Over the past eighteen years, I’ve humorously noted that I live in the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret… and over the past week or so events in Utah have reminded me of that even more. The first of those events was the pronouncement by the LDS Prophet and Revelator that young men, particularly returned missionaries, needed to immediately settle down and get married, rather than enjoying the life of a single male.  Now… considering that something like 98% of these young men are 20 or 21 years old with either no college education at all or a year or so at most, and considering that almost all men anywhere marry someone their own age or younger, this pronouncement struck me  as a commandment with the direct impact of keeping women effectively barefoot and pregnant, since I’ve observed that, in the vast majority of young married couples in Utah, the woman forgoes or postpones education in order to support and educate her husband.

The Prophet also stated that men should treat their wives as equals, but no one seems to have remarked on the incredible condescension buried in this statement, because it carries the implication that women are not equal, but should be treated as such.

Interestingly enough, several other recent events and reports reinforce and illustrate this problem.  First, the Utah State Department of Education just sent a letter to a number of high schools declaring that a slide show that the state had developed on birth control methods “must not be used.”  Even more interesting was the fact that the slide show, in accord with Utah law, did not advocate using any form of birth control, but only factually presented various methods and emphasized that abstinence was the only 100% effective form of birth control and that condoms were not fully protective against many forms of sexually transmitted diseases.  That wasn’t enough for lawmakers and various activists, who successfully pressured the State Department of Education into withdrawing the presentation.

Third, in the wake of Equal Pay Day, figures from the Utah Department of Workforce Services revealed that Utah has: (1) one of the worst wage gaps between men and women’s wages; (2) the greatest gap between the wages of college-educated men and women of any state; and (3) is the only state in the union where the percentage of women graduating from college has declined compared to all other states.  Nationally, women earn 77% of what men earn; in Utah, the figure is 68%.   Nationally, men with bachelor’s degrees earn 1.3% more than women do.  In Utah, men with undergraduate degrees earn 6% more than do women with the same degrees; the state with the next worst discrepancy is Idaho, where men with a bachelor’s degree earn 2.7% more than do women with the same degree.  In 1980, Utah women graduated from college at a higher rate than women in all other states.  Although the graduation rate has increased somewhat, the increase has been so small that women in other states now graduate at a higher rate.

Another interesting fact is that Utah, for all of its cultural emphasis on marriage for life and eternity, actually has a divorce rate higher than the national average, and two-thirds of all Utah women with children work.  So… it’s not exactly as though all that support of husbands actually relieves Utah women of any financial burden or requirement to work.

And the Utah reaction to this?  Well… Senator Orrin Hatch opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act, designed to close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, because civil penalties on employers who discriminated in paying women less were too high.  Also, the vast majority of the Utah legislature, as I noted in a previous blog, attempted to gut the Utah open records law and to remove references to the names and genders of state employees – which would have effectively made disclosure of pay discrepancies by gender impossible.

Now… if I have this all straight… young Utah men are supposed to get married before they finish their education, requiring their wives to support them and delay and forgo their education, and schools are not supposed to offer factual information to those young women about birth control, and… by the way, Utah has the highest birth rate in the nation and the greatest wage discrepancies between college-educated men and women… and the majority of Utah law-makers oppose both dissemination of birth control information and measures that would reduce pay discrimination against women.

Reporting straight from the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret…

The other day I read a technical article about music, a subject in which I have great interest, but less talent, except for appreciating it. According to the article in the May 2011 issue of Discover, a scientist investigating the structure of music used the technique of lossless compression [“which exploits repetition and redundancies in music to encode audio data in fewer bits without losing content”] to analyze the structure of musical compositions.  He discovered, amazingly, that pop music was far more complex than classical music.

Although no one has yet pointed it out, so far as I can tell, he was wrong.

His rationale was that when he used the lossless compression technique, popular compositions only shrank to sixty to seventy percent of their original volume, while compositions by Beethoven shrank to forty percent of their original volume.  From this, he deduced that, underneath the apparent complexity, classical music must be composed of simpler patterns,

Duhh!

All music is composed of, or built up from, simpler patterns, including pop music and rap.

What he apparently isn’t considering is that classical music pieces are far, far longer than pop pieces, and incorporate a complex structure that contains repetitions of motifs, restatement and re-orchestrations, etc., all of which can be encoded in such a way as to compress the music to a greater percentage than can be done with a simpler and shorter work of music.

By way of analogy, take the statement, “Mary had a little lamb.”  There’s no way to reduce that statement more without losing clarity or meaning.  You might be able to remove the “a,” and get a reduction to 94%.  Then take something like, “Sheep (Ovis aries) are quadrupedal, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name “sheep” applies to many species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries. Numbering a little over one billion, domestic sheep are also the most numerous species of sheep.”  The second passage can indeed be reduced in volume without losing meaning, possibly by twenty to thirty percent, but because it can be reduced in size more than the first statement does not mean it is simpler.

The scientist is question appears to be drawing the wrong conclusion from correct data, or using accurate but incomplete data.  This is, of course, an age-old human failing, which includes the Ptolemaic astronomers who created elaborate models of the solar system with the earth at the center.  When I was an economic market research analyst I saw this happen more than a few times, where senior executives would look at the data, which was as accurate as we could make it, and then draw unsupportable conclusions, like the senior executive who used reliability findings to support developing a technically superior compoment that no one would buy because the customers didn’t need a component that was reliable for 30 years when the product to which it was attached had a useful life of five years.

In the first case, that of the compression of music, long classical pieces can be compressed more than shorter popular pieces.  That’s a fact, but it’s not because the popular pieces are more unique, but because they’re shorter and simpler, another bit of data not considered by the scientist in question… and a reason why some scientists end up in trouble, because they don’t think beyond the scope of the problem they’ve addressed.

And… most likely, the fettered simplicity of pop music is exactly why it’s popular… because listeners don’t have to work out all the patterns.

They oppose openness in financial transactions, whether consciously or subconsciously, because such openness is the only way to stop financial cheating and the shenanigans that so drastically boosted their income… and still do. A recent article in New Scientist by Mark Buchanan [March 19, 2011] cites several studies on the matter, including one from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that makes the point that every possible regulatory “fix” can be gamed or evaded so long as the details of transactions are kept secret.  In short, the key factor that enabled investment banks to extort over a trillion dollars from the American people and the government and to pay and keep paying multi-million dollar bonuses to thousands of employees was not primarily inadequate regulation but secrecy.

In short, secrecy enables criminality. We all know this, I suspect, in our heart of hearts, because, except for psychopaths, we all behave far better when we’re under observation… or know that we could be.  It’s amazing how traffic slows to the speed limit when a highway patrol cruiser is sighted.

So why do we continue to insist on the details of our lives, particularly the financial details, being kept secret?  How long would discriminatory hiring and salary practices exist if everyone’s salary in a company happened to be public?  Is it any wonder that less wage discrimination tends to occur in the federal government, where salaries are pegged to known scales that are public?

And could all of those strange and discriminatory loans that fueled the last boom and bust have been made to the same extent and degree if the details would have had to have been made public?  I have my doubts.

Yet, for all this, I have no doubts that most people would cringe, if not do worse, if more openness were required by law – at least openness for them.  I recently mentioned the action of the Utah state legislature to effectively gut the Utah open records law, and I can now report, for those who have not followed this, that the public outcry was so great that the legislature repealed the very law they had passed the month before, a law which would have, in practical terms, exempted all electronic communications from the provisions of the open records law, among other things.  So it was very clear that the public believes that legislators should be publicly accountable.  Yet if such provisions were suggested for individuals, or for corporations, the howling would deafen everyone. 

Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a wage-discrimination case filed against WalMart, as a class action suit on behalf of female employees.  The suit alleges that WalMart systematically paid women less than men in exactly the same jobs with the same duties.  In their questions at the hearing, a number of justices raised the question about how difficult implementing any decision would be, suggesting that even the Supreme Court doesn’t want to get involved in making such records public, let alone making a ruling that could indeed lead to more openness for all corporations.

So often we talk about not wanting everyone to know our business, our income, etc., but the problem with this is that while our neighbors and our friends may not know… the government already knows, as do most corporations.

Perhaps it’s time that we know the same about them.

Is it my imagination, or are there more and more movies and books, not to mention television series, dealing with what I’d call either disasterism or grandiose triumphalism?  What I mean by disasterism is obvious – great and awful cataclysms, either natural or man-made, that threaten nations or the entire world or what the world is like in the wake of such disasters. Grandiose triumphalism – those are the stories whereby the single hero or the small band of heroes saves the world or the nation from evil aliens, or “bad guys” or cosmic disasters.

If you go back thirty years or longer, such movies were far fewer in number, and they generally were relegated to Saturday serials or grade B or below low-budget films. Now… they’re everywhere.

One possibility is, of course, that the incredible improvement in special effects and computer generated graphics allows film to capture/create events that simply couldn’t be filmed before, and that the appeal of such epics was always there, but could never be exploited because the industry lacked the ability to portray them in any even semi-realistic fashion.

Another possibility is that the audience has changed.  Certainly, immediately after WWII many Americans, indeed many across the world, had just experienced the greatest single global conflict the world had ever seen… and it just could be that they really didn’t want to see another, even in futuristic cinema, whereas today a comparatively small percentage of movie-goers in the western world has ever personally experienced that sort of disaster, and a cinematic disaster doesn’t recall past personal experiences. 

A third possibility is that the growth of disaster books and movies and their popularity in the U.S. is occurring because we don’t want to face the disasters we’ve already created – the ones that will take years and years of discipline and drudgery – and rather than consider them, we escape into the vast and unreal disasters and challenges, in essence saying, “What we’re facing isn’t as bad as what’s in this movie.”

But… for whatever reason, doesn’t the growth of all the disaster flicks and one man/one group against the aliens/world/nature/galaxy seem just a little creepy?

 There are times when I’d like to torture every geek product developer who has a great idea for “enhancing” an existing product, particularly if the enhancement consists of cramming more features into an existing product to the point where any errant keystroke or movement results in some form of disaster.

Over the past year, I’d been vaguely amused when my wife complained that documents that she’d typed on her office system vanished, leaving her with a blank page.  Surely, she had been exaggerating.  Still… there was a nagging feeling there… because she doesn’t invent things like that.

Last week, I was trying to write a story on my laptop, which features the latest [at least it was the latest when I bought the laptop some five months ago] version of Word.  I was happily typing along, occasionally swearing under my breath when somehow I brushed some key when I was typing an “h” or some such and found myself with a “search and replace” screen.  That was merely annoying, but I really got angry when… suddenly… I discovered that the entire story had vanished and I had somehow “saved” a blank page with exactly the same file name, effectively erasing many hours work.  After several minutes, I did find a previous “autosaved” version, minus the several hundred words I’d written in the past half hour.  I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what combination of keystroke shortcuts had created that disaster, but couldn’t.  So I went back to work on the story. But… the same replacement/erasure problem occurred twice more… and twice more I lost work and time.  I also suffered an extreme rise in blood pressure and a reinforcement of my existing prejudice against product developers who have adopted the “churn and burn” tactics of sleazy stockbrokers and investment bankers by coming out with newer and newer versions of basic software that only gets more expensive and more costly with few real improvements.

As I’ve noted in previous blogs, enhancements aren’t “enhancements” when they create more problems than they solve.  I shouldn’t have to be an absolutely perfect touch typist in order to avoid having such “handy enhancements” distracting me and destroying my work.  This sort of thing is exactly what happens when the perceived “need” for more “features” overwhelms functionality.  It’s also why I do my writing on older and more functional word processing platforms – when I can.

I’m certain some geek expert can probably explain why such features are good or even how I can disable them.  BUT… I shouldn’t have to disable features that can create such havoc.  Nor should I have to dig through autosaved files to reclaim something that vanished because an idiot developer wanted to add another enhancement to an already over-enhanced product.

Enough is enough… but that’s another old maxim that seems to have been forgotten or ignored in the social/cultural rush for “more” and “more.”