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ithinkthingsaboutstuff · 4 years

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What is with Birds of Prey criticism?

i have seen BOP

and i have read comments and review’s from different people (male and female) and i have decided to throughout my observations into the void.

now personal taste is personal taste and everyone is allowed to like or not like whatever they want.

but i will be looking at this from a ‘structured’ pov so i will be breaking the movie down into what others have got to say about it.

and with that in mind i will be taking things out of context but i will be summarising and linking to the sources when possible.

i will be looking at how people have persevere them (again male and female) and why this might be so (but i will say now that it is only my best guess, and i will try to be as fair as possible)

and i will also add i have only seen the movie once at this point so i may miss some things or misremember others

so from here on out we this will be nothing but

------------------------------------------SPOILERS-----------------------------------------

ok so with that out of the way.

PLOT

the plot is basically

Harley and the joker have broken up (joker, dumped her)

this makes Harley lose her immunity in Gotham as she was protected by the fact she was the jokers girlfriend.

black mask is one of these people and is one of the most powerful in Gotham.

but he needs a diamond (that belongs to Helena) to be the most powerful in the city,

but when Zsasz and Black canary, get it take off them by a street girl (Cass)

Harley says she will get it back to square herself with mask and he will protected her afterwards

(there is also a b plot with Helena going around kill everyone who was involved with the death of her family)

things happen

and they all end up fight Black Mask men in a amusement park

and Harley kills him on a dock.

then they all part ways.

now this is an oversimplification.

but that does allow the movie to explore the characters and their relationship's with the world and the story.

but over all an average plot but no so more them say

-the avengers (2012)

-thor (2011)

-age of ultron (2015)

-spider-man homecoming (2017)

and so on.

Criticisms

this is what one critic had to say about the movie

review from Mick LaSalle

“but no, even that makes things sound better than they are. There’s no character there at all. There’s a look. There’s an attitude, and there’s an assemblage of mannerisms, but these are all veneers surrounding a vacuum.”

“None of them suggest a personality, beyond some generalized zaniness.”

now i am no expert but is having a look, an attitude and mannerisms all things that make up someone’s personality?

i can see if he was trying to say she has not much to add to the overall story or if it over shadowed everything in the movie, for sake of being “zany”

but it was integrated into the movies narrative as a the main story telling tool,

e.g. Harley’s narration and the cartoons/ animation that came with. those where there to add character to the movie through Harley’s, so basically Harley’s personality is the films personality.

and this is what he had to say about the plot

“If she wanted the Joker back, that would be something. That could be a movie. If she wanted revenge, that would be a weak motive, but it would still be something.”

now this has some interesting connotations,

what he was trying to say with this sentiment is only something i can guess, but i will want to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was asking for a story similar to ‘mad love’ from the s4 of the Batman new adventures.

looking more at the sickness of that relationship (that some people admired and fawned over in suicide squad) so if that is the case then its not a bad thought,

however the way it is phrased makes it sound like more like Harley needs the Joker to be major part of the story for it to be any good.

but Harley has had comic’s for year’s that prove the opposite.

now to compare this what he had to say about the Joker (2019)

“What’s terrifying and brilliant about Phoenix’s Joker is that he seems to be operating from an intricate yet alien form of logic. There is very little common ground between the character and the viewer, no shared understanding of right and wrong, real or unreal. He erupts into laughter without warning — a terrifying, piercing laugh that he can’t control. He sits in the audience at a comedy club, joyously and maniacally laughing at setups, not punch lines.”

now i am not saying Joker is a bad movie, I am just saying that he complained about the lack of story and character in one film and praised it in another.

now i also understand that these films are different, and they have different tones and messages. and ever genre (one is action, the other is drama)

but basically

he is saying Joker’s lack of clear “personality” made the movie good and Harley’s made it bad (again this is apples and oranges, and way to simple)

but the main point is that he has failed to look for WHY Harley is that way, or how that adds to the movie like he did for Joker.

now moving on to

Anthony Lane

“ No one could call Harley Quinn a recluse. She loves to go out, get wasted, meet people, and fight them. In onscreen graphics, she proudly reports what it is about her that vexes her opponents. (“Voted for Bernie.” “Have a vagina.”) Yet Harley is often alone in the frame—marching toward the camera in her T-shirt and shorts, smiling madly through lips of fire-engine red, and peppering us with unceasing chatter, as if words were buckshot. She lives on her own, too, with a stuffed beaver in a tutu and a pet hyena named Bruce. (As with the title, note the surfeit of nuttiness. Rarely have I seen a movie strain so hard to seem out-there.) Our heroine needs some kindred spirits, and quick.”

ok benefit of the doubt this is just a colourful way to describe the movie and Harley’s set up,

however with the next paragraph that follows i don’t think so

“No surprise, then, that Yan’s movie, peopled as it is by women who talk among themselves, with only fitful reference to men, doesn’t so much pass the Bechdel Test as ace it, while also ticking the profanity box, the ear-splitting box, and the bone-snapping box—every box, in fact, except for the tricky one that requires a motion picture to be good”

the strange thing is that he was so close to an epiphany

yes Harley is social but she is lonely that is the point of her being with the BOP, taking in Cassie.

and saying someone who is social is not able to be lonely is the dumbest thing i have ever heard.

and i can name dozens of movies off the top of my head that is a group of guys ‘talking among themselves, with only fitful reference to women’

- the hang over (1,2 and 3)

- die hard

- pulp fiction

- fast and furious (all 9 of them)

- the other guys

- Sherlock (RDJ movies)

- the dark night

- scarface

- any Adam Sandler movie for the last 20 years

-memento

- rush hour (all 3)

- fight club

like damn dude your getting all bent out of shape for women having the nerve to want to tell story’s about other women.

(and i would also like to point out that very on in the movie was a ‘bad guy’ or did bad things all throughout the film and the men are just what they are up against you know like some kind of antagonist??? fucking wild idea right, and as we all know every female villain in movies are always written with respect and dignity, can you feel my sarcasm)

and this is what this man also said about ‘ford vs ferrari’

“Ford v Ferrari” is directed by James Mangold, and it may be his strongest film.

like dude you are showing your hand here.

but i am not wasting any more time on this dude.

let us move on to the lady’s

MOLLY FREEMAN

“the movie ultimately embodies different kinds of liberation - not only of women breaking free from their abusive boyfriends, psychotic employers and the restrictive boy's club, but also the freedom and power that comes with finding a group where they feel accepted and supported.”\

“Cathy Yan's directing and vision for the film, which is realized in the action, costumes and music. The fighting sequences are absolutely brutal and choreographed in a way to showcase the characters' respective abilities. Harley's gymnast moves make a return, and when she gets her hands on a bat, the Cupid of Crime really lets loose - and it'll leave audiences breathless with exhilaration. Birds of Prey stands out because it's uniquely female, from the characters' fighting styles down to the details of Harley pausing mid-fight to give her friend a hair tie. This further extends to the costumes, designed by Erin Benach (A Star Is Born), which are exquisite and perfectly showcase each character's personality.”

Susana Polo

“Each character’s storyline is given a slightly different genre and tone, as well, one of a number of tactics the production employs to mimic Harley’s manic internal life. Huntress stalks around Birds of Prey like it’s a Kill Bill-esque revenge epic, while Renee Montoya is in a hard-boiled cop flick. The main heroine ensemble actors all breathe a wonderful amount of life into little-known characters overdue for mainstream attention.”

“Winstead delivers a comedic twist on the Huntress’s classic personality that I hope makes its way to comics as soon as possible, and the 13-year-old Basco deserves particular credit for holding her own alongside Robbie in their many scenes together. Robbie’s Harley Quinn is just as scene-stealing as she was in Suicide Squad, appearing to operate on at least 20 percent cartoon logic at all times — a useful skill for an occasionally fourth-wall-breaking narrator. Cartoon-channeling is also a useful skill for the star of a movie with such splendid fight scenes.”

now i am not saying every man hates the movie, and every woman loved it that is insane and dumb.

but what does seem to be a common theme is that positive or negative, men and women are looking at different aspects of the movie

women look at the movie on its own terms and men seem to look by comparing it to other “guy movies”

now this a generalisation but this is a common idea that seems to run through it.

and here is some general thoughts from some people who have made comments, online.

female

“I am sick and tired of being told what movies I need to like as a woman, this is a bad movie. It isn't a zero nor is it a ten and anyone rating it that way isn't being honest either with you or themselves. The storytelling is odd and the flashbacks are weirdly placed to the point where they take you out of the movie. This movie has too much exposition and then not enough which I congrats I guess. I don't think men are rating this film low because they are "man babies" I think they are rating it low because there are far better superhero and anti-hero movies out there to choose from.”

this is based on personal taste and why it didn’t sit right with them (and that’s fine)

male

“A rush movie without any type of storyline and God knows where they are heading with DCEU and it's characters..It's only Harley and Harley who has never been in BOP in comics...Mis usage of characters and movie..Just make a decision where do you wanna go with your movies”

now this interesting, when this people has the same feels as the person above

they don’t look to the movie itself they look to find out evidence to discredit instead of anything in the film itself.

again i am not saying this person is wrong to feel this way i simply think the method of expressing it, is interesting.

(and for the record this is actually an incorrect statement Harley and Poison Ivy have been apart of the team at different points)

male

“The girls looked terrible like they were going Break-Dancing or something and Harley Quinn was dressed up like a Bird with makeup?? The ending was ridiculously stupid and predictable and the misogynist male pig attitudes towards the females in the film were jaw dropping cringe moments, like who acts like that??”

now this is about appearance, and the male characters, now this is showing that men see a violent, man who literally gets someone to cut a MAN’s face off

and the only thing they focus on is that ‘oh he is mean to women damn SJW’s’

that is the weird’s thing? like you the bad guy is bad to the hero’s? shocking.

now i am not saying that the character is perfect and well crafted like loki or kilmonger but he serviced the purpose he was meant to, he was powerful intimidating and unpredictable.

(and black mask has always been a nut case)

but i also think its interesting that these men who cry about SJW’s and how they mock men (and that does sometimes happen, it would be dumb to say they didn’t)

never seem to mind that that women get called bitch’s and whores in every other movie.or that women are used shallow props to move the movie along.

almost like it is distressing when you see someone you can identify with is treated like the peace of garbage.

female

“The Film was decent enough for a lowkey Friday night out with the girls. Nothing you'd rant & rave about or even remember seeing in a few months but it was entertaining in places. The script felt a little bit underbaked & the story itself felt a bit disjointed. The direction of the film was lacking for me. In a world where Todd Phillips pulled off Joker (2019) this seems like a more rushed project that would've been better at Netflix or even Amazon Prime for release. I think the deserve another crack at this movie & another attempt at something with a bit more substance”

honest to the point and is looking at the movie on its own term's

notice how she does not need to devalue other women to get this across, not the character’s, not the write or director but was looking at it from a personal taste and rewatchablity,

the anger about this movie is so strange

like how many hero movies have been worse then this and was not taking very chance they get to bash the creators and that they should not do their job’s because the movie had women as most of the cast and was mainly about them.

anyway i hand it over to all of you.

#Birds of Prey #birds of prey movie #Harley Quinn #bop #long post

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swagobjectwinner · 3 years

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Importance of Evergreen Content for your Hotel Website

Guest writer Cooper Jitts from TALK Agency shares the importance of Evergreen content in today’s time and why its important for a hotel website to increase conversions.

In the world of SEO and growth marketing, trending content is like a spring flower. It blooms quickly, attracts a flurry of visitors, then wilts and disappears forever. On the flip side, evergreen content is a camellia. It grows strong and steady, blooming throughout the year while attracting a steady stream of new and returning visitors. Which would you rather see on your hotel website?

Since the start of the pandemic, trends have been taking centre stage. But these trends have been focussed on doom and gloom. Then there’s the fact these are trends. They won’t generate interest forever. In fact, most people have had enough of them already.

However, if you build a content strategy focusing on evergreen content, you’ll soon enjoy year-round interest that carries on working for you long after it has been published. Unlike trending content, evergreen content helps you establish your authority, boosts your organic reach and can launch you up the search rankings, saving you time and money, year on year.

Why Is Evergreen Content Important?

If you take business growth seriously, then you’ll already know smart marketing plays a huge role in your success. The more people you reach, the more likely you are to see those lead conversions rise. However, reaching the right people is more important than reaching the most people – and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry (hospitality industry) or niche will build trust in your brand. But to summarise, here are 5 reasons why you need evergreen content in your life.

1 – Rank Higher In The Search Engines

As evergreen content tends to be informative, educational, always relevant and timeless, it typically performs better in the SERPs. By filling it with useful information about your property and room types along with the local tourist attractions, site seeing and food joints etc. will add more value. In this way, you’re likely to get more visibility, and it will help you climb those search engine results pages. The more content and value your site would provide, the lower the bounce rate will be – another major ranking factor.

2 – Boost Site Visitors And Traffic

With 95% of all traffic going to websites on page one of Google and Bing, just 5% venture to page two and beyond. Evergreen content and clean visuals tend to rank higher, it helps in attracting new visitors and reaching out to a wider audience. Evergreen content will also usually have a much higher word count, making it easier to use keywords and latent semantic indexing naturally. The more traffic you drive to your website – there are more chances of driving some commission-free direct bookings and increase profitability.

3 – Gain More Leads And Conversions

Every visitor to your site is a potential guest, meaning the more visitors you attract, the more guests you could drive. You could have the best conversion strategy known to man, but without leads it’s worthless. Increase efforts on lead generation with social media outreach, email campaigns, blogs etc.

4 – Builds Site Trust And Authority

By providing reliable and informative content, evergreen content is generally shared much more on social media than generic trending topics. The fact it offers so much value and info also helps you establish your hotel business or brand as an industry leader, someone to trust. Share travel stories of your guests, reward them for their posting reviews, sharing pictures and videos. Your happy customers could help you in building trust. Basically, the more trustworthy you come across as; the more likely you are to drive more guests.

5 – Works For You Long After It’s Published

Trends typically die a quick death, meaning most content is lost in the darkest corners of the SERPs. Why spend hours pulling together a post that will generate interest for a few weeks when you could create something that works months, years, even decades after it’s published? Ultimately, this drives consistent traffic to your site, helping reinforce all other aspects of business growth both in the short term and the long.

The Different Types Of Evergreen Content for accommodation providers:

So, we’ve briefly covered why evergreen content is important for businesses. Now let’s take a quick look at the different types of it you can create. You’ll probably be familiar with some of these, which is always a good thing as you’ll have a good idea of the direction to go.

(Can we link the below to our content assets? Like the Airbnb guide, other relevant blogs etc.)

Checklists (If you are a VR owner or Airbnb Host) Common Mistakes Glossary of a Topic or Subject How-To Guides (Travel and Local info) Property Videos Stay Reviews Stay Resources & Ideas Step by Step Instructions Top Tips and Top Tens Ultimate Guide To

Now while these types of content won’t necessarily see you gain instant evergreen status, the ways in which they are structured and written can. As an example, if you’re into a holiday or leisure business, you could write a post about the top 10 surfing beaches to visit in Sydney. Or perhaps you sell garden tools, in which case you could do an ultimate guide to getting a perfect lawn.

Think of how to deliver all of your knowledge, tips and advice to your audience in an educational yet entertaining way. Avoid using ‘trend techniques’ and add as much verifiable value as you can. Guide them from start to finish naturally, and of course, be relatable. How To Create Evergreen Content

1 – Streamline Your Subjects

Keeping your scope specific to the topic at hand is always better than going too broad with your info. Evergreen content is supposed to be useful and assist the reader with a specific subject matter. Going off-topic will likely drive them away. By zoning in on one or two important points, you can become an expert on the subject, gaining the reader’s trust along the way.

Always keep your audience in mind while developing content, know your guest profile and accordingly choose the Subject. Choose a catchy title and begin with a great engaging intro, incorporate relevant pictures and videos to make it effective.

2 – Use Relevant Keywords & Lsi’s

When creating content, you need to write for humans first, and search engines second. But that doesn’t mean one should be sacrificed for the other. Remember, ranking higher in search results is important but the content has been drafted for your guests to read. Weaving keywords and LSIs into content in a natural way can be hard – and the search engines know when your keyword spamming, using irrelevant links or being a clickbait creator. Yep. You don’t just need to know which keywords to target. You need to be able to use them naturally, building context and convincing the reader at the same time.

3 – Join The-Dots By Linking Content

Evergreen content works like mycelium. The forest floor is connected via a network of branching, thread-like fungi, each working to help the forest thrive. In return, the trees provide nutrition to the mycelium in a symbiotic relationship. This is the same for the content you create. Use your past and future content to provide context, back up what you say and drive your audience from one section to another. Do this and you’ll not only improve your ranking – but also your brand authority and trust scores. Interlinking within web pages will keep the guests engaged – create a lot of content and build a structured architecture for your website. For e.g.: If you are providing spa services at your property and having a webpage dedicated to the same, then you may provide links to other sections of your website where the guests may experience services such as: yoga, aerobics and wellness.

About the Guest writer

This article has been written by Cooper Jitts. Cooper is the Founder and Director of Talk Agency, a digital marketing company that provides white-hot service to clients while keeping on top of emerging digital trends.

#evergreen hotelwebsite content

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themeresthobby · 7 years

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From Holmes to Sherlock by Mattias Boström

Or, ‘I hear of Sherlock everywhen’.

This book was released in August 2017, and I pre-ordered it. I’d never pre-ordered anything before.

It wasn’t because I had sky-high expectations, I just looked forward to a structured, but fairly wide-reaching, introduction to the meta, the history, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it of Sherlock Holmes. The circumstances that spawned the stories, and the circumstances the stories spawned. And this had good reviews, and is/was up to date. I didn’t actually search for something like this, I only learnt of it when I happened to see the author’s Twitter account.

I enjoyed it. It was written in narrative form, so it was basically a biography of Sherlock Holmes the phenomenon. While there is a time an place for more academic treatments, this served the purpose I read it for.

Under the cut: description and highlights of the contents, plus digressions.

Twice the length of The Great Detective, which I posted about before here. Incidentally, in The Great Detective, the author mentioned he and Boström, childhood pen-pals who lost touch, found out they were writing similar books at the same time by coincidence

Before anything else, I imagine parts of this would be good springboards for further research for people who study intellectual property laws. There is discussion of unauthorised Swedish translations, Danish films, and, of course, those German penny-dreadfuls, all during Doyle’s lifetime. And it also covers the Klinger v Conan Doyle Estate case.

I found it useful as a thorough primer - I know about the most famous and most recent ‘story beats’, but I have a hard time deciding which other topics to explore. This was a smörgåsbord. (If I’m copy-pasting ö for Boström, might as well go all the way.)

A who’s who of Holmesiana*, and history. Like those pastiches with a bunch of historical figures squeezed in, except they were actually there.

*(Anglosphere, save for Lenfilm Holmes and short background on Holmes in Russia, those Nordic copyright issues, and a sentence about Holmes being popular in Japan.)

Side note: Six Degrees of Sherlock Holmes? So many possibilities! Google turned up this blog post and this DW thread.

Some important figures are introduced without being named until a short while later. Not the best for more cynical/’get to the point!’ readers, but like I said, this was written as a narrative. I found the guessing-game device charming.

A large portion of this involved Doyle and his heirs, though enough was about the people behind adaptations and fan culture to keep this from veering into Doyleana.

But even in the Doyle-era chapters, minor players got their time to shine. Here are two who stuck with me (summarised, not quoted):

Arthur Whitaker, architect and ornithologist, wrote a Sherlock Holmes story called ‘The Man Who Was Wanted’ and sent it to Conan Doyle, only for Doyle’s heirs to claim, decades later, that Doyle had written it. He cleared up the matter within the last six months of his life, but never published the handbook on British birds he had been working on.

Jeannie Gwynne Bethany, grew up with her father, a mathematician, as her only teacher. She had wanted to become a doctor, and had attended lectures and studied medicine. (No indication of where in reference list or in text.) She became a published fiction writer and married Cambridge science professor George Thomas Bettany, who also worked as an editor for the publisher Ward, Lock & Co. One day, George asked her to judge a manuscript. She was enthusiastic, even feeling sure it was written by a doctor. The publisher accepted it and included it in November 1887′s Beeton’s Christmas Annual.

And I didn’t know George Edalji showed up to the Festival of Britain Sherlock Holmes exhibition. Wow.

And that exhibition featured “genuine Victorian dust” from “the most neglected room” of the British Museum.

There were mentions of some nice things we couldn’t have, like those in this post. Reference for the contents of that screenplay was the author’s correspondence with Paul Herbert and Peter E. Blau.

Pastiche writers who got the most of the spotlight: Mitch Cullin and Nicholas Meyer. Some description of Laurie R. King’s Russell-verse. Very short mentions of Lyndsay Faye and Anthony Horowitz, and others.

Lenfilm Holmes!

Young Sherlock Holmes got its own chapters. For a movie I didn’t like, reading about how it was made was interesting.

And for a movie that was never made: Sherlock Holmes and the Vengeance of Dracula. Moriarty would have brought Dracula’s sarcophagus back to Britain and Holmes would have to team up with Moriarty to stop him. Still a better Holmes story than The Asylum’s.

The Great Mouse Detective’s CGI clockwork sequence was a homage to Miyazaki’s The Castle of Cagliostro. Miyazaki also directed Sherlock Hound. Six degrees, I’m telling you.

Name echoes! I like seeing minor coincidences. Eille Norwood’s surname by birth was Brett, while Jeremy Brett’s was a stage name. Joseph Bell was the name of a radio announcer who was part of Edith Meiser’s radio dramas.

The introduction and last few chapters featured BBC Sherlock, but mainly background, praise, and nothing very in-depth. You can deduce how enthusiastic I am about that series from my blog content.

Guy Ritchie’s movies and Elementary also got chapters of their own, but again, nothing too in-depth to the eyes of someone who was vaguely in the loop when they started. Frogwares was acknowledged. Graphic novels were acknowledged, but nothing specific.

Wait a minute, it didn’t mention The Asylum’s Sherlock Holmes... and A Case of Evil... arguably the spiritual successors to those early Danish and German films. But who am I to judge, I haven’t watched them. What if I unironically like them. What if.

History is in the making as I type - this book came too soon to record the highlights of the late 2010s: Sherlock Gnomes and Will Ferrell’s Holmes and Watson.

(But seriously, I hope Holmes and Watson will be funny. I mean, IMDB says they’ve cast Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Queen Victoria. What could go wrong?)

#Sherlock Holmes #book thoughts tag #from holmes to sherlock

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insightshare · 7 years

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Seven things I learned about Participatory Video for Most Significant Change

by Anna Patton, InsightShare Associate and training participant

Laptops banned. No notebooks allowed. For those of us who like to write everything down, the instructions for the latest InsightShare course on Participatory Video for Most Significant Change (25-27 October, in London) were a bit daunting. How would I remember it all?

Fortunately, visualisation (lots of drawing, arranging of keywords and mind maps) and experiential learning (going through the process ourselves as participants) helps it stick. Here’s what I learned:

1. “Most Significant Change” sounds a bit fluffy, but it’s actually a recognised evaluation technique.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation means that those affected by (and those affecting) a programme are involved in the process of assessing what worked. Together the group negotiates and agrees how to measure progress.

The Most Significant Change process, developed in the mid-1990s, is one form of participatory M&E. Groups collect people’s stories of significant change in their lives, analyse them, and then systematically select the most significant ones. Reflecting on the stories at each stage allows those involved to learn about what causes change.

MSC is now accepted as a valid monitoring and evaluation technique, and has been used by government agencies like the UK’s Department for International Development and international organisations like Oxfam.

2. Adding video makes a lot of sense.

MSC was conceived mainly as an oral exercise, with stories captured in writing. This can have its issues, especially if you’re gathering hundreds of testimonies. One user of MSC reports that it was difficult to get the evaluation teams to write up stories, because they saw it as adding to an already heavy workload. Written stories also risk being left unread: some people may be illiterate; those who can read might be put off by many pages of text. Writing also loses the expression and body language of the storyteller.

Using video, meanwhile, can bring those stories to life, potentially increasing the impact on the viewer. As InsightShare facilitator Isabelle explains: “It takes data off the paper, and it makes it human”. Since anyone can learn basic video skills, storytellers can speak to peers, in a familiar setting; they can watch videos back immediately and as a group. People may also be more inclined to attend a screening than to take part in a focus group. In short, it’s fun and accessible, yet still analytically rigorous and data-rich.

3. It’s best suited for organisations prepared to learn — and maybe even change.

With so much pressure these days to demonstrate the value of a project and show what’s been achieved, it’s easy to think evaluation is about reassuring funders. But as one of my fellow trainees put it, this is evaluation “that aims to improve — not to prove.”

The stories are based on responses to an open question — usually: “What has been the most significant change in your life [in x time period]?”. That prompts unforeseen answers. Perhaps the programme had unintended effects; participants might not mention the aspects you thought were crucial; maybe something else entirely influenced the change they talk about.

So organisations considering PV MSC need to be doing it for the right reasons. (It works especially well as part of a long-term intervention, when the findings of a first phase can feed into the next one.) And they need to know that the process “can bring a cost”, as InsightShare facilitator Neville says, and “the cost is change.”

4. It’s not going to replace quantitative methods any time soon.

Quantitative methods help you see what has changed and by how much. MSC isn’t a replacement for that: it doesn’t use predefined indicators, or anything that needs to be counted and measured.

But MSC can work well alongside quantitative research, by exploring why things have changed, as Soledad Muniz, InsightShare’s head of innovation and development and our trainer for this course, told us. It adds a deeper understanding of what a programme or activity has actually meant to people, she said, and that “lets you understand people’s perspectives on how change happened in their lives, as well as how other enablers contributed to that."

Many InsightShare clients, such as Nike Foundation, have used PV MSC as part of a much bigger evaluation exercise.

5. It can also build skills and experience among those involved.

PV MSC gets you more than just useful feedback: it can also build capacity.

Training local evaluation teams — beneficiaries, local staff, other stakeholders — and taking them through the whole process means they learn and practice data analysis, presentation and public speaking, consensus-building and negotiation, and video recording/editing skills. Depending on existing levels of education/experience, training and support can be time-consuming and costly; though the process can also be done on a much more limited budget, without ticking all the participation boxes.

6. Sharing personal stories can be powerful stuff.

How often have you simply talked to people who listen, without interruption, for as long as you needed to, knowing you were in a safe space? Oddly, something so simple seems rare these days.

Day two of InsightShare’s PV MSC course offered this experience. After the story circle, one of my fellow trainees said she found it “enriching and liberating to have the opportunity to share my story in a safe and neutral space. It was the first time I’ve shared my story so freely… It was beautiful… to feel truly listened to.” Another said that sharing her story “made it real and opened new doors for reflection and decision-making”.

As for me, talking and listening sparked a palpable sense of connection in a room of near-strangers. We each described different things — but there were common experiences, similar worries. Even when there’s little in common, you’ve shared something of yourself that you maybe don’t even bother your best friends with.

It’s not hard to see how storytelling circles can build solidarity among a community and develop people’s confidence in speaking up. (Of course, the process can also be difficult and even traumatising; in some cases a trauma counsellor might need to be present.)

7. Selecting one story isn’t random.

This was the bit I struggled most with. How can one story ever be representative of a hundred or more? And what about all the detail you miss by focusing only on one story?

The point, though, is that the evaluation team have heard and analysed all the stories. They can choose what data to capture from them, and this can feed into a final report.

And in fact, it’s not really about the selected story being representative, but about being meaningful. Two metaphors for the MSC process help illustrate why it makes sense to focus on the meaningful:

“Do you remember the average things [about a holiday abroad] or the wonderful and terrible things? MSC helps teams of people focus on the memorable events and uses these events to help realign effort towards achieving more of the wonderful things and less of the terrible things. When the focus is on learning, we need to capture more than just the average experiences.”

“A newspaper does not summarise yesterday’s important events via pages and pages of ‘indicators’ (though they can be found in some sections) but by using news stories about interesting events… The most important stories go on the front page and the most important of these is usually at the top of the front page.”

From ‘The ‘Most Significant Change’ (MSC) Technique: A Guide to Its Use’ by Rick Davies and Jess Dart

And MSC is robust because of the breadth. Hearing a few stories from the field might be merely anecdotal, but as the InsightShare PV MSC toolkit explains, “when 50 or 300 stories or more are collected and analysed, meaningful patterns emerge.”

What about defining significant? As our group struggled to choose which of our six stories to select, Soledad suggested another metaphor: “think of a chrysalis becoming a butterfly”. Change is something that can’t be reversed.

Aside from this, what any given group decides is significant will be subjective — and that’s ok. Because the criteria that a group uses to select their story also says something about what matters to those people. That’s a valuable thing for any organisation to learn about those it’s trying to help.

Photos: Ingrid Guyon

References & further reading: http://insightshare.org/resources/participatory-video-and-the-most-significant-change/ https://www.odi.org/publications/5211-msc-most-significant-change-monitoring-evaluation http://insightshare.wixsite.com/videogirls/the-pv-process http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.pdf http://www.tools4dev.org/resources/the-most-significant-change-msc-technique-tool-review/

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haplesshuman · 7 years

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Rebel Girls: The Rant

I know, I should’ve done this on International Women’s Day, but I never thought of it at the time. I was going to combine this with the review of The Exiles, but when writing the review, I realised this is something that needs an entry of its own, and if that means delaying the Breaking Dawn review a week, then so be it. I need the extra time to locate my rubber gloves anyway.

That’s not the point. Recently, I was on Facebook and a video posted by Rebel Girls. They did an experiment (I say this whilst resisting the temptation to put single quote marks round the word) in which they removed all books from three shelves which had no male characters, no female characters, female characters that don’t speak and princesses. Then they talked about their non-fiction book, about real-life women who took their destiny in their own hands, saying that this might fix the problem!

Uh... Right. This is not the first time I’ve seen a study get used to sell a product (looking at you, Persil), but this one pisses me off more than most. I wanted to comment on the video on Facebook, but it would’ve been one in a sea of comments, and to be frankly honest, what I have to say about this is too long for your average Facebook post. So that’s why I’m posting my right to reply here, on Too Long; Didn’t Read.

I’m going to start with the flawed solution. To basically summarise this video in one sentence, it’d be, “We think there are no books about girls who don’t have to be rescued by a man, so we wrote this non-fiction book about women who didn’t need to be rescued by a man!”

...Wait a second. You’ve found a gap in the market, and you’re not filling it? Sure, writing a book about real women who have overcome real problems is one thing, but that’s not filling the gap you’ve found. When you find a gap in the market, you freaking do something about it, you don’t leave the gap for someone else to fill.

By the way, if that’s a call to authors everywhere to do this, I’m answering that call.

Secondly, the experiment itself. The mum and the girl in the video just pick the books off the shelves. You just can’t do that without actually looking at the content - with the exception of the princesses one. These were three bookshelves of fairly narrow books. No way could they have just picked them off the shelves, which makes me wonder if the experiment was rigged.

Shocking, I think that’s my first Tinfoil Hat moment.

Then there’s the princess one. There’s a lot of hate aimed at fictional princesses, and I can understand why, because of the stereotype that they’re just passive characters waiting for their prince to come. However, removing all books about princesses is a bad case of throwing the baby out of the bathwater.

First of all, there’s the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which I really like. The main character is someone who ran away when she learnt she was going to be married to a man she loathed, learnt fencing, magic, Latin and cookery against the wishes of her parents, defended herself against magical creatures and wizards alike, and with the help of people she’d befriended along the way, foiled an evil plot.

She is also a princess.

In that experiment, Dragonsbane and Dragonsearch would’ve been removed from the shelves just because the main character, Cimorene, happened to be a princess.

Then there’s The Princess Diaries. For all I dislike about them, Mia is not the kind of princess who is waiting for a prince. Yeah, she whines about not having a boyfriend, but she’s also a teenage girl. It’s not her fault she’s a princess, she’d give anything to be normal and can’t give up being a princess because her overbearing grandmother decided to tell the press that she was a princess.

In that experiment, The Princess Diaries and its nine sequels would be removed. Just because Mia’s a princess.

Then there’s one other thing. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but I have heard it’s tricky to get boys to read (a point I shall return to). In my early days reviewing children's and YA fiction, I reviewed Gold of the Gods by Bear Grylls, a book I still dislike. Yet when I look on Amazon, most of the reviews are by parents or grandparents who bought it for their son/grandson, and found that it got them into reading.

The lone female character, Christina (who is the only character I actually liked) was a damsel in distress and nearly had her earrings stolen, and when she protests, her brother is asked he minds her earrings being borrowed. She is treated with nothing but contempt by the main character (who I marked down as a Marty Stu).

That book, by the rules of the experiment, would’ve stayed on the shelf. Because Christina speaks, and she’s not a princess.

Thank you, Jean-Luc.

We have now got to the point where I reference Dragons’ Den. In the recent series, a woman came in with some dolls that fell deep into the Uncanny Valley and came with stories about the dolls’ characters. The stories were empowering women stories, of course. Anyway, she said she did this because she couldn’t find toys for her daughter that weren’t stereotypical girly toys. I figured she wasn’t looking hard enough.

And when I see Rebel Girls saying they had never read any books that had female characters not having to be helped by a guy, I say they might not have looked hard enough either. There are tons of books out there with strong female characters. The Chalet School books for one. Jaqeuline Wilson’s books frequently feature female characters who take matters into their own hands. The Harry Potter books have some very competent witches.The Famous Five are two boys, two girls and a dog. There’s also the Shirley Holmes books (yeah, they were books long before the awesome TV show came out). Then there’s The Hunger Games. God I would not mess with Katniss Everdeen. And I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface there.

Then there’s, as I’ve mentioned above, the troubles with getting boys to read. The book Rebel Girls are trying to sell is aimed at girls. Perhaps it should be aimed at boys, too? They might learn something useful, too. Lessons about important women shouldn’t be limited to girls, you know.

Last of all: “If you see it, you can be it.”, and the mention that children’s media - be it books, cartoons or TV - is dominated by men. I disagree. There are plenty of TV shows, cartoons and books with female protagonists. You just have to look. There’s the books I’ve already listed. There’s a whole load of kids’ TV shows with female protagonists. With cartoons, it’s a bit harder, but ever heard of Mona the Vampire? In fact, I can think of a lot of 90s TV shows where the protagonists are female. And I’m pretty sure it’s still the case now (Wolfblood, anyone?). You just have to look.

OK, that was a long one! As you can tell, a few buttons were pressed there. Before I go, I’m just going to explain how things are going to be for the next few weeks.

You may remember that whilst I explained why I wasn’t going to review The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, I said this:

“The copy I got at a charity shop only just fits in my quarantine box.” before vowing to explain why I had a copy of Breaking Dawn in the first place. Well, now the time has come.

I got the copy of Breaking Dawn for ease of actually reviewing. The other books I’ve been reading at bookstores (kindly don’t shoot me), but Breaking Dawn is so much of a brick that I thought it’d take too long if I did that. And Breaking Dawn is handily split into three books (thank you, Stephenie Meyer, sorry I’ve been spelling your name wrong), so I decided that each book will get its own review. I also have a copy of The Princess Diaries: Royal Disaster (or Take Two depending on where you’re looking). This means I have a provisional schedule for the next seven weeks. It goes as thus:

25th March: Breaking Dawn, Book 1

1st April: The Princess Diaries: Royal Disaster/Take Two

8th April: Breaking Dawn, Book 2

15th April: Breaking Dawn, Book 3

22nd April: Why I Won’t Review The Host

29th April: Eragon

This is still very much a provisional schedule, as I’m waiting on a reservation at my local library, and am hunting down a copy of Caddy Ever After.

See you next week.

#rant

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tarzan-health · 7 years

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Response to Pete Evan’s interview on the Sunday Night show (26/03)

I just watched the interview with Pete Evans from the Sunday Night show which ironically aired on Sunday night. For anyone who doesn't know Pete, he is a celebrity chef and one of the judges on My Kitchen Rules. He also promotes a strict paleo diet. Pete has been criticised for a number of extreme health related claims that he has made, while having no qualifications or authority to do so. To be honest, I don’t really following any of Pete’s stuff but after watching the interview on the Sunday Night show, it brought up a couple of important topics I couldn’t help but comment on.

First some context. Pete was asked a number of questions in the interview related to his health claims, including bone broth as a substitute for baby formula for infants that cannot tolerate breast milk, for whatever reason; milk is a cause of calcium deficiency that leeches calcium from bones; and fluoride in tap water is a harmful neurotoxin that causes health issues. When questioned about the evidence to support his claims, Pete stated “it is just a known fact” that dairy leeches calcium from bones and there is “mountains of evidence” to support his claims about fluoride. Pete also questions “why doctors are experts in fluoride” and that a formal educations is basically a waste of time, “why do you have to study something that is outdated, that is industry backed, and that is biased. That would be insane to study something that you are going to waste your time with.”

I’m no expert in paediatric nutrition, calcium absorption or fluoride, and I am in no way here to ‘prove’ that Pete is wrong with is claim. I think it is pretty ‘common sense’ and ‘a known fact’ that the evidence heavily out weights his opinions, but I’ll leave that up to you to decide. I do however want to comment about his claim that education is a waste of time, specifically focusing on, why education is more than just learning content, what is bias, how research and evidence actually work and finishing with tips to determine of someone is qualified to speak about a certain topic.

Why is education important

Pete stated that education is a waste of time as all you learn is outdated information. Although one of the goals of education, especially at a university level, is to learn content in a specific area, the deeper and much more important goal is to learn how to think critically and evaluate information. This may sound easy, but trust me it is harder than you think. This is my sixth year studying and I am still perfecting how to analyse information critically. Why is this so hard you may ask? Because thinking critically in uncomfortable and disagrees with many of the automatic thinking processes that are prewired in your brain. The human mind wants to take short cuts, it wasn’t to generalise, summarise and group information. It wants concluding definite answers on things and hates ambiguity. Unfortunately science, especially human science, is exactly the opposite of this. Thus critical thinking means living in the sphere of ambiguity and at any minute having to change your beliefs about something that may have been a pedestal of your life. This is pretty hard to do, if not impossible in some circumstances.

Biases

From what I can tell, Pete seems to think that big pharma, big agriculture and other corporations are controlling health governing bodies (such as the Australian Medical Association), health professional, higher education institutes and scientific research. Now I don’t want to call this a conspiracy theory, but for lack of better words, let’s just call it a conspiracy theory. According to Pete, information from the sources mentioned above is industry backed and bias information. What exactly does bias mean?

Bias can basically be describes as, a failure to think rationally and lack good judgement with a tendency to think in a certain way. It is true that in research big corporations sometimes fund experiments and this would have to be treated with caution as the study may be bias. The study may support a result that benefits the company that funded the study. BUT that’s not the whole story. Research also has to abide by strict rules and ethics, and good research goes through rigorous reviewing of experts in relevant fields before it is published. The study also has to state who it was funded by and provide detailed methods of how it was conducted. In many cases research is done completely independent of the corporation that funded it and in the slight chance that the published study is bias, it would likely be in very subtle ways, such as reporting confirmatory results but then stating a bunch of limitations afterwards. Most qualified people with research experience should easily be able to decipher an article to interpret what it really means, but unfortunately many lay people who read research article just read the abstract (the summary at the top) which is where the results are very briefly describes with lack of any context. So the point is that bias in research does exist but not to the extent that Pete thinks, and people with research experience are pretty clued on to checking who funded a study and then interpreting the methods, results and the limitations.

Now that the research bias by funded corporations has been covered let’s move to individual bias, with regards to researchers and lay people. There are a number of types of biases that influence thinking. While studying at university it is essential to learn and understand your own biases and learn to be aware of them to decrease the amount of influence they have when understanding and conveying information. This is why scientific research articles are full of references as evidence that they aren’t just making stuff up and giving their own opinion. Every time I asked a question in class regarding something I heard or read, I was questioned about where I heard that information, who said it and where that person heard it. It’s much easier to just accept and believe information that sounds good opposed to questioning it and thinking about it. What if I want to believe eating blended avocado seed will cure cancer, I would love if that were true. Being aware of biases means having to question and think about information that is presented to you. It means that sometime you have to accept things that you don’t want to believe are true or disregard things that you want to believe are true. Most researchers and health professionals (good ones anyway) understand this and apply it when doing research or giving health advice.

On the other hand, people without any knowledge of their biases are not even aware of how much they influence their lives. Bringing it back to Pete, in my opinion he is falling victim to the ‘appeal to nature fallacy’, which means that natural things are viewed as good and unnatural things are bad. As you can see, this is a simplistic dichotomy that over simplifies things. Remember how much our brain likes that? Pete is adamant about the paleo diet and living a natural life and is opposed to unnatural chemicals. So I can see how difficult it would be to believe that a chemical in the water supply or in sun cream that you out on your skin are not dangerous.

This brings us to the concept of cognitive dissonance, which is a mental discomfort which arises through a contradiction of beliefs and/or behaviours. To believe that unnatural things are bad, but chemical in drinking water can be a good thing, is a difficult task. The ambiguity of this does not sit well for most people, thus there is generally a change in behaviour or belief to align with the other. So while Pete is quick to demonise education and research as being bias and controlled by big corporations, he lack to acknowledge his own biases and how they influence how he interprets information and his own beliefs. Another example of cognitive dissonance to drive home the point – If I (Pete) follow a paleo diet that says dairy is unnatural, and I also believe that all things natural is good and unnatural is bad. One day I (Pete) hear that dairy leeches calcium from the bones (which supports my beliefs that dairy is bad and unnatural), but then I hear a doctor say that calcium is good for bones. It must be concluded that the doctor is wrong. But then, another doctor says the same thing, then another. It must be concluded that all doctors are wrong and not educated in nutrition. But then, dietitians start saying the same thing. It must be concluded that the dairy industry own the Dietetic Association, all universities that teach this and all research that support this. It definitely cannot be that I (Pete) may be wrong.

How research works

Now for a summary of how research works. Another reason Pete states that education is a waste of time is because it is outdated. I agree with him, in a way. Information that is taught at university (especially health related information) usually comes from text books which encompass a body of evidence that is gained over years and years of research. Much of this evidence is from studies that have been tried and tested a number of times and there is a general consensus within the relevant field as to what can confidently be called correct. For example, that dairy is a good source of calcium. The problem is that it takes a long time for such studies to be conducted and a consensus formed, although bulk evidence is the only way to be sure that something works and isn’t harmful.

To put it another way, health related research has to be behind the cutting edge because it has to accumulate evidence to support whatever point being made is. This might seem bad in the example of a new drug coming out that can cure cancer; you would want to administer it straight away. But it might be the case that the drug actually causes liver failure three years after administrations. It is usually better to play it safe and accumulate a lot of evidence over time first. So although learned content in classes will always be behind the times, the important thing to remember here is that the main goal of getting an education (specifically at university) is to learn how to think critically and evaluate information. With this ability a person is able to look at new research and critically evaluate how good it is and if it could be relevant to them or their practice (if they are able to apply it to clients/patients). But this would be very difficult to do without having an extensive education learning the relevant field specific jargon, underlying principles of anatomy/chemistry/biology etc. and understanding statistics.

Determine if someone is qualified to speak

On a final note I would like to comment on how to determine if a person is authorised/qualified to speak on a health related topic. This comes back to the importance of education again and how well someone understands science. You have probably heard the saying that goes something like ‘the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know’. Well this is pretty applicable to determining whether someone knows their shit.

First of all, a truly qualified person will stick within their professional boundaries on a given topic and not claim to know more than they do. They will generally state that they don’t know much (haven’t read the research etc. ) about the given topic and may or may not give their opinion about it depending on how much they know, which they are likely to use a statement like ‘it’s not my field of study but in my opinion based on 123, then I would say xyz, but I haven’t seen all the research so don’t hold me to that’.

Secondly, someone who really knows their shit will unlikely give you a straight forward definitive answer about anything and as we now know, people really don’t like that. Not much that is health related is straight forward and black and white. A person is a dynamic system interacting with a dynamic environment, and to make matters worse, there are very strict ethical guidelines that prevent doing certain studied that could be used to explain cause-and-effect relationships (the strongest kind of evidence). So we are usually left with having to pull meaning out of correlations (things that occur at the same time) which occur within that dynamic system interacting with a dynamic environment which contains millions of variables. So if anyone claims to know a definitive answer for something that will work for everyone, they are blowing smoke up your arse (cough cough ketone diets). You should be making some connections right now; the human mind likes simplifying things; uneducated ‘health gurus’ give simple answers that can be applied to everyone; qualified professionals are taught how to think critically, understand the complexity of healthy related issues and do not pass their own opinion off as being true about things they do not really know about.

A final point is that people who know their shit will be able to give you detailed information about the topic they are speaking about. They will likely tell you loads of stuff that you don’t even understand as they explain the mechanisms of how things works. In most cases they will be able to recite at least one study or piece of evidence that supports this and likely give you an over view of what that study was about, the methods used, the results and the limitations. Not that you would have had to analyse Peter Evans that hard to determine he doesn’t really know much about what he is talking about, but he definitely did not show any of these signs.

Link to interview https://au.news.yahoo.com/…/pete-evans-answers-his-critics…/

#Nutrition #health #new #debate #science #research #education

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