loved it, just loved her snarky sense of humour, the pathos and misadventures of her family life, one that I could so relate to and as I explored more, I checked out her links and then gasp! discovered who she was in real life - and that's so scary b/c I've been pretty indiscriminte and not at all discreet during my www wanderings....... and if someone was pretty determined, they could find my likes, dislikes, etc quite easily enough (Just like my friend, Fi did!).

Anyway, its been a while since I dropped into my blog for a chat - let's hope the next entry doesnt take another 4 months!

The Birth

Well, here it is.. my blog has entered the world (sounds too much like Brave New World, but what can ya do?) I've been a netizen for yonks and have wanted to create my own blog for ages now. It actually started June 05 when I fell really really ill and was diagnosed with pneumonia which effectively incacerated me in my house for 5 weeks (yeah, it really was that severe!). So I surfed the net, listened to music, occasionally ate some soup, slept, coughed and surfed the net some more. My wandering on the net led me to the fantastic group blog called http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/ and I got hooked. I don't know if my fledgling efforts will be as good (or even as popular). I've been a regular diary-writer too and so initially, I did have doubts about an online diary but I think my paper diary will be quite different from my blog. Okay - lets hope I keep up with this!