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 23nd 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
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