beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

So, I read a story where the Earth's entire colonisation effort was something like thirty women, and they were going to get implanted with preserved embryos on their first day there because they might be the whole hope of survival for the human race.

... which bothers me on several levels.

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Obviously if everyone is women you do what the computer tells you and grow whatever was frozen well enough. Er, whoever.

How long would they keep up the Ladies Only plan?

I mean if the plan is to get as much genetic diversity as possible out of the frozen embryo stores in the ship and there's some kind of time limit on that, you'd want to make sure there's plenty of wombs to go around. Would you get everyone out in a single generation?

If you're aiming for ten thousand colonists, even if you have multiple births routinely and soak the risk, that needs a really big first gen pool. So you'd want to keep up the embryos plan for multiple generations, without losing any of the earlier generations. You could do that with donor sperm and embryos. Or with a lot of social stuff to make sure your great grandchildren are still interested in decanting old world people.


also one of the mathier pieces says "the consequences of the increased medical risks of late childbirth have not yet been considered." It wanted to stretch the generations on a generation ship by having kids around 40, but, wow is that a biggie to leave out of your math. I mean, your chances change substantially over time.

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But only the first 200 would be volunteers who up front believe themselves willing to act that way. The future survival of the human race would depend on their reproductive behaviour. Their choices would be severely constrained.

And to get all the embryos out of storage in the shortest generations they'd need to get their daughters to act the same way. Which seems... unlikely.

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Hard science fiction that sets out a space colony as that baby focused without thinking through how they're actually going to feed the babies is just bad.

I mean, maybe they all get pregnant before they've got a crop going on the grounds that if they starve to death it's all one anyway, but... no.



Also the science problem in the novellette I read was far less interesting to me than the social consequences of the background setup. ( Read more... )


I think one big factor for viable colony size calculations is something like, if we send people who act pretty much like people of that cultural background do, how many do we need?

Like, we'd need to include murder rates from somewhere.

You do not get perfectly behaved people. No matter how you filter them at the start.



And the cultural changes would be massive even in the first generation kids. I mean how many immigrants feel like they don't really understand their children?

And if the future of the human race depends on women's reproductive choices, it's kind of more likely to work if you start with what those choices *actually* tend to be. First gen you could filter for people that want big families - though not for people that want big families once they start having them and are surrounded by them - but second gen will do as they will.

How do you design a colony socially so it does what you need genetically?



Clue: you do not stick thirty women on a one way trip and keep them pregnant from the first month they get there.




Hard science needs to at least glance at soft science or it requires the ridiculous.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/01/parents-guide-girls-ambitions-women

Government to tell parents how to make their children "aspirational" and "ambitious for themselves".
Because clearly the solution to structural inequalities is to tell individuals they need to try harder.

I guess this may not be obvious to people who have achieved the sort of power that can make this stuff happen, but: sometimes, wanting is not getting.
Telling girls to want more... have we not been asking? Have we not been trying? I rather thought we were.

But no, not according to this bollocks. Apparently we hold ourselves back.

This is not feminism. This is the same old same old in high heels.

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More Torchwood numbers.
If I stick to just counting speaking parts then I can count how many speaking characters get dead, how many are women, and how many are people of color. I can also count black men, because there's a specific issue there. But must remember 'dead black men' is a subset of 'dead people of color'. Do I need a column for 'dead white men' or is that just the remainder? ...I need a column.
I can only count what I see, and may be inaccurate.
This being Torchwood many of these characters are either dead before they're speaking or die more than once. ( Read more... )

I did attempt to count corpses as well, but there's some crowd scene issues going on. I could freeze frame and have a go, but massive job much?

Right. Table under the cut. It may not be a very useful table, but I've made it now so I'll post it.

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And now for season 2:
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There's also longevity tests to play with: Who makes it through two minutes, who gets two seasons, who's still going? Maybe I do that later.


Okay, I have *tried* to make tables but I keep on thinking of more ways up to put the data. Is it one black man dead out of one black men ever, or one out of many? I need another column or something. Wait, I'll write it as fractions, so 0/1 means one black guy survived and 1/1 means there was one black man and he died.

There were 11 black men with words to say in the two seasons. Two died.
There were 13 black women with speaking parts, some of them in several episodes. Two died. Plus the woman in the recording was already dead.

So there's a pretty good chance of survival in Torchwood even for black people.
Win.

Under this next cut goes a list of all the dead speaking characters.

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I also made a little list of queer relationships in answer to someone elses post so I'll paste them in here because I have the window open.
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If there is any more counting to do someone else can do it. I have head of fuzzy and forgot both breakfast and lunch. *facepalm*

Have finished counting characters in Torchwood season one and two.
Those links go to my longer notes.

I did more tables later and more notes about race here.
And some about deaths.

I am counting speaking characters: male or female, white or of color, and Bechdel test pass/fail.
My count is likely imperfect. I can only count what I see.

According to the 2001 census Cardiff is 92% white.
I'm going to assume that men and women are 50/50. (I'll assume it because I *looked* for a number but did not find one. Google fail.)

I shall do math and draw conclusions, in pretty color coded tables.

First a recap on season one, now in one table:
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Green means there's at least the percentage found in Cardiff, orange means it's close (I chose 40% for women, roughly meaning one more woman needed to be even), and red means they've got some explaining to do.
On the Bechdel green is pass, an orange fail means two women talked about men, a red fail means no scene had only two women talking. Thankfully there's always at least two named women, they just don't always get to chat alone.

And now for season 2:
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So, general conclusions:
There's a consistently high percentage of people of color, helped along by the way that Tosh on her own is a representative proportion for anything up to 10 speaking characters, so with a maximum cast of 28 and most shows in the mid-teens then one or two other people of color keep the percentages quite high.
Season One averaged 17% people of color.
Season Two averaged 18% people of color.
Consistent, and consistently more than double the 8% wiki reckons for Cardiff and the UK.
I am not complaining, I'm counting. I think it's cool.
I had a thought, and looked up the USA: around 80% white. [ETA: Though different bits of wiki have different answers, and 80% white is the *highest* number; try here ] So Torchwood is actually reflecting [or closer to] the ethnic diversity of the USA. And Torchwood does quite well shown in the USA.
Interesting.

There's a very frequently low percentage of women. Over the entire two seasons only 4 episodes had 50 something percent women. No episode had more than 60% women, and 6 had only 20 something percent, with the lowest at 21%. The inequalities are not symmetrical, you never get a lot of women and very few men to the same extent you get a lot of men and very few women.
Season One averaged 37% women per episode.
Season Two averaged 39% women per episode.
An improvement, technically, and yet not a very large one.
2/5, or 40%, of the main cast are women... so at least they're consistent.
Which is odd.
Did we suddenly get outnumbered and me not notice?

Bechdel Fail and Pass are about 50/50 over the two seasons, but season one was 8/5 in favour and season two was 5/8 to the fail. Episodes with quite a high percentage of women can still Bechdeil fail.

I did not count have now counted the hypothetical 'reverse Bechdel' where two men talk about something other than a woman. In the interests of technical accuracy I probably should. Since I'm not rewatching them all again right away I'll do it from the transcripts. And, also, do it later.
... later apparently meaning after 0330.
I have made blue 'pass' to mean two men talk about something other than a woman. I have made pink where there is no scene with no women in it. ( Read more... )
So, now I've checked, there's a difference between the two seasons. The first season has four episodes where every scene has at least one woman, and one that barely just barely has men alone; the first and last episodes are both all mixed, and it's about even on test fail between genders. The second season has two all mixed episodes, not the first and last; the fail is 2 m-m to 8 f-f. There's more times women are involved in interactions in the first season.

I've said before I liked the first season better for politics reasons, but this wasn't consciously what I had in mind.

Next, because clearly I need to do more math, I can take the full transcripts and the notes I've just made on categories of all those speaking characters, and I can figure out how many words they had each in each episode.
... this may take a while...

Have finished counting characters in Torchwood season one. ETA: Went on and finished both, please read completed tables instead /ETA.
I shall do math and draw conclusions. Would be easier if I could remember how to make a table... aha, auto generator to the rescue...
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So that's the numbers in a table with color coding.
Pretty. But revealing some problems. More with the gender than race though.

After exam, which I will clearly pass due to all my concentrating and studying and stuff, I will go and count season 2. I wonder if it's better.

ETA: Went on and finished both, please read completed tables instead /ETA.

There are some theories about texts that boil down to numbers, like "there's not many x people in y genre" or "all x people get killed in y media" or "very few x talk to other x on TV".

The Bechdel test isn't a pure number test, but it involves counting to two (named women) and then ticking a box (talk to each other) and another box (not about men). So you could make a form where you could fill in Name 1, Name 2, ticky ticky, Bechdel Pass.

So today I feel like sitting down and rewatching some TV, but I also feel like continuing the meta debates that net fandom is so good at. So I decided I would count.

Now I need to decide what to count.

Characters
female
male
white
of color
sexual orientation
not-disabled
disabled

... and none of those categories are actually tick boxes when you get into details, nor are they binaries. Plus I've noted me not noticing little things like a character/person not being white. So my numbers might not be very good.

There was a OFCOM report on disability in the media in 2005. "Estimates of the proportion of people with disabilities in the UK population range between 14 and 19%. In 2004, 12% of sampled programmes (on BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Five) included representations of people with disabilities. However less than 1 person/character in 100 in the sampled programmes overall had a disability."

There's probably reports for other areas but I don't have them on my laptop and don't see them on the list with the disability report. Poking the internet isn't how I want to spend my afternoon.

I just did a quick look around at some definitions and have realised I'm going to be really bad at really a lot of categories. That's embarrassing.

I shall try anyway.

So does anyone have any suggestions? What am I not seeing? What needs seen?

Finished the chapter! Party!
... okay, there's still the half page on masculinities and the page and a half on queer theory, but I read them already once when I got the book. I, er, have a tendency to start on pages as mention 'queer'. *shrugs*

So, have read many much about feminisms. Methinks my head got full hours ago and most of it will fall out again, but so it goes.
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