#70 December and the 2010s, computer storage, language & class, park shapes, male employment, worry

December 31, 2019

Good morning.

            December was a busy month for us. Including two family events, we had seven dinner gatherings. I am a social bug, I agree, but even for me that was a lot of company. That said, we thoroughly enjoyed the conversations with all who dined with us. We look forward to having friends over, but we may space them out a little more next year.

            Now we are at the end of the year and, at least in number terms, the end of a decade. I am aware there is an argument about whether the new decade starts on 1/1/2020 or 1/1/2021, but the numbers go from the teens to twenty, so I'm going with 1/1/2020.

At the start of the decade I was in my 23^nd year as Secretary to the Faculty, I had just met Kathy (three weeks earlier), Krystin was hanging around the house and looking for a job, Elliott was living at home and going to begin his first semester of college, and I had just acquired Pat's cat, bringing us to a total of three. During the decade my working life came to an end (well, working for a salary came to an end), Kathy and I married and she lives here, Krystin is deceased, Elliott moved to his own apartment, and we are down to two cats with Bela's death in October. The personnel here has changed, as has the amount of time I spend in the house. Except for the deaths, all those other changes have been an improvement in my life.

* * *

            Elliott and I were recently chatting over lunch and the topic of storage capacity on a new laptop came up. He noted that Microsoft will have a limit of one terabyte of storage in Office 365. That led us to wonder how many MS Word pages that would be. Of course Google found me an answer.

A 1 page document with 12 point Times New Roman . . . that has single spacing and as many characters as would fit (4004) is 12.5 kilobytes. A terabyte is equal to 1073741824 kb. So, if you divide those kbs by the single page size, you get 85,899,345.92 [pages].

            Then the question is, how long would it take to read and write that many pages? Writing, of course, would depend on the nature of the content. If it's factual, data- and evidence-checked, and so on, such a page could take an hour or more. If it's musings like mine, without looking for information or sources or evaluating information, perhaps I could write a full page in 10 minutes. Assuming the latter, that's 6 pages per hour. 85,899,345 divided by 6 equals 14,316,557 hours. If I were to work 10 hours per day seven days per week, that would be 1,431,655 days, or 3,922.34 years. I have written a lot of material that's ended up in the University of Minnesota archives, and sometimes it seemed like a terabyte when I was writing it, but I suspect I'm a little shy of the total of 85.9 million pages.

            I can see where a terabyte might be useful—if not now, in the near future—for movies and games and such, but probably not for writing.

* * *

            With this message I have succumbed to the logic of inserting only one space after periods and colons. But I keep adding the second one; it will take awhile to break the habit of a lifetime.  Thank goodness for "replace all."

* * *

            I have long believed that Henry Higgins was right (and have written so before). In the opening scene of My Fair Lady, he urges Colonel Pickering, " Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter, Condemned by every syllable she utters. . . . An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him." A recent Scientific American article begins with this: "Based on a new set of scientific studies, it seems that Higgins may have been right: people can determine our social class by the way we talk." The article reports on a study out of Yale published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

The American Dream is a popular narrative in the United States. Works of fiction romanticize the idea that people determine their future success through effort, and popular media sensationalizes stories of individuals beating the odds through hard work. These fundamental meritocratic narratives contribute to the willful ignorance that Americans exhibit regarding the relative lack of actual economic mobility in society. Despite our collective optimism, social class, defined as one's overall societal status and measured by indices of income, educational attainment, and occupation status, is remarkably stable across time and generation.

Although social class cues are communicated across a broad variety of behaviors, speech patterns are among the most powerful means of social class perception. . . . [Some] forms of speech [are] associated with more desirable social characteristics than others and give off cues about a person's social class background [footnotes omitted].

            While this might be thought of as trivial social science research, it does have serious implications in some theaters of life. "The paper lays out evidence from five studies demonstrating that people can accurately judge someone's social standing from that individual's speech and that people use these judgments to discriminate against lower-class job candidates." One of the experiments was of particular interest, I thought. The researchers recruited people who had had experience in hiring and asked them to evaluate audio recordings of 20 prospective job applicants. They "were able to accurately judge the social class of the candidates . . . [and] judged the higher-class candidates as more competent, a better fit for the job and more likely to be hired. They also awarded them a higher starting salary and a larger sign-on bonus."

            Americans, it has been said and written often, largely deny that social classes exist and the vast majority of us identify as "middle class." This is one more piece of evidence that it just isn't so: we can and do distinguish among social classes.

* * *

            Here's an oddball piece of research out of Texas A&M University: "Effects of greenspace morphology on mortality at the neighbourhood level: a cross-sectional ecological study." The gist of the findings is that urban parks that have irregular shapes are better than square parks in terms of their effect on the mortality rate of those who live near the parks. There's already plenty of research demonstrating that more green space is better (which this study also found); nobody before thought about what shape that space should be. (Who thinks up these questions?)

            The authors didn't know why this effect exists; they speculate that it "might be attributable to the increased number of access points provided by complex-shaped green spaces." It seems that urban planners should toss in weirdly-shaped parks to make people healthier as well as (they suggest) linking parks with greenways. Minneapolis has greenways, but it would be a challenge to have irregularly-shaped parks in many parts of the city, where the neighborhoods are laid out in neat grids.

            The study was done in Philadelphia. Maybe there's something peculiar about Philadelphia. (In case any of you are interested in the methodology, here you go:

We calculated landscape metrics to measure the greenness, fragmentation, connectedness, aggregation, and shape of greenspace, including and omitting green areas 83·6 m2 or smaller, using Geographical Information System and spatial pattern analysis programs. We analysed all-cause and cause-specific mortality (related to heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and neoplasms) recorded in 2006 for 369 census tracts (small geographical areas with a population of 2500–8000 people). We did negative binomial regression and principal component analyses to assess associations between landscape spatial metrics and mortality, controlling for geographical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors.)

It is interesting that they did *not* find any reduction in mortality for the three afflictions they noted (heart, respiratory, neoplasms); the increased and odd-shaped green spaces affected all-cause mortality. So something is at work here, but what it is remains a mystery. There may also be confounding variables that weren't identified.

* * *

            A sad article on NPR in early December. "In 1968, about 95% of men in their prime working years held jobs. The number has fallen to just 86%, even though today's job market is ultra-tight. . . . The decline in male workers is concentrated almost entirely among men with high school diplomas or less, or even a bit of college. . . . At one time, men of all educational levels were equally likely to be working; today, a huge gap has opened up, with many more college graduates holding jobs."

            Those data reflect a finding I saw a couple of years ago: All of the job growth since the recession in 2008 has gone to people with college degrees. The number of jobs available to males with only a high school education has been stagnant—and may even be shrinking.

            I wonder, however, about women who have no more than a high school diploma. Are they better off?

* * *

            Those of you who are also Facebook friends of mine know that each morning I post something humorous (or what I hope passes for humorous)—wordplay, puns, paraprosdokians, witticisms, etc.—as a distraction from the dreadful news we read daily. A few days ago I posted this: "Worrying works! More than 90 percent of the things I worry about never happen."

            In one of those odd coincidences in life, the Washington Post had an article about worry a few weeks earlier (I learned later).

A Gallup poll found that 45% of Americans said they felt worried a lot — about work, relationships, children, health and money, among other things. Unrelenting worry accompanied by anxiety symptoms such as irritability, difficulty concentrating, muscle tension, fatigue and poor sleep, has been recognized as a condition called generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

It seems that 6-12% of Americans suffer from GAD during their life; some struggle with it for years. "Many people with GAD also have other anxiety disorders and depression, as well as significant work and interpersonal problems. GAD also represents a significant risk factor for cardiovascular problems." Gee, I wonder why the last. . . .

            Those who worry overmuch, so the research suggests, think more positively about the value of worry than the rest of us, it's motivating, and two behaviors that accompany GAD in many cases are perfectionism and workaholism. However, worry does not help prepare and people who do it too much aren't particularly good at problem-solving. And get this:  "Worriers tend to catastrophize, predicting that things will turn out worse than they actually do. A recent study found that 91% of worries held by people with GAD did not come true." So my morning funny was on the mark as far as the research goes!

            My morning funny today (December 31) was "What does it mean if you were born in September? That your parents started the new year with a bang!" That led Kathy and me to figure out the dates we were likely conceived.  It turns out that I'm a Thanksgiving baby and Kathy—how romantic—is a Valentine's Day baby.

            On that note, I bid you not worry (too much) about the upcoming year and hope that your 2020 is better than your 2019!

           

-- Gary

(#69) year-end greetings

12/10/19

 

Greetings.

As for the wrap-up of the year, here's what I imagine holiday letters should be like: succinct.  As you know, "succinct" is an alien term for me.  I've written about most of this earlier in the year; here's the condensed version.

Kathy and I are happy.  Today marks the 10^th anniversary of our first date, at The Loring (bar and restaurant) in Dinkytown, on a snowy winter evening.  Kathy remembered that she was so nervous she could hardly speak coherently.  I was not at all nervous and liked this woman a lot.  Despite her nervousness, she agreed to see me again.  We kept seeing each other.  We still do.

            Elliott's life is both good and not so good.  He has a delightful girlfriend and the relationship seems secure and happy.  His U of M job taking care of rodents is not so great and he's looking to find another one—and a career.  Because he lives in an apartment, oil painting has been in abeyance (because of the smell and the need to use paint thinner and varnish), which is bad.  Spencer had spinal fusion surgery on November 1 and is slowly recovering.  It's a long process, but we're optimistic he'll get back to a job and a regular life in the near future.  We celebrated Krystin's birthday, two years plus 13 days after she died; she would have liked the small party—and would be peeved that she missed it.

            We lost our most loved cat, Bela, in what seemed to us a mysterious fashion.  He just stopped eating and died ~10 days later.

            We have enjoyed the frequent company of friends, old and new, and expect to continue to do so in 2020.  We especially enjoyed hosting our Scottish friends Rod & Morag for several days in October.  We were returning a favor they've bestown on us on several occasions.  We  had fun visiting cousins on my side of the family when we traveled to LA and San Diego last winter.  I think some of the places we saw are now burned.  We also enjoyed a journey to Door County in Wisconsin and a visit with long-time friends temporarily living in Wauwatosa.  It was a year of mostly fun domestic travel.  "Mostly" because inclement weather followed us everywhere.

            Kathy's job continues to be demanding.  She looks forward to the day when life is less hectic.  My retirement is not demanding but I'm enjoying myself immensely—even though I very much enjoyed my work.  I was just saying to some friends (also retired) that after 3+ years, I cannot imagine ever going back to full time employment.  Now that the time sink of Krystin's book and our 50-year high school class reunion is past, I'll find other projects to engage me.  When I get around to it.  In and among boxing up all kinds of things for Elliott to inherit someday and making a modest attempt to improve my bridge game (which may be an exercise in futility, a type of activity with which I am quite familiar).

As for a year-end message, frankly, I cannot do better than what I wrote last year.  It's what I wish for everyone every year:

Whatever the occasion you mark at this time of year, if any, I wish you contentment.  I hope you find yourselves at ease, secure, and fulfilled in your personal lives and relationships, able to face the worries of the world, large and small, from that firm foundation.  May your 2020 have more positives than negatives, may the positives bring delight to you, may the negatives be minor, and may the year find you at peace in your life.

            Please stay in touch.

            Gary

#68 telling time, napkins, birds of a feather, climate & real estate, living vs. not, wrapping presents

Good morning.

            We have in our house two grandfather clocks.  One is full-size and sits on the floor; I purchased it about 15 years ago when my Iowa friend Christine Grant alerted me to an ad selling an Amish grandfather clock at a very good price.  The other sits on a desk; it's brass and glass and was a wedding present to my paternal grandparents in 1900.  The full-size version has chains that must be pulled regularly to raise the weights to move the gears and the pendulum; the desk-size version must be wound with a key.  In both cases, the clock gains or loses time almost randomly, a few minutes here and there, and I can fiddle endlessly—without success—with the weight on the pendulums to try to adjust the speed.  So, I have wondered to myself many times, how on earth did people keep accurate track of time with these clocks before the radio would announce the time? 

            If you were wealthy and lived in London, here's one way.  From one of the Charles Lenox mysteries by Charles Finch.

Just before noon each Tuesday, Arthur, a footman belonging to the staff of Lenox's house, took the London underground to Paddington Station, carrying two pocket watches.  Usually with a minute or two to spare he arrived at the terminal and watched, with a feeling of stale drama, as the large railway station clock ticked toward the hour.  When it finally struck twelve o'clock, he reset both watches, one in each hand, to the same time.

This accomplished, he returned to Hampden Lane [the Lenox house] and wound all the clocks to match the hour upon the pocket watches, or at any rate an average thereof, which usually put the house within five seconds or so of British railway time."

I have no idea if this is historically accurate.  In any case, it's one possible explanation for how anyone kept accurate time with these clocks that are forever fast or slow.  I can set our two using my cell phone, but that didn't work too well in the 1870s.

* * *

            Yes, this is a first-world problem, but I live in the first world.  Sometimes it's a healthy distraction to look at the minor matters in life.

From Numlock News:

The use of paper napkins is taking a steep, steep dive: twenty years ago 60 percent of American households regularly bought paper napkins, but according to Georgia-Pacific statistics that figure is now down to 41 percent. The trend is clearly generational: 61 percent of people over the age of 65 use paper napkins every day, compared to just 37 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds. If you work for one of the two conglomerates that dominate the space, this is stressful, if you're anyone else this is a long-awaited generational shift in favor of sustainable practices. Naturally, the first group really wants to make the second group buy their napkins, and to do so they're basically turning them into paper towels.

I happen to be somewhat OCD about napkins, I suppose because I was raised that way.  It seems to me that you have to have *something* on which to wipe your hands when eating (unless you manage never to get any food or liquid on your hands, a feat I've never managed to accomplish).  So what is one to do if paper napkins are forbidden--use cloth napkins, which have to be washed, and thus use resources in a different way?  I don't know if the paper used in napkins is biodegradable; it may vary with the manufacturer, for all I know.

* * *

            I was reminding Kathy during a recent chat of the contrary advice that folk wisdom offers, a phenomenon I learned about from my long-time friend and colleague Regents Professor (emerita) Ellen Berscheid when I took my first (social psychology) course from her in winter 1974.  In the course of one her lectures she noted these contradictions (I think), among others I can't now recall:

Opposites attract – but – Birds of a feather flock together

Look before you leap – but – He who hesitates is lost

Out of sight, out of mind – but – Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Familiarity breeds contempt – but - Home is where the heart is

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise – but – Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die

            And so on.  You get the drift.

            There've been studies over the years suggesting pretty persuasively that as a matter of fact opposites do not attract.  Quite the contrary.  Four guys (in this case, it was guys) from the Stanford School of Business, the University of Cambridge, and Stony Brook University did a very large study to test whether birds of a feather flock together—but instead of using attitudinal surveys or other measures that can be of shaky reliability, they looked at several million Facebook users' posts to gauge whether people of similar personalities showed patterns of interaction.  Much of the previous research looked at commonalities among people (age, education, ethnic background, religion, etc.); they were looking at personality.  "Psychologists looked at this issue for many years, but the results were quite clear:  Friends and partners are not similar in terms of personality. . . .  This was surprising, because we know intuitively that people choose partners and friends who have similar personalities. It made us wonder if, perhaps, the researchers were doing something wrong."

            Instead of surveys (e.g., are you an introvert), they "used big data gleaned from Facebook — all those "likes" that users click to show their approval of someone else's posts or opinions, and their word choices in their own posts and responses — to develop a more accurate picture of user personalities."  These "digital footprints" don't lie and are extremely difficult to manipulate—and Facebook users certainly aren't thinking about a personality inventory when they post.  "If nothing else, Kosinski says the study raises doubts about the old saying that opposites attract. They might sometimes, but those cases are the exceptions, not the rule. 'As it turns out,' he says, 'the great majority of our interactions are with people who are a lot like us.'"

            If Elliott and I are examples, it certainly was "birds of a feather."

* * *

Here's an odd way that science denial will cost people.  Researchers at the School of Business at the University of British Columbia have found that real estate prices are higher in "climate change denial" neighborhoods than in "climate believer" areas.  "Cities from New York to Miami and from New Orleans to Los Angeles are feeling the impact of climate change -- and in some areas, rising water levels, heat waves, droughts and fire risk are putting a serious dent in real estate values."  The folks who did the study looked at sea level data, climate change attitudes from a Yale program, and real estate transactions in high-risk areas.

They found that, even after taking myriad variables into account, homes projected to be under water located in climate change "denier" neighbourhoods sell for roughly 7 percent more than homes in "believer" neighbourhoods.  "If everyone were to say, 'I'm not buying beachfront property here because it's going to get flooded,' then prices would collapse. But if you don't believe in climate change, you might say, 'You guys are crazy. Climate change isn't a real thing, so I see a buying opportunity.'"

The researchers didn't study climate change attitudes and real estate prices in other countries because "belief in climate change is much more ubiquitous in those areas." And within the U.S. there are significant differences.  People in California are more likely to accept climate change science; those in Florida are less likely to do so—even though the real estate risks in Florida are extremely high.

You would not catch me buying ocean-front real estate on any coast.  Just watching the East Coast places we've visited many times over the years—Virginia Beach, Kill Devil Hills, Myrtle Beach—and seeing the devastation in those areas convinces me that things ain't gonna get any better for those low-lying lovely coastal towns and resort areas.  But I suppose if you believe these are just normal swings in the climate, then maybe you can snap up a deal.

* * *

            Two professors of biology, one from Columbia and one from Touro, writing in The Scientist, have developed a set of criteria to distinguish "natural" (my term, not theirs) from "synthetic biological organisms and robots" (their terms) so that we can determine whether the latter are living beings.  They do so in the face of advances in (1) artificial intelligence that can, will, lead to robots that can understand and mimic human emotions, and (2) manipulation of DNA to create new organisms.  To what extent are they living creatures and, especially in the case of humanoid robots, should they be deemed "persons"?

            This is not a trivial matter because the definition may carry certain legal and moral obligations, depending on what that definition is.  Their view:  Living is "the property of an organism that possesses any genetic code that allows for reproduction, natural selection, and individual mortality."  So, for example, "robots would not fit into our definition because human beings can control all aspects of computer functions. There is no uncertainty, nor unknowability, with AI robots. AI-based human robots can be programed to replicate themselves and even can be programed to terminate. However, robots do not sense 'mutations' or engage in any natural selection process and, therefore, would not meet our criteria as 'living.'"  So, robots, no.

            Slightly more scary:  "Organisms that utilize synthetic DNA nucleotides may meet our criteria as living. However, it is important to recognize that while developing synthetic 'life forms' constitutes technologically exciting endeavors, the danger that they may destroy all existing life forms on Earth through the unpredictability of natural selection may push such projects across an ethical boundary."  This is the legitimate worry about GMOs, not whether we can develop berries that are impervious to frost or soybeans that are invulnerable to bugs.

* * *

            And here, to end this epistle, is some research appropriate to the season, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.  University of Nevada-Reno marketing research has discovered that "neatly wrapped gifts can inflate expectations about what's inside, which means poorly wrapped gifts may be more pleasing to recipients."  When Gallup reports (for 2018) that people expected to spend $885 on gifts, I guess wrapping is worth a look. 

            The researchers "were interested in exploring the validity of the common assumption that recipients prefer gifts that are neatly wrapped"  What they discovered was that people use the quality of the wrapping as "a cue about the gift inside and form expectations."  However, the finding didn't hold when giving to acquaintances (as opposed to family or friends).

When relationships are less established -- acquaintances rather than friends -- the gift recipients use the neatness of the wrapping paper as a cue to sense the gift giver's value of the relationship. Gifts that are nicely wrapped suggest that the gift giver views the relationship as important, and this positivity increases the chances that the recipient will like the gift.

            So if you're wrapping presents for close friends and family, throw on old paper and let the bows be crooked.  If for an acquaintance (the relationship with whom you value, or think you might value), be neat and put on extra ribbon.

            With warm regards on this winter morning in the Upper Midwest—

            Gary