Feel-Good Movies

Welcome back. I hope you feel like watching a movie.

Although I’m not a movie buff, I felt bad that, in 10 years of blogging, my only mention of movies was horror films (Pandemic Prep Horror Flicks). Then I came upon a study of feel-good films by two researchers affiliated with Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. At last, I had the opportunity to blog about movies that more viewers than my daughter, Rachel, might enjoy.

Watching a feel-good movie with popcorn (photo from www.groovypost.com/unplugged/chromecast-vs-roku/).

Characterizing Feel-Good Movies
The researchers note that, while feel-good films are widely dismissed as being sentimental and intellectually undemanding, audiences seek them out precisely because of their feel-good qualities. Viewers want to relax, to have their spirits lifted. These films don’t appear to be a genre in their own right, yet they’re more than just a vague category.

Surveying some 450 participants from Germany, Austria and the German-speaking regions of Belgium and Switzerland, the researchers gained insight into characteristics these films must have.

In addition to an element of humor and a happy ending, feel-good films can be identified by certain recurring plot patterns and characters. They often involve outsiders in search of love, who have to prove themselves against adverse circumstances, and who eventually find their role in the community. Romantic comedies (rom-coms), such as Love Actually, Pretty Woman, Amélie and The Intouchables, have a high potential for emotional uplift. 

Pretty Woman (1990) movie poster (from www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/).

Beyond romance and humor, feel-good films have moments of drama. The emotional trajectories involve serious conflicts and are profoundly moving, even if the plots are often developed within a fairy-tale setting.

The ideal feel-good film mixes all of these elements. Nevertheless, as you might surmise from the prevalence of rom-com feel-good films, viewer preferences vary greatly, especially by gender and age.

Best Feel-Good Movies
To examine the subject further, I did a quick search and found multiple lists of “the best” feel-good movies.

One, for example, from staff of Collider, an entertainment website, has 25 movies, five of which are animated (e.g., Frozen) and three of which came out at least 69 years ago (e.g., The Wizard of Oz). Consistent with the research study findings, the Collider raters advise that their selections aren’t just blithely cheerful, brain-dead pictures. They’re all terrific movies that carry an uplifting message that is earned, thoughtful, and will definitely leave you smiling as the credits roll.

Five months ago, Empire Online, the digital version of the world’s biggest movie magazine, offered 30 Feelgood Movies to Make You Smile. Only 4 of the 30 also appeared on Collider’s list of 25 (Amélie, Singing in the Rain, Sing Street, and The Princess Bride).

The editors of the online version of Glamour recently announced their 41 Best Feel-Good Movies to Keep Your Spirits Up. There were no animated movies and none older than 1964. Five on the Glamour list were also on Collider’s list (Bring It On, Clueless, Elf, Love Actually, and Ocean’s 11), and five others were also on the Empire Online list (Crazy Rich Asians, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Little Miss Sunshine, Love, Simon, and Pitch Perfect).

Wrap Up
I could sample more lists for comparison, but you get the idea. That the lists overlap so little is likely due to a handful of reasons. Mostly, I’d go with the researchers’ comment that viewer preferences for feel-good films vary greatly, especially by gender and age.

By the way, Pretty Woman, which is frequently on television, was not on any list I saw, but School of Rock, When Harry Met Sally, and one of my favorites, Babe, were. Thanks for stopping by.

 Babe (1995) movie poster (from www.imdb.com/title/tt0112431/).

 

P.S.
Study of feel-good films in Projections journal: www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/projections/15/1/proj150104.xml
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/m-laa043021.php
Example lists of best feel-good movies:
collider.com/best-feel-good-movies/
www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-feelgood-movies/
www.glamour.com/gallery/best-feel-good-movies
www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/g33500002/best-feel-good-movies/
www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/tv-movies/g25726999/best-happy-feel-good-movies/ [2019]
parade.com/972242/alexandra-hurtado/feel-good-movies-to-stream/

Household Chores Help Brain

Welcome back. Nine years ago, in a blog post Vacuuming with Cats, I wrote:

[M]y wife takes the lead on fix-it chores in our household. If, instead of cheering “Go, Girl!” you bemoan the lot of the harried wife who, even in this modern age, must still do it all, please search for my older blog posts on laundry and food shopping. You’ll learn that I handle those chores. In fact, in my very first post, I mentioned that I also do the cleaning…This accounting isn’t to seek acclaim or refocus the target of your bemoaning; it’s only so I may get to vacuuming.

Warren’s cleaning tools…well, most of them.

Forgive my reminiscing. I just wanted to explain why there’s a very good chance I have increased the volume of my brain. Oh, sorry again. I should have mentioned a study by researchers affiliated with Canada’s Rotman Research Institute, the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and the University of Toronto. They found that time spent engaging in household physical activity was positively associated with brain volume in older adults.

May I tell you how they came to that conclusion?

Looking at Physical Activity and Brain Health
It’s well documented that physical activity, especially recreational, is positively associated with brain volume and cognition in older adults. What is less understood is the contribution of other daily activities. The researchers set out to identify associations among household physical activity, brain volume and cognition in older adults that were cognitively unimpaired and free from significant medical, neurological or psychiatric conditions.

Screening of potential study participants included telephoned demographic, medical and cognitive questions in addition to three hospital visits for a health evaluation, cognitive assessment and structural brain imaging (acquired with a Siemens Trio 3T MRI Scanner).

Sixty-six participants were selected (ages 65 to 83; 62% female) and further assessed using Phone-FITT, a telephone questionnaire for collecting information from older adults on the frequency, duration and intensity (based on breathing) of all physical activities performed over the past month. (The questionnaire's developers note that intensity measures tend to decrease response reliability and might be omitted, which the researchers did.)

Phone-FITT accounts for season, allows reporting of activities not specifically listed and categorizes household apart from recreational physical activities. Household physical activity includes light housework (tidying, dusting), meal preparation and clean up, shopping, heavy housework, home maintenance (yard work, home repairs) and care giving.

Analyzing the Data
The researchers extracted estimates of the volumes of intracranial, whole brain, gray matter, white matter, hippocampal and frontal lobe from the structural images of each participant’s head. To account for head size variability, brain volumetric measures were adjusted for intracranial volume.

Brain cross-section, showing gray matter and white matter
(difference.guru/difference-between-white-and-gray-matter/).

Cognitive performance was assessed in four domains: memory, working memory/attention, processing speed and executive function.

Associations among physical activity (household and recreational), brain volume and cognition were investigated with statistical modeling, adjusting for age, gender, Framingham Risk score (estimates 10-year cardiovascular risk) and either intracranial volume or education. Additional analyses examined significant results and associations with hippocampal and frontal lobe volume.

Wrap Up
The study found household, but not recreational, physical activity was positively associated with brain volume measurements, especially gray matter volume. In contrast, no significant associations were observed between household or recreational physical activity and cognition.

Key differences between brain gray matter and white matter (www.developinghumanbrain.org/ graphic modified from www.pinterest.de/pin/457959855860455384/).

The researchers posited that the lack of association between recreational physical activity and brain health indicators could be attributed to the removal of Phone-FITT intensity from the analysis, which might also explain the lack of association with white matter volume.

Above all, the study highlighted the brain benefits associated with household chores and may motivate older adults to be more active by providing a more sustainable, low risk form of physical activity.

Please don’t inquire if I can assist with cleaning. I already have enough to benefit my brain. Many thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of household physical activity and brain volume in BMC Geriatrics journal: bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-021-02054-8
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/bcfg-sto041521.php
Phone-FITT reference: journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/japa/16/3/article-p292.xml
Brain size and volume background: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence

Reading Folded Documents

Using an X-ray microtomography scanner and computational algorithms, an international team of researchers read unopened, securely and intricately folded 17th-century letters without unsealing or damaging them in any way.

Computer-generated unfolding sequence of 300-year-old sealed letter (from Unlocking History Research Group, www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/qmuo-sos030121.php).

Welcome back. Before I warm up, I must credit researchers affiliated with MIT, Adobe Research, King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London and The Netherlands’ Utrecht, Leiden and Radboud universities for the fascinating study I’m about to review.

Their research was a twofer for me; maybe for you, too. Though generally familiar with tomography from both geologic seismic surveys and X-ray CT or CAT scans (computer tomography aka computerized axial tomography), I was new to X-ray microtomography. Likewise, I’d come across articles on reconstructing documents but had never heard of letterlocked messages, much less applying X-ray microtomography to reveal their contents. Suppose I jump right in.

X-Ray Microtomography (XMT)
Tomography is a method of producing three-dimensional images of the internal structure of solid objects (e.g., the human body or earth) by recording how that internal structure affects energy waves passing through the object. With CAT scans, the energy waves are imposed X-rays; with geology, the seismic waves may be generated by earthquakes or explosions. 

Schematic of X-ray microtomography (from www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1044580310002706).

X-ray microtomography, in use since the early 1980s, is tomography that produces high-resolution images with micrometer-size pixels. Among a wide range of applications (e.g., archaeology, fossils, electronics) is biomedical, including dentistry, where XMT can produce high-quality images from the outer to innermost structure of teeth and surrounding structures. The XMT scanner used to read letterlocked messages for this study was developed for dental research.

Letterlocking
The Letterlocking Dictionary and Wikipedia help me define letterlocking as folding and securing a written message, whether on paper or another material, to serve as its own envelope or sending device.

Dating to the 13th century in Western history, letterlocking fastens a letter with slits, tabs or holes, various folding techniques and the possible addition of sealing wax or string. It’s all to prevent the “letterpacket” from being read without breaking the securing features or leaving other signs of tampering. Although letterlocking might involve intricate folding with artistic elements that suggest a sender of elite status, the procedure was used by all social classes before the proliferation of mass-produced envelopes.

Letterlocking categories based on manipulations and assigned security score; filled category numbers indicate historic originals exist; unfilled numbers indicate hypothetical categories; letterlocking formats show up to 12 edges with indicative examples (www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21326-w).

The study examined four letters from the Brienne Collection, a postmaster’s trunk of undelivered letters sent from all over Europe to The Hague, the Netherlands, between 1689 and 1706. The trunk contains 3,148 items, including 1,706 opened or partially opened letterpackets and 577 unopened letterpackets, which may themselves contain additional items. One of the four tested letterpackets was opened.

One of four tested letterpackets (DB-1627) from Brienne Collection: (a) outside front and back, (b) transparent view through volumetric XMT data, (c) crease pattern visible if fully opened, (d) proposed step-by-step letterlocking process to make packet from a flat piece of paper based on virtual unfolding results, (e) letterlocking category and format (www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21326-w).

Virtually Unfolding Letterlocked Messages
The computational algorithms used to unfold the four XMT-scanned letterpackets built upon earlier work that extracted text from historical documents--primarily scrolls, books and once or twice folded artifacts, particularly highly damaged documents that could not be physically opened and read.

Given that the letterpackets were largely undamaged homogenous paper material, the focus was to automate and extend computational flattening frameworks to address more intricately folded documents than had previously been considered. The general steps were as follows:

- XMT scanning produces a volumetric dataset representing material density in 3D space.
- Segmentation identifies and separates layers of writing substrate.
- Flattening computes a distortion-minimizing, 2D embedding of the segmentation result, corresponding to the document’s unfolded state.
- Hybrid mesh propagation repairs discontinuities on the folded and flattened embeddings and automatically merges flattened connected components into a common reference frame.
- Texturing produces a 2D image of the virtually unfolded letter by mapping voxels (essentially 3D pixels) from the volumetric scan to their corresponding flattened destination.

Wrap Up
Virtual unfolding produced nearly complete reconstructions of all four letterpackets. Each had a distinct folding sequence, including inner folds angled diagonally to their outer silhouette. For two with a separate paper lock, unfolding reconstructed the primary writing substrate and the paper lock as two pieces.

The results demonstrated the applicability of the approach for letterlocked messages and likely for many other types of historical texts (letters, scrolls and books).

So, was it a twofer for you? At least a one? Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of virtual unfolding of sealed documents in Nature Communications journal: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21326-w
Letterpackets from study: brienne.org/unfolding
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/qmuo-sos030121.php
X-ray microtomography background: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_microtomography
Letterlocking:
letterlocking.org/dictionary
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterlocking
letterlocking.org/imaging-locked-letter-collections
www.youtube.com/channel/UCNPZ-f_IWDLz2S1hO027hRQ
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-people-do-before-envelopes-letterlocking

If you're interested in letterlocking, here are two rather involved (very cool) techniques:

Letterlocking with a spiral lock (photo from 5:29 minute video www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZRA8KZrNTQ).

Letterlocking with dagger-trap pleated letter (photo from 12:11 minute video www.youtube.com/watch?v=16GAIaYN_Gk).

Voting Access

Welcome back. The initial results of the 2020 Census were released last month, and the race has begun. Population counts from the census are used to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives among states and, thus, also determine the number of each state's electoral votes (one per senator and one per House seat) for the next 10 years.

2020 Census results (from news.yahoo.com/census-results-big-disappointment-hispanic-005034556.html).

By the end of September, the Census Bureau will provide the breakdown of population by local areas. Each state will then redraw (redistrict) their congressional districts to ensure they are of equal population and adjust other legislative boundaries.

Although some states with more than one district have shifted redistricting from the state legislatures to special commissions or made other changes, most have not (33 at last count). Instead, these states use or have the potential to use redistricting for partisan gerrymandering (manipulate district boundaries to favor their party). Gerrymandering can exert a huge influence on election results and everything that goes with that.

Wait, this isn’t a blog post about gerrymandering; in most cases, we’ve got 10 years to fix that. There’s an immediate, more pressing problem. Partisan politicians won’t need gerrymandering if they can stop people from voting.

Suppressing the Vote
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 required certain states and local governments that had a history of voting discrimination to obtain federal approval before implementing any change to their voting laws or practices. That protection went by the wayside in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Shelby County v. Holder, that one section of the Voting Rights Act was no longer constitutional.

President Lydon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., other civil right activists and politicians standing behind him (from dp.la/primary-source-sets/voting-rights-act-of-1965/sources/1389).

Did it matter? Oh, did it ever. Within five years after the ruling, there were cuts to early voting, purges of voter rolls, imposition of strict voter ID laws and closure of nearly 1,000 polling places, many in predominantly African-American counties. Virtually all voting restrictions were by Republicans.

But apparently that wasn’t enough. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud convinced millions of his supporters that the results were rigged, undermined voter trust and gave Republican state legislators a new, albeit bogus, justification to restrict voting access--election integrity. As of late March, they had introduced 361 bills in 47 states.

An April Pew Research Center survey of 5,109 U.S. adults confirmed that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents bought into what Trump has been pitching and now back what their legislators have been trying to do for years. For example, the percentage that favor early or absentee voting without a documented reason fell from 57% in 2018 to 38%, while Democrat and Democrat-leaning independents’ support remained over 80%.

Wrap Up
That April Pew survey found marked differences in Democrat and Republican support for multiple voting proposals, from requiring government-issued photo IDs to allowing ex-felons to vote. 

Pew Research Center survey of response of Democrats/Democrat-leaning independents and Republicans/Republican-leaning independents to voting access proposals; April 5-11, 2021, 5,109 U.S. adults (from www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/04/22/republicans-and-democrats-move-further-apart-in-views-of-voting-access/).

Still, the current political split is best captured with the finding of a March Pew Center survey of 12,055 U.S. adults: Everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote – agreed to by 28% of Republicans/Leaning Republican and 85% of Democrats/Leaning Democrat.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Census:
www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/historical-apportionment-data-map.html
www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-data-release.html
Redistricting and gerrymandering:
www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-systems-a-50-state-overview.aspx
apnews.com/article/15945f8bd618d3c749e7c56d3a572d71
ballotpedia.org/State-by-state_redistricting_procedures
www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/what-is-gerrymandering.html
www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2020/07/08/487426/partisan-gerrymandering-limits-voting-rights/
Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Shelby County v. Holder:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965#Coverage_formula
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
Voter suppression and latest threats:
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-march-2021
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions-republicans-states/
www.cnn.com/2021/04/03/politics/state-legislation-voter-suppression/index.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
us.newschant.com/politics/with-florida-bill-republicans-continue-unrelenting-push-to-restrict-voting/
www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/us/politics/republican-pollwatchers.html
Pew Research Center surveys:
April 2021: www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/04/22/republicans-and-democrats-move-further-apart-in-views-of-voting-access/
March 2021: www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/01/share-of-republicans-saying-everything-possible-should-be-done-to-make-voting-easy-declines-sharply/