“Mad Men” – Speaking at the Wrong Time

June 26, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “Mad Men” season closer on Sunday night sang reprises of its hit numbers –  liquor, cigarettes, adultery, politics (national and office), and even a bit of advertising.  Those plus that other “Mad Men” staple – language anachronisms.

The show is so careful about authenticity – every hat and hairdo, every dress and lipstick shade, suit and necktie, every piece of furniture (home and office), and of course the assumptions and ideas that were part of the culture of the 1960s.* It seems as though Matt Weiner, the show’s creator, has hired experts to fact check everything we see on the screen.  Why does this pursuit of historical accuracy not extend to language? 

On Sunday, one of the characters says that something “sounds like a plan.”  It may sound like a plan, but it does not at all sound like 1968. That phrase is very recent.  The script might as well have had a character pushing the envelope or throwing someone under the bus. 

Then, Don Draper changes his mind about moving to Los Angeles, after his wife has already arranged to continue her acting career there. Now Don tells her that he’ll stay in New York while she works in Hollywood.  “We’ll be bi-coastal,” he says.

Not in 1968, you won’t.  To check, I ran “bi-coastal” through Lexis-Nexis – all English language publications for the year 1968.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Lexis-Nexis doesn’t turn up bi-coastal until more than a decade after Draper uses it, when, in January 1980, the New York Times comments on the “new breed” of transcontinental commuters.  The Washington Post doesn’t have bi-coastal until mid-1982. 

I went to hear Matt Weiner speak two months ago.  In the Q & A, I was going to ask, “Do you deliberately put a couple of linguistic anachronisms in each episode just to drive old guys like me up the wall?”  But I didn’t.  It was right after the episode where Joan has a dinner reservation for Le Cirque six years before it existed, so Weiner already had enough troubles with time travel.  (Or as we say these days, he already “had enough on his plate.”  Funny, but one of the “Mad Men” characters used that same phrase back in the 1960s.**)

It turns out that Weiner does have a staff who check for historical authenticity.  It’s headed by Kathryn Allison Mann.  According to the LA Times,

Mann reviews each and every completed script to ensure that all language is period-appropriate. Any suspect words or phrases are checked against the Oxford English Dictionary, slang reference books and printed material from the era.

I wonder if anyone on Ms. Mann’s staff is old enough to have been an adult in the 1960s. 
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* The characters are, of course, oblivious to the sexism and other attitudes that they take for granted but that practically leap off the screen to 21st century viewers.  See this earlier post.

** My first post about the language of “Mad Men” is here .

Bandleaders

June 24, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

America is the global leader in broadband, with high speeds and great service. And it’s all because the government restrained “onerous” regulation and let companies like Verizon do what they want and charge what they want.  So says an op-ed in Friday’s Times.

It was written by the CEO of Verizon, Lowell McAdam.

I pay Mr. McAdam’s company about $115 each month for my land line, wi-fi, and cable (all FIOS).  Mr. McAdam compares the US favorably with Europe, “where innovation and investment in advanced networks have stagnated under an onerous regulatory regime.”  I asked a friend who lives in Paris what he pays for his FIOS phone, wi-fi, and cable.  The monthly bill:  39.90€ ($52) or half of what I pay Verizon.  Maybe there’s an upside to stagnant and onerous. 

There’s nothing wrong with getting what you can afford, and it occurred to me that US broadband is the best because we can afford more.  Onerous regulations or no, most other countries are not as rich as the US.  What if you looked at broadband and per capita GDP? 

The OECD did just that with data from June 2012, and here’s what they found.  (Their several spreadsheets on this are here.

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

As of a year ago, France had greater broadband penetration despite a lower per capita GDP ($35,133 vs. $46,588)  – 25% more broadband on 33% less income, and at half the cost to consumers.  If you re-rank the OECD countries factoring in per capita GDP, the line-up changes.  Wealthy countries – notably the US and Luxembourg, drop well below the OECD average.

Of course, not all broadbands are equally broad.  Verizon sold me on fibre optical with their assurance that it was dazzlingly faster than their DSL that I had been clunking along on.* This graph breaks down broadband into its various incarnations.

The US is slightly above average on all broadband, but when it comes to a high fibre-optical diet (the dark blue part of the bars), we are ahead of several other countries that have greater total penetration.  On the other hand, the Scandinavian countries are ahead of us, as are, impressively, the Asian countries. 

This is not to deny US advances.  TechCrunch summarizes more recent data from Akamai on these changes:  

the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services.   

Still, the US lags behind other, less wealthy countries.  InnovationFiles, using Akamai data for different variables, has a less congratulatory view.

• The U. S. has picked up one place in the “Average Peak Connection Speed” that’s the best measurement of network capacity, rising from 14th to 13th as the measured peak connection speed increased from 29.6 Mbps to 31.5 Mbps.
• In terms of the “Average Connection Speed,” widely cited by analysts who don’t know what it means, the U. S. remains in 8th place world-wide. but we’re no longer tied for it as we were in the previous quarter; Sweden is right behind us on this one.
• In terms of “High Speed Broadband Adoption”, the proportion of IP addresses with an Average Connection Speed greater than 10 Mbps, we remain in 7th place, but now we’re tied with  Sweden.    [emphasis added]

The title of CEO McAdam’s op-ed is “How the US Got Broadband Right.”  Given the content, I  guess “We’re Number 13” wouldn’t have been appropriate.  Even “We’re Number Seven (Tied With Socialist Sweden)” doesn’t quite have that affirmative zing.

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* The most noticeable improvement was that our land line phone.  Previously it had been all but unusable because of static that Verizon could not figure out how to fix. Now it works.  

Pop Goes the Linguist

June 22, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Pittsburgh of my youth, soft drinks were “pop” or sometimes “soda pop.”  In college, I found myself among New Yorkers, who ordered a “soda” and made fun of the native Bostonians who called it “tonic” (pronounced “tawnic”)

A few weeks ago, this linguistic map* was making the rounds of the Internet.  It confirms my own impression (though it omits the tonic). 

Today I went to the Yankees-Rays** game, where I saw this.

“Pop” in the Bronx?  I am at a loss to even guess how this word choice might have happened. The mad men with the Pepsi account are probably New Yorkers.  The audience, even if this was today’s national TV game, would be heavily from New York and Florida, both in soda territory. Frankly, I'm puzzled.

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* The map is from a set created by Joshua Katz   from survey data gathered Bert Vaux. You can see all 22 maps here.

** The team was originally the Devil Rays.  I can find no confirmation for the idea that the cause of this casting out of devils was pressure from religious conservatives.  The owner, Stuart Sternberg, explained the new name “We are now the ‘Rays’ – a beacon that radiates throughout Tampa Bay and across the entire state of Florida.”  To my own ear, a team of Rays suggests not a beacon but instead a line-up might with stars like Bradbury, Kurzweil, Charles, and others.

Murky Research, Monkey Research

June 19, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marc Hauser left his professorship at Harvard after an investigation found that he had committed scientific misconduct. Basically, he made up the data for some of his published articles. 

It wasn’t the irony that got me – Hauser’s research focused on morality.  It was this brief passage in a Nation article* (here) about the scandal:

Marc Hauser has worked at the exciting interface of cognition, evolution and development . . . Hauser has worked primarily with rhesus monkeys,

That took me back to my first disillusioning dip into the murky waters of scientific research, waters I had imagined to be clear and pure.

As a teenager in the early sixties, I worked one summer in a psych lab where the principal investigators were doing experiments on rhesus monkeys. 
                                                                       

“Communication of Affect in ‘Cooperative Conditioning’ of Rhesus Monkeys.”  That was the title of the article that appeared not long after, though it was probably not till years later that I came across it and was appalled.  The abstract begins:

Rhesus monkeys in primate chairs were conditioned to bar press within 6 seconds of presentation of a light in order to avoid electric shock.

First of all, those “primate chairs.”  The chairs were plexiglass contraptions that isolated the monkey’s head from his arms, and his arms from his lower body.  Clearly, the chairs were uncomfortable, to say the least.

For the first stage of the experiment, you put a chaired monkey in front of a TV screen – black and white, maybe 9" diagonal.  His hand can reach a bar. When the green circle comes on the screen, he has six seconds to press the bar or he gets an electric shock. You train two monkeys.  It doesn’t take them too long to learn the drill.

Following acquisition of this avoidance response two animals were placed facing each other and the bar was removed from the chair of one monkey and the stimulus light from the chair of the other. In order for either monkey to avoid shock a communication was necessary since neither animal had access to all elements of the problem.

You put the monkeys in different rooms. One monkey sees the green circle, but he has no bar to press. The other monkey has the bar but his screen no longer shows the circle. Instead, what he can see on the screen is the other monkey.  Monkey #1 has to let Monkey #2 know when the light comes on, and Monkey #2 has to then press the bar. Otherwise they both get zapped. 

The results indicated that through nonverbal communication of affect an efficient mutual avoidance was performed.

As I recall, the article had photos of the monkeys and an analysis of the facial expressions of Monkey #1.  “Nonverbal communication of affect,”  said the journal articles. Bullshit. Or as they say on each episode of (appropriately enough) “Monk,” here’s what happened.

First, you need to know the layout of the lab.  Our domain was the narrow top floors of an otherwise  large building. 

There were a few linoleum floored rooms. One of the two large rooms was for the humans – psychologists and assistants – who hung out, drank coffee, and did the acrostics from a stash of old copies of the Saturday Review.  The other large room housed the monkey cages, about a dozen in all in two tiers – cages too low for the animal to stand up let alone run or swing or do what monkeys do. The other two or three rooms housed the subject monkeys in their primate chairs. It was our own little Gitmo. The age of animal rights lay far in the future.

When it was time to “run” the monkeys, we would check the TV hookup and other equipment, put Monkey #1 in one room, close the door, put Monkey #2 in another room, close the door. Then we humans would go to our room, close the door, and watch the monkeys on our TV monitors. 

When the light came on, Monkey #1, just as it says in the published articles, would change his facial expression. But he would also swing his head violently about. He knew he was about to get zapped with significant amperes. More to the point, he would scream. His shrieks would echo through the hall. We humans could hear him in our room, and no doubt, Monkey #2 could hear him in his room.  Nothing was soundproof. We could even hear the thump thump as Monkey #1 flailed his arms about between the two plexiglass layers of his chair. 

Often, Monkey #2 would press his bar. As the abstract eloquently says “efficient mutual avoidance was performed.” But what was Monkey #2 doing? Was he reading the “nonverbal affect” of facial expressions on a small black-and-white TV monitor and knowingly pressing the bar? Or was he just terrified by the screams, and in his terror flailing his arms about and incidentally hitting the bar? 

I don’t know how many papers the group published.  In any case, it was probably not scientific misconduct. It was not fraud. The authors did not make up the data. They reported the numbers of bar presses and trials, and they showed photographs of the monkey face on the TV monitor. They just didn’t bother to mention the soundtrack.**

One day early in that summer, when I got home, my older brother asked me about the project I was working on.  “Communication in monkeys,” I told him.

“What do they do – say ‘aba dabba dabba?’” 

That may have been closer to the truth than were those articles published in the psychology journals.

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*HT Andrew Gelman, who recently blogged (here) about Chomsky’s defense of Hauser.

** This was not my only disillusioning experience in this lab. See this post from six years ago about my failure with flatworms. But don’t get me wrong – I mean, some of my best friends do psychology experiments on animals.