Let's hear it for the girl!

Today is International Women's Day. I want to reflect on some data I just learned yesterday about the negative correlation between corruption and the presence of women in government. Transparency International ranks countries every year in terms of perceived corruption. There even a color coded map that I saw a few months ago at a presentation on Sarbanes-Oxley (don't ask) that reflects perceived corruption ranks.

Here is the 2006 map.

The book Traffic reported that studies showed a correlation between corruption and presence of women in government roles. One study apparently correlated TI's perceived corruption index with the number of women in cabinet positions finding that the more women in power in government, the less corrupt the government. The other study showed an increase in the number of traffic tickets in Mexico (that increase itself correlated with fewer accidents) was associated with more women police giving tickets because there were fewer bribes. Unfortunately, since I am listening to Traffic as an audio book I cannot check the references for these studies.

As tempting as it is to want to believe that women are less corrupt and should therefore be more in positions of power in governments, TI itself does not subscribe to the validity of this relationship. TI says:

Surveys of corruption experiences and perceptions of the past years have shown that women are less likely to pay a bribe. These findings have made analysts wonder if men are per se more corrupt than women.

A simple answer would be: no. A more complex one would be: we do not know yet.

Correlations between decreasing corruption levels and the growing involvement of women in politics can not be confirmed. Research seems to rather point to the fact that women have fewer resources as well as less access to institutions or networks where corruption occurs and therefore less opportunities for paying bribes.

It can not be taken for granted that women will be less corrupt than men or not form their own networks, once they have reached a higher level of representation at leadership level in society, politics and business.

So equality for all means that women are equally corrupt. I have certainly known some women whose ethics scare me. Lady MacBeth also comes to mind (notwithstanding her "out, damned spot" speech which is not an advertisement for "Shout"). But it would be nice to test the hypothesis by having more women in positions of power in governments throughout the world.

Moral Indignation

I read today that President Obama has intimated he would talk to the Taliban. Somehow the words "Neville Chamberlain" popped into my head. (oh no! I sound like McCain!) The Taliban for me are like the Nazis. They treat women like animals and insist on ignorance and fear as the foundation of their society and governance. It seems inconceivable that a compromise can be made that allows them to rule. I will try to keep an open mind but I am quite disturbed by this development.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08obama.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/weekinreview/08COOPER.html?_r=1&hp

I also was offered two tickets to see Das Rheingold this week at the LA Opera. I used to go to the opera all the time and am toying with the idea of taking the tickets. I am not a big fan of Wagner's music (I recall squirming through Tristan and Isolde) but I had not considered other reasons not to see the opera until my husband refused to go based on ideological objections to Wagner's anti-semitism. So what to do? I am honestly more worried about sitting for almost 3 hours without an intermission than I am about making a politically incorrect statement. If Daniel Barenboim can consider conducting Wagner, I can go see him. But to sit trapped in a long row of people and not have access to the bathroom for 3 hours??? Let's keep our priorities straight!

Read for Freeeee!

I love the library. I still dream about the library of my childhood and its creepy marble staircase. When we moved to suburbs I found the local library and spent hours there in the evening when I was in high school walking its aisles looking for fun things to read. (Yes. I know. I was and still am a nerd).

When I moved to LA, I tried at first to go to the library in Santa Monica but the smell of homeless urine was too overwhelming for me. In 1983 we moved to Hermosa Beach which has a number of nice suburban libraries in the area although none as nice as the one during my teens.

I took my children to the library all the time. We poked through the books in the small children's section in Manhattan Beach every couple of weeks. When I was working, my housekeeper took them for story hour . As it turns out, my daughter loves the library. (We also took her to Borders a lot during her childhood). My son not so much although he talks about getting his son to the story hour.

I now take the next generation to the library. Two weekends in a row now, my grandson and I have gone to the library. Last week we went to Torrance and this week to Redondo. Both of those libraries have large children's sections with toys and ample tables and chairs. They have books at a child's eye level and dvds or videos in a separate section. My grandson loves it there! He pestered me all morning to go to the library. You can't ask for much more than that.

I typically do not take books out of the library anymore for myself. My husband buys so many books that we have more recent releases than the library. But I love the audio books in the library. They carry The Teaching Company audio and video courses, Modern Scholar audio courses and a lovely selection of recent nonfiction. For example, I am listening to "Traffic" and "Musicophilia" courtesy of the Redondo library and watching "Genetics" thanks to the Torrance library. The PV library also has a good selection of audio books and course but you have to pay a $1.00/disc to borrow for a week. The other libraries loan them for free and for 3 weeks.

Did I mention that I love the library?

Deposed!

I am avoiding reading the deposition of one of our executives. It is a 220 page transcript of a full day of questioning that I already sat through. I have to read it to determine which parts of it are highly confidential (you know, like price terms and distribution patterns) and what is merely confidential that anyone from the other side or another studio who is also a party can read. After 25 years at this, I would rather do almost anything else--except answer interrogatories. Even document review can be more interesting. There is something satisfyingly voyeuristic about reading other people's emails and powerpoints. I learn a lot about our business when I read those types of documents. But I am old fashioned. I cannot read them on a monitor. I need to have paper copies. The young lawyers working for the firms we hire do not understand. I try to explain that one day their eyes will get old and fuzzy too and they will have to give up their contact lenses (assuming they have not had lasik) and wear glasses. But it does not compute for them.

So here are some random thoughts on a Friday afternoon before I go to a meeting which mercifully gets me away from the depo transcript for a few hours.

1. What is really behind the "accident" that injured Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and killed his wife? I hate to be so suspicious and cynical but Mugabe showed up at the hospital very quickly.


2. There was actually an article in the NYT this morning about Hillary discussing her trip to Europe and upcoming meeting with Russia foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. Yay! The major news media know where in the world Hillary is today. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/world/europe/07diplo.html?partner=rss


3. I finished my first book on the Kindle 2- Still Alice which is a novel about a 50 year old woman psychology professor at Harvard who copes with early onset Alzheimers. I will come back to the issue of memory loss in a later blog. We have a meeting this coming Tuesday with psychologists at UCLA about the results of my mother in law's memory testing. Some of the symptoms in the book rang too true for her current condition.


4. At least for Still Alice the TTS feature in Kindle 2 works. It is not that bad. It captures inflections and pauses for punctuation. I tried both the male and female version.


5. I have downloaded the Kindle app to my iTouch and tried that too the other day. It did not sync as well as I had hoped.


6. The only other books I have downloaded to Kindle so far are American Wife and a Kindle userguide. I must say I enjoy the larger font. (see eye issues above)


7. I suppose there is an inconsistency that I hate reviewing docs on a computer screen and love the Kindle. Kindle is definitely easier on the eyes than a monitor. Maybe I should put the depo transcript on the Kindle!


8. I was supposed to go to Portland tonight with my husband and daughter. He was to give a talk in Salem and she wanted to look at colleges in Portland and environs. However, my husband is tired and sick from his East Coast trip last week and it is going to rain all weekend in Portland with temps in the 30-40s. BRRR. I do not fancy leaving So. Cal where it is predicted to be sunny and warm this weekend. Besides, it is daylight savings time this weekend. Who would change the 30 or more clocks in our house?

Out of the Kitchen Cabinet

If I play my cards right, and President Obama is reelected in 2012, perhaps I can throw my hat in the ring for a Cabinet position. So far, there are 3 women confirmed and one nominated for the official 15 spots on the Cabinet and another 3 women in Cabinet level positions. Not a lot of women considering how many openings there are. (23 if you include the VP). Apparently Clinton had 9 women in his cabinet at one point. So Obama needs to be looking for more women and since I am a grandmother twice over, I think I should qualify.

Some of these women like Hillary and Kathleen Sebelius are 60ish and thus in the grandmother age bracket. Solis, Napolitano and Christina Romer are 50ish so I am already too old to jockey with them although I was a grandmother at 51 so maybe there is still hope. Fuggedaboudit when it comes to the 40 somethings (Rice and Jackson) --the Obama generation. They still do not have wrinkles in their faces.

Sebelius has my props for being governor of Kansas as a democrat (and for being able to wear so much cyan). I lived in Lawrence KS for a year and never got used to seeing people in the drive through (not many other types of places to eat back then when KS was a dry state) who had shotguns in the back of their trucks. In 1980-1, when I was an assistant professor at KU I was asked to work on a program evaluation of a project in the local public schools where children were taught how to express their feelings in words as part of the school curriculum (e.g Pauly says "I am angry, Grandma" when he does not get what he wants) . Some of our fundamentalist furry friends in KS thought that such humanistic BS had no place in children's lives unless the parents wanted to teach it to them. No school will teach my kid that feelings are ok! So we had to try to determine whether the program harmed the kids and made them want to take their parents' shotguns out of the pickup and shoot the parents. (Wow. I guess I have some strong feelings about this). I left KU before I found out what happened to the school program.

I understand that Sebelius knew well enough to let Kansans have their guns but was brave enough to veto an anti-abortion bill while Governor. Her support of a woman's right to choose is already being touted as a flashpoint for the nomination although it is hard to tell so far how much traction that will get. Polls still show that people in this country support a woman's right to choose. However, we cannot be complacent about these rights and I applaud the efforts of those who still fight the fight to keep the anti-abortion forces at bay.

The Continuing Saga of "Where in the World is Hillary?"

Apparently because there is so little coverage of our new Secretary of State, the State Dept. website has now put up an interactive map to let us know where in the world is Hillary. This week she is in the Middle East--Eqypt, Israel, Palestinian "territories", and then onto parts of Europe: Belgium, Switzerland and Turkey. The State Dept. site reports:

In Egypt, the Secretary will participate in the Gaza donor’s
conference being held in Sharm el-Sheikh. Leaders from around the world will assemble at the conference to address the immediate humanitarian concerns in the Gaza Strip. Addressing the pressing needs in Gaza is important to the United States. We also want to move forward the comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace that President Obama spoke about when he and Secretary Clinton named Senator Mitchell as Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. After visiting Egypt, Secretary Clinton will visit Israel and the Palestinian territories.

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entires/clinton_departs_for_middle_east_europe/

But where is the news coverage of this trip? In the NY Times today, Thomas Friedman wrote about the super envoys and Hillary, first raising and then disputing the issue of whether she was not up to the job because she needed help from what Friedman called the "Super Subsecretaries of State". http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/opinion/01friedman.html?scp=2&sq=Hillary%20Clinton&st=cse

The LA Times does not appear to be covering this trip. Hillary was last mentioned Wednesday, 2/25/09, again in an article about the appointment of another super envoy, Dennis Ross, for Iran. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/02/25/news/fg-ross25

At least the LA Examiner has the somewhat expansive AP story online. Not sure who reads the LA Examiner. http://www.examiner.com/a-1876907~Clinton_to_visit_Mideast__reconnect_with_Europeans.html?cid=rss-Politics

The Washington Post has a more substantive article discussing the Palestinian humanitarian crisis and difficulties with crafting anything with the new right wing Netanyahu government in Israel. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/28/AR2009022800321.html

The Guardian, as you might expect, buries the mention of Hillary in a story about Tony Blair demanding the end to Israeli blockade of Gaza. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/02/tony-blair-israel-gaza-blockade Likewise, the BBC, which gave a fair amount of coverage to the Hillary Near East/China trip, only mentions her in a story about an Israeli warning over those pesky Gaza rockets. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7917384.stm

All in all, still fairly minimal coverage for our chief diplomat as she ventures into the thicket. I have to wonder if the coverage is limited because it is Hillary or because newspapers are in such a decline these days. I seem to remember endless coverage of Condoleeza Rice's trips. Give Hillary equal billing!

I Can't Hear You!

I have been waiting patiently for months now for my Kindle to arrive. It did not come for Christmas when it was supposed to come because there was allegedly a back order. Then we found out that everyone in the back order queue would get a Kindle 2 to be shipped on February 24, 2009. Mine was actually shipped on 2/23 and arrived at my husband's office on 2/25. My husband was in NYC so my son was supposed to bring it home. However, due to communication slippage (I thought his Dad told him and his Dad thought I told him) my son did not bring home the Kindle. No problem! He could get it the next day.

The next day turned out to be Lelina's birth day so my son did not go to work. Here it is several days later and still no Kindle for me. My husband, who escaped the great NYC spring snow storm this morning, just went to his Venice office to retrieve his mail and my long awaited Kindle. No harm no foul, right?

But wait. In the past 3 days that I did not have my Kindle 2 I lost the right to have my ebooks turned into computer generated voice audio books. Amazon has apparently "caved" to pressure by the Author's Guild and has agreed to disable the TTS (text to speech) function on the Kindle 2 when authors or publishers want. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/01/authors-guild-blocks-kindle-voice

Typically I find myself on the author/publisher's side of this debate. I understand that making money in ancillary markets is very important and if the publishing industry needs to protect its audio book market by preventing free TTS in Kindle that should be the right holder's right. However, today I am a consumer who feels wronged. I do not get the benefit of a feature that Kindle 2 was marketed to have. I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore! I am joining Larry Lessig in the fight. What exclusive right under 17 USC section 106 does reading aloud a copyrighted work violate? Lessig says:

We're worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn't given them -- the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me -- users and innovators have less freedom.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/2009/02/caving_into_bullies_aka_here_w.html

I suppose the right that is violated, Prof. Lessig, is the public performance right. I don't know how Kindle 2 TTS works so it may even implicate the public transmission right if the voice is delivered from the internet.

Ray Blount Jr. in the NY Times said:

But there’s another thing about Kindle 2 — its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.
True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?_r=1

So what to do? How to feel? On the one hand, I absolutely adore audio books. I listen to 2 different ones everyday--one while walking and another while driving. But the voice that is reading to me makes a big difference. For example, I am listening to Oliver Sacks Musicophilia now in the car and find I cannot concentrate on the subject matter, which I find very interesting, because I hate (and I do mean hate) the reader's voice. It is a British voice which modulates from low baritone to bass on a regular basis. I want to scream at the tone of it. (and since I am in the car, sometimes I do.) However, the reader of that particular book, John Lee, is very popular with Random House's Books on Tape, having recorded 93 other works for them, both of fiction and nonfiction. Maybe he is on retainer. Or I have a "musicophilia" problem of my own and cannot appreciate a voice loved by everyone else. I prefer American voices whether male or female. I can also tolerate British women's voices better than the deep upper crust male British accent. I understand the TTS function on Kindle 2 is computer generated but "listenable" and will be produced in both male and female versions. As a consumer I am intrigued by the possibility of having Kindle read to me when my eyes are too tired. I did not expect to use the function on Kindle much but still would like the right. Then again, I spend my days arguing that a consumer does not have the right to circumvent the DRM on a DVD and back up the DVD to his or her computer. After all, I studied at the feet of the late Prof. Mel Nimmer (who always walked me to my car after my night seminar with him when I was pregnant with my son) , not Prof. Lessig and the rest of the Stanford/Berkeley copyleft group.

Still . . .