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Sharefighters ↬

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Years after Metafilter established itself as one of the web’s web's best niche communities, its regulars, at no one’s one's bidding, started calling each other MeFites. (Me fights!) There might have been competing alternatives once, but this name stuck. MeFite became canon.

It’s a pillar of subcultural capital to invest in names, codes, and inside jokes as a means of shoring up identity and contrasting one’s one's chosen peers against the dominant culture. So it has bugged me for a while that we diehards who share and discuss stories directly on RSS readers don’t don't have a name for each other. The standby in the Google Reader days was ‘sharebro’, but where that hot paper bag of noise came from I don’t don't care to find out. Ours is a new era of social RSS. Eclectic, threatened, more diffuse than ever, but wiser for it.

Luckily NewsBlur’s NewsBlur's aslum happened on a solution before anyone else has to. He bases it off a Dinosaur Comics formula for taking the gender out of occupational nouns: as firemen become firefighters, waitresses become waitfighters.

Hence sharefighters. It has a definite certainly has a ring to it. Sharefighters. Dousing the flames of ignorance. Resisting Resising the pull of big social networks. Putting up dukes for independent content creators. Punching above our weight. Roundhousing dudebros out the door.

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msteffen
4097 days ago
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popular
4097 days ago
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acdha
4096 days ago
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This beats the sometimes-apt feeling “sharecroppers”
Washington, DC
theprawn
4097 days ago
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So then we're not going with blurts?
fancycwabs
4097 days ago
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That works.
Nashville, Tennessee
Michdevilish
4097 days ago
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That has a Palahniukian vibe: "Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/chuck_palahniuk.html)
Canada
aslum
4097 days ago
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So good to see this taking off, even if it was a half joke when I made it up!
Blacksburg VA
lelandpaul
4098 days ago
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Sharefighters, ho! (Somehow this seems to give a retroactive new meaning to "nerdfighter", which I'm kinda ok with, too.)
San Francisco, CA
RedSonja
4098 days ago
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I *like* it!
grammargirl
4098 days ago
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Sharefighters! I like it.
Brooklyn, NY
vpatil
4098 days ago
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Sharefighting!

In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity - NYTimes.com

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Comments: "In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity - NYTimes.com " Charity"

URL: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-toyota-donates-efficiency-to-new-york-charity.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&


The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea.

Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.

A Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement,” kaizen is a main ingredient in Toyota’s business model and a key to its success, the company says. It is an effort to optimize flow and quality by constantly searching for ways to streamline and enhance performance. Put more simply, it is about thinking outside the box and making small changes to generate big results.

Toyota’s emphasis on efficiency proved transformative for the Food Bank.

Slide Show | A More Streamlined Charity As part of their own philanthropic efforts, Toyota is helping the Food Bank for New York City to improve its efficiency.

At a soup kitchen in Harlem, Toyota’s engineers cut down the wait time for dinner to 18 minutes from as long as 90. At a food pantry on Staten Island, they reduced the time people spent filling their bags to 6 minutes from 11. And at a warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where volunteers were packing boxes of supplies for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a dose of kaizen cut the time it took to pack one box to 11 seconds from 3 minutes.

Toyota has “revolutionized the way we serve our community,” said Margarette Purvis, the chief executive and president of the Food Bank.

But Toyota’s initial offer to the charity in 2011 was met with apprehension.

“They make cars; I run a kitchen,” said Daryl Foriest, director of distribution at the Food Bank’s pantry and soup kitchen in Harlem. “This won’t work.”

When Toyota insisted it would, Mr. Foriest presented the company with a challenge.

“The line of people waiting to eat is too long,” Mr. Foriest said. “Make the line shorter.”

Toyota’s engineers went to work. The kitchen, which can seat 50 people, typically opened for dinner at 4 p.m., and when all the chairs were filled, a line would form outside. Mr. Foriest would wait for enough space to open up to allow 10 people in. The average wait time could be up to an hour and a half.

Toyota made three changes. They eliminated the 10-at-a-time system, allowing diners to flow in one by one as soon as a chair was free. Next, a waiting area was set up inside where people lined up closer to where they would pick up food trays. Finally, an employee was assigned the sole duty of spotting empty seats so they could be filled quickly. The average wait time dropped to 18 minutes and more people were fed.

The unusual partnership between Toyota and the Food Bank, which one Food Bank coordinator compared to a cultural exchange program, highlights a different way for-profit businesses can help their communities, experts said.

“It’s a form of corporate philanthropy but instead of giving money, they’re sharing expertise,” said David J. Vogel, a professor and an expert in corporate social responsibility at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s quite new.”

And many nonprofit organizations, facing tighter budgets as financing from federal and local governments diminishes, are having to make smarter business decisions.

“Nonprofit organizations are taking on what happens in the for-profit world because they will run better,” said Ronald P. Hill, a professor of marketing and business law at Villanova University.

In the early 1990s, Toyota limited sharing its expertise to its auto parts suppliers. But as the Toyota Production System Support Center, the company’s headquarters of efficiency, came to recognize broader interest in the Toyota model, the company offered consulting-style services to nonautomotive manufacturers and nonprofit organizations. Today, the center supports about 40 organizations, half of which are small to midsize manufacturers that pay a small fee. The rest are nonprofits, like the Food Bank, that get the services free.

“There’s a lot of opportunities in a variety of industries to improve and become more competitive by applying the Toyota production system,” said Jamie Bonini, the support center’s general manager.

The lessons provided by Toyota come at a critical time for the Food Bank as it faces increasing demand in a weak economy.

“From banks to restaurants to airlines, people give money and time and we’re grateful,” Ms. Purvis said. “But, it’s very rare for people to come and say, ‘You know what, this is the model that made our company great and we will share it with a charity with the hope that it will provide for the neediest people in your city.’ ”

At the Project Hospitality food pantry on Staten Island, which is part of the Food Bank network, Toyota engineers tried to expedite the pickup process. They drew a layout identifying spots where there were slowdowns. They reorganized the shelves by food groups and used colored tape to mark the grain, vegetable, fruit and protein sections. The time clients spent in the pantry was reduced nearly by half.

Similarly, the Food Bank called on Toyota engineers to help one of its affiliated charities, Metro World Child, keep up with demand in the Far Rockaways after Hurricane Sandy.

Lisa Richardson, an engineer with a background in manufacturing, watched as volunteers walked around a warehouse in Brooklyn and scrambled to pack boxes of food. So she created an assembly line and volunteers dropped food items into boxes as they moved across a conveyor belt. The average time to pack one box shrank to 11 seconds from 3 minutes.

Still not satisfied, Ms. Richardson changed the size of the boxes.

“There was a lot of empty space in the box and they were shipping that air out in the truck,” Ms. Richardson said. The Food Bank was using standard boxes of 12 by 12 by 12 inches. By changing the size to 16 by 8 by 8, workers can pack each box more tightly and more boxes can go out in each truck

Next up, Ms. Purvis says, is a plan “to kaizen” the Food Bank’s 90,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bronx, where Toyota will try to optimize use of the space and figure out delivery routes, among other tasks.

“I never thought that what we needed were a bunch of engineers,” Ms. Purvis said. “In our world food is king, but we didn’t know that the queen would be kaizen.”

Correction: July 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the university at which the Haas School of Business is located. It is at the University of California, Berkeley, not Berkley. An earlier version also misstated the surname of a Toyota engineer. She is Lisa Richardson, not Anderson.

Correction: July 31, 2013

An article on Saturday about Toyota’s offering its efficiency expertise to the Food Bank for New York City misspelled the given name of the general manager of the Toyota Production System Support Center. He is Jamie Bonini, not Jaime. And because of an editing error, the article misstated the dimensions of a standard box used by the Food Bank. It is 12 by 12 by 12 inches, not 12 square inches.

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msteffen
4129 days ago
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The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95

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The Pixel Painter: A 97 Year Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 pointillism documentary

The Pixel Painter: A 97 Year Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 pointillism documentary

The Pixel Painter: A 97 Year Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 pointillism documentary

The Pixel Painter: A 97 Year Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 pointillism documentary

The Pixel Painter: A 97 Year Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 pointillism documentary

Meet Hal Lasko, mostly known as Grandpa, a 97-year-old man who uses Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 ’95 to create artwork that has been described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art.” Lasko, who is legally blind, served in WWII drafting directional and weather maps for bombing raids and later worked as a typographer (back when everything is done by hand) for clients such as General Tire, Goodyear and The Cleveland Browns before retiring in the 1970s. Decades after his retirement his family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and he never looked back. Approaching a century in age, Lasko is now having his work shown show for the first time in an art exhibition and also has prints for sale online.

Watch this touching documentary short directed by Josh Bogdan which tells how Lasko discovered an entire new artistic career well into his 80s. If you liked this, also learn about 73-year-old Tatsuo Horiuchi who paints exclusively using the shape tool in Microsoft Excel. (via Colossal Submissions)

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msteffen
4135 days ago
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sarcozona
4135 days ago
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Keep doing what you love
Epiphyte City

Michael Hayden on the Effects of Snowden's Whistleblowing

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Former NSA director Michael Hayden lists three effects of the Snowden documents:

  1. "...the undeniable operational effect of informing adversaries of American intelligence's tactics, techniques and procedures."

  2. "...the undeniable economic punishment that will be inflicted on American businesses for simply complying with American law."

  3. "...the erosion of confidence in the ability of the United States to do anything discreetly or keep anything secret."

It's an interesting list, and one that you'd expect from a NSA person. Actually, the whole essay is about what you'd expect from a former NSA person.

My reactions:

  1. This, I agree, is actual damage. From what I can tell, Snowden has done his best to minimize it. And both the Guardian and the Washington Post refused to publish materials he provided, out of concern for US national security. Hayden believes that both the Chinese and the Russians Russian have Snowden's entire trove of documents, but I'm less convinced. Everyone is acting under the assumption that the NSA has compromised everything, which is probably a good assumption.

  2. Hayden has it backwards -- this is good. I hope that companies that have cooperated with the NSA are penalized in the market. If we are to expect the market to solve any of this, we need to cost of cooperating to be greater than the cost of fighting. If we as consumers punish companies that have complied with the NSA, they'll be less likely to roll over next time.

  3. In the long run, this might turn out to be a good thing, too. In the Internet age, secrecy is a lot harder to maintain. The countries that figure this out first will be the countries that do well in the coming decades.

And, of course, Hayden lists his "costs" without discussing the benefits. Exposing secret government overreach, a secret agency gone rogue, and a secret court that's failing in its duties are enormously beneficial. Snowden has blown a whistle that long needed blowing -- it's the only way can ever hope to fix this. And Hayden completely ignores the very real question as to whether these enormous NSA data-collection programs provide any real benefits.

I'm also tired of this argument:

But it takes a special kind of arrogance for this young man to believe that his moral judgment on the dilemma suddenly trumps that of two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers.

It's like President Obama claiming that the NSA programs are "transparent" because they were cleared by a secret court that only ever sees one side of the argument, or that Congress has provided oversight because a few legislators were allowed to know some of what was going on but forbidden from talking to anyone about it.

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msteffen
4136 days ago
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popular
4136 days ago
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bogorad
4134 days ago
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yep
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
gmuslera
4136 days ago
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If a company tells you that respect your privacy and then don't, lies, forced by the government or not. Must be punished. Regarding the morality of warning others that are being actively attacked in times of peace, i'd say that the attacker have no morality and can't complain about others
montevideo, uy
smadin
4136 days ago
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"If we are to expect the market to solve any of this" uh OK Bruce let me just stop you there
Boston
Romanikque
4136 days ago
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Mr. Hayden, if you can't do you your job without violating the Constitution as a matter of basic, standard, everyday operational procedure, then you you purely suck at your job.

I see myself screaming this as the black bag goes over my head....

Ok a little dramatic, but whatever
Baltimore, MD
christophersw
4136 days ago
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"I hope that companies that have cooperated with the NSA are penalized in the market." - Me Too!
Baltimore, MD
ProbablyWrong
4137 days ago
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The government is of the people, by the people, for the people. The government does not exist to preserve itself, its agencies, or its employees. Snowden has the clarity of mind to understand that harming the government may be necessary to save the republic.
chrishiestand
4137 days ago
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//
San Diego, CA, USA
redson
4137 days ago
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Schneier on Former NSA Director on Snowden.

Visualizing the Bechdel test

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to my sister, to my brother and to my friend Ber

Introduction

Bechdel test was enunciated by Alison Bechdel on the comic Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985. For a movie to pass the test, it must meet the following prerequisites:
  1. It has to have at least two women in it,
  2. who talk to each other,
  3. about something besides a man.
The most widely used form of the test today added the necessity of the two female characters to have names. The test has the characteristic of being simple, so easy to apply, and not requiring much for a movie to succeed. However, one of it's limitations is that the application of the test on a single movie is debatable, since there can be many artistic choices that end up making the movie not pass the test (for example, Run Lola Run doesn't  have two female characters who talk to each other). Thus, its application is more interesting when applied to a set of films, since it may reveal patterns of how women are represented consistently in this particular set. The graphs present here subdivide the films into groups according to variables available on various sites, to try to find how each category affects the way females characters are represented.
I have little academic knowledge in film or in sociology, so I'll try to avoid comments that are not about the graphics.
The Bechdel rates are from bechdeltest.com. I removed movies where more than 50% of users who commented on it disagreed about the classification. The site classifies films according to each prerequisites of the test. Here, I grouped the films based only on whether they pass the test or not. I did it for clarity.


Click on the charts to enlarge them.

The charts

Years

Despite the fact that <a href="http://bechdeltest.com" rel="nofollow">bechdeltest.com</a> provide data about the movies' year, I used data from imdb.com, as I rely more on them in this regard.
The graph below shows  the proportion of film that succeed on the Bechdel test across  the years. 


The visualization of variations seems compromised, due to the fact that there are  some years with very few films analyzed,  as can be seen in the plot of movie analyzed on <a href="http://bechdeltest.com" rel="nofollow">bechdeltest.com</a> by year:
 To try to circumvent this problem, I used the lowess function in R,that applies a locally-weighted polynomial regression. This regression has its smoothness related to the parameter f, which, according to the maintainer's description, is:
The smoother span. This gives the proportion of points in the plot which influence the smooth at each value. Larger values ​​give more smoothness.
Below is a gif that shows how the change on the parameter f  from 0 to 1 influences the graph.

I wanted to show how the parameter affects the graph, making clear the bias that the method may be having in this case.  Bellow is the chart with f = 2/3, the default value for the function. 
The actual measures on each year here don't represent the data as in the first graphic, what is important now is the trend. So, it seems  that there was, at the beginning of the last century, a rapid insertion of female characters, this increase stabilized in the 1930s. Another  tendency in this direction seems to have happened between the 1960s-80s. 

Movie Genre 

The genres of each movie were  obtained from <a href="http://imdb.com" rel="nofollow">imdb.com</a>, where each movie can have multiples genres.  Only genres present in more than 50 films are shown.

There are several discussions on whether or not documentaries should be evaluated according to the parameter of the Bechdel test. I am of the opinion that they should not, but I didn't put too much thought into it, and, as I've said before, I m not a expert on the subject. So, I decided to leave them here.

Directors and writers

These chart represented writers and directors with more than five films evaluated. As these professionals often end up specializing in certain genres, these were added in the graph for comparison. There were too many directors and writers, and this would make the chart too long and boring, so I selected those that I consider to be the most famous to display in these charts. Also, I didn't repeat the ones in the directors chart in the  writers chart. Some famous directors,  like Akira Kurosawa, James Cameron and M. Night Shyamalan did not have five movies analysed as directors, but did as writers. The directors and writers were  obtained from <a href="http://imdb.com" rel="nofollow">imdb.com</a>. When a movie is based on a book, IMDB  gives credit to the book's author, that's why many of them appear in the writers graph.  

Directors

Writers

Directors, writers and producers by gender

These charts are divided by the gender of professionals working in different stages of film production. How the gender was assigned is described at the end of the post.

Countries

Proportion of Bechdel test classes  according to the country of origin of the film. This information was  obtained from <a href="http://imdb.com" rel="nofollow">imdb.com</a>. Only countries with more than 15 movies where included.
The first time I heard of the Bechdel test was while talking  the Academy Award for Best Picture. So I wanted to compare this award against others. I chose the ones that I believe are the most important. I have included the movies nominated for the best picture in each award (Palme d'Or at Cannes, Golden Bear in Berlin, Golden Lion at Venice and the Academy Award for Best Picture). The information on the awards come from <a href="http://imdb.com" rel="nofollow">imdb.com</a>.

What we talk about when we talk about Bechdel test

During the process of production of these charts, I have wondered if the Bechdel test was actually measuring what it intended. That is, if it really captured groups of movies where women were underrepresented, and, when they appeared, had their role around men. 
To try to answer this question, I researched, in the movie scripts present in imsdb.com

 and in 

script-o-rama.com

,

the number of words spoken by men and women and the proportion of times that men refer to women and vice versa (how often does a genre talk about the other). I colored the points in the graphs according to the Bechdel test, and thus expected films where women talk as much or more than men and/or movies where men refer more to women than women to men would, mostly, pass the test. I removed the outliers from the chart to make the range easier to visualize. As this chart can be tricky to understand, I did this scheme below to demonstrate what each square represents. 

Below the result, I added a violin plot on each axis to help to visualize the distribution of the variables.


Before talk about the colors, I want to address the vertical dispersion of the graph. I was surprised to see that women talk so much less than men in movies. I thought this might show a bias in the movies chosen to be analyzed in <a href="http://bechdeltest.com" rel="nofollow">bechdeltest.com</a>. To see if this was the case, I did the same graph for all scripts present in <a href="http://imsdb.com" rel="nofollow">imsdb.com</a> and in <a href="http://script-o-rama.com" rel="nofollow">script-o-rama.com</a>, irregardless if the movie was analyzed in <a href="http://bechdeltest.com" rel="nofollow">bechdeltest.com</a>. And the result was:
So, it does not appear that <a href="http://bechdeltest.com" rel="nofollow">bechdeltest.com</a> has some bias on this variable.
Now, about the distribution of the Bechdel test in the chart, at first, it seemed to me that the test was capturing what it proposes, since the blue dots are seemingly more likely than others to be on the center or down and to the left. Thus, movies where women are represented or referenced at least as much as men are passing the test.  However, there is a positive correlation between the two variables:
I speculated that this must be due to the fact that secondary characters generally refer to the main characters. Thus, women have fewer lines, which shows that they are mostly secondary characters, that makes them refer more to men, that are usually the main character. If this reasoning is true, the chart is showing that the Bechdel test, when discriminating to one variable, also discriminates for the other. But, maybe referring to the main character is not something that just secondary female characters do, but also secondary male characters. So I tried to develop a way to see if the test was also able to display films in which women are more focused on men than other male characters.  
 To try to address this issue, I made another chart, where I compare if female characters  refer more to men than male character to men.  
Here is the scheme of what this graph is representing:



And here the chart. 

Here, the right hand side of the chart is where women are talking more about men than men about men. In other words, the females characters more frequently makes refering to males than male characters. My hope is that this is a good way to judge whether women are represented by characters more focused on a man than would be expected.  Looking at the violin plots at the top, it seems  that the Bechdel test didn't 

discriminate this feature in the movies. So, it seems that the test is a good way to measure if female characters are having the same voice as the male character, but not so much to measure what this voice is saying.

To finish, here is the same chart as above, but for all scripts.


Bechdel test aside, it seems clear from these graphs' Y axis that women are alarmingly less represented than men in movies. 

Where does the data come from?

Classification of films according to the Bechdel test

The classification of the films was obtained in bechdeltes.com site. In it, anyone can enter information about a movie and classify it accordingly. Usually, those who put the data also insert a comment saying why. Every movie has a discussion on the classification. When posting a comment on this conversation, the user can click that she/he has disagreed with the classification or can simply comment. Seeing some of these pages, I realized that most users that do not click on the disagreed box, agreed with the classification. Thus I made a filter where I only accepted films where more than 50% of users who commented do not disagree with the classification. Note that 50% do not refer to the amount of comments, but 50% of users who commented (one user can comment more than once). Some films had more than one entry. In such cases, if the classification of these were different I removed the film, if both inputs have the same classification I considered the sum of the comments to apply the filter mentioned above.

Year, country, gender, directors, writers, producers and awards of films

Information of the production of the films were obtained from imdb.com. Here is a discussion of APIs available to obtain this type of information. Some APIs have the problem that, when there are more than three directors or screenwriters for a film, they do not return at all. In these cases, it was necessary to search the IMDB site manually. I have found no API that provides information on movie awards, so, for this information, it was also necessary to manually search the site.

Gender of directors, screenwriters and producers

The gender of the people involved in the films were assessed in different ways. 

  1. First, I check whether the page of the person on IMDB contained if she/he was an actress or actor, which would deliver the genre, since the word is gender specific.
  2. If there were no such information,  the number of gender-specific pronouns (she/he, her/he, herself/himself) present in the trivia and biography of the person was counted. The gender with the most pronouns was linked to the person.
  3. If there was a draw in the count or the person did not have these fields on her/his page, the first name was matched against the table of first name and gender present in genderchecker.com. I found this list conservative, ie. when a first name has a reasonable proportion of both genders it returns "unknown". That is, it avoids false positives.

If it was impossible to get the gender by theses methods the gender was assigned "unknown" and has not been used in graphics which involve that variable.

Information on the scripts for the films

To be able to assess what the Bechdel test was capturing, I made ​​some graphs with data of the screenplays of films. The screenplays were available from the websites imsdb.com and script-o-rama.com. I developed a R script to read these screenplays and to couple each line to a character. These character names were matched with the names of the characters on the page of the movie on IMDB. From the method stated above, it was possible to return the gender of actors and actresses who play each character. Thus, it was possible to couple each line to a gender. The R script is not perfect, mainly because some scripts presented in these sites are not well formatted. So, I applied some quality filters: The screenplays accepted were the ones that my R script could capture:
  1. At least 500 lines linked to characters.
  2. At least five characters.
  3. At least 50 lines linked to each gender.

Theses quality controls aim to avoid screenplays that the R scripts did not get right in ways that could compromise the charts. The necessity for minimal number of lines is to be sure that the R script got a good part of the screenplay.  The filter on characters number is to avoid screenplay where  very few characters have been identified, what would make the ones that were identified over represented. And the minimal number of lines linked to each gender is to avoid cases where to R script identified only marginal characters of a gender. 

The R scripts used

All graphics and the data extraction were performed using R. I uploaded the working directory here.  The codes  are not fully annotated and the directories  still a little messy. At the moment, I do not have the time, but as soon as possible, I will try to organize them. In this directory, there is also some scripts to deal with the financial information from the-numbers.com and score information from rottentomatoes.com that I didn't show here, because I didn't find it very interesting. 

Table

I made a table with the movie informations here. This table is after removal of the movies where more than 50% of users who commented  disagreed with the <a href="http://bechdeltest.com" rel="nofollow">bechdeltest.com</a> classification.

Final consideration

This is my first attempt at doing graphics on a subject that has no relation to my work (and in a foreign language to me), so any criticism (about the design, data or grammar) is very welcome.

Edit 07/05/2013 : I corrected the title of the X axis of bar charts. They were named as "percetage".

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msteffen
4149 days ago
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popular
4150 days ago
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veracity
4145 days ago
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The sad state of women in movies; the Beshdel Test does not lie.
Sydney, Australia
Michdevilish
4150 days ago
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Interesting!
Canada
davidedwards
4150 days ago
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Ahh Bechdel, the only test that Showgirls could pass.
Fort Collins, Colorado
RedSonja
4150 days ago
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For those of us who are visual learners...
smadin
4150 days ago
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whoa. fascinating, and pretty exhaustive.
Boston
Courtney
4150 days ago
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Data visualizations for the Bechdel Test, so so so good.
Portland, OR
digdoug
4150 days ago
I know I'm part of the problem, but the first thing I thought when I saw the "Violin plot" was how unfortunate it was for a discussion of women in movies.
WorldMaker
4149 days ago
But "The Violin Plot" sounds like an awesome all-woman ensemble heist film, like if Felicia Day was to make a film in the vein of Ocean's Eleven...
jepler
4151 days ago
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visualizations ahoy
Earth, Sol system, Western spiral arm
jlvanderzwan
4157 days ago
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This is amazing

The Oberlin–Wellington Rescue

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On Sept. 13, 1858, ex-slave John Price was accosted on the streets of Oberlin, Ohio, by a U.S. marshal, who took him to nearby Wellington, hoping to return him to Kentucky as a fugitive. Ohio was a free state, but the federal government had committed to helping slaveholders retrieve their runaway slaves.

When word of Price’s abduction spread, a large crowd of Oberlin townspeople surrounded the marshal’s hotel and demanded his release, eventually breaking in to return him to Oberlin. Thirty-seven of the rescuers were indicted, including black abolitionist Charles Langston, who made this impassioned speech at his trial:

But I stand up here to say, that if for doing what I did on that day at Wellington, I am to go to jail six months, and pay a fine of a thousand dollars, according to the Fugitive Slave Law, and such is the protection the laws of this country afford me, I must take upon my self the responsibility of self-protection; and when I come to be claimed by some perjured wretch as his slave, I shall never be taken into slavery. And as in that trying hour I would have others do to me, as I would call upon my friends to help me; as I would call upon you, your Honor, to help me; as I would call upon you [to the district attorney], to help me; and upon you [to Judge George Bliss], and upon you [to his counsel], so help me GOD! I stand here to say that I will do all I can, for any man thus seized and help, though the inevitable penalty of six months’ imprisonment and one thousand dollars’ fine for each offense hangs over me! We have a common humanity. You would do so; your manhood would require it; and no matter what the laws might be, you would honor yourself for doing it; your friends would honor you for doing it; your children to all generations would honor you for doing it; and every good and honest man would say, you had done right!

This was met with “great and prolonged applause, in spite of the efforts of the Court and the Marshal.” Langston was convicted but given a reduced sentence of 20 days. His eloquence was hereditary, apparently — his grandson was Langston Hughes.

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msteffen
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