May 18, 2005
Gay Marriage - Asking the Wrong Questions
Recently on the local talk radio station, one of the desk jockeys, Jason Griffin, who supports gay marriage was asking callers if gay people getting married had personally affected their marriage in particular. His callers said no.
Griffin’s approach is interesting and effective, but I’m afraid it’s logically flawed for two reasons.
First of all, people calling in to a conservative leaning talk radio show who are already resistant to gay marriage are probably not going to be the ones who would feel the effects of society’s redefinition of marriage. They most likely already have a clearly defined definition of marriage in their heads that is not so dependant on society’s whims as others’ may be. Obviously they are willing to defend that definition, both against Griffin and against things that happen around them.
Secondly, the question assumes a rather simplistic view of peoples’ objections to gay marriage. No opponent to gay marriage who is saying it would affect marriage as an institution is seriously suggesting that once two gay people get married, other marriages across the country will immediately drop dead for that reason and that reason only.
That would be like a doctor reading a study that says rheumatoid arthritis suffers are 10% more likely to have consumed lots of red meat, and then telling each patient that comes in that they got the disease because they ate lots of red meat. Diseases of the body are a little more complicated than that, and so are diseases of marriage.
Can you imagine someone objecting to the doctor telling people to eat less red meat because the doctor can’t come up with an example of someone who ate a steak and then woke up with rheumatoid arthritis the next day? There may be other reasons to not agree with that plan of attack, but the one given here ain’t one of them.
Any societal occurrence that affects traditional marriage, for good or for bad, takes years to show its effects in any statistically significant way and even then it’s going to be pretty hard to measure because of all the other factors that also have influence. Does this mean that we, as a society, should stop asking ourselves what possible effects, subtle or not, any change might have? I think not.
Marriage as a societal institution isn’t a right, it’s something society has around to benefit itself. If gay marriage supporters actually want to change peoples’ minds, they need to stop insisting that marriage is a right and refusing it to them is outright discrimination, and instead try to convince the public that gay marriage helps society. And “well, it doesn’t really hurt anyone” just isn’t going to cut it. It’s absurd to say that gay marriage will have absolutely no effect on marriage itself. Indeed, the only question that should be up for debate here is “how.”
This all reminds me of the flurry of commentary from supporters of gay marriage after Britney Spears’ 55 hour marriage.
We will lose marriage in this nation," without constitutionally limiting it to heterosexuals, warns Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. The Traditional Values Coalition, meanwhile, sees "same-sex marriage as a way of destroying the concept of marriage altogether."It would be far easier to take these claims seriously if gay-marriage critics spent as much energy denouncing irresponsible heterosexuals whose behavior undermines traditional marriage. Among prominent Americans, such misdeeds are increasingly ubiquitous.
Exhibit A is musical product Britney Spears's micromarriage to hometown pal Jason Allen Alexander. The 22-year-olds were wed on January 3 in Las Vegas. Clad in sneakers, a baseball cap, ripped jeans, and a navel-revealing T-shirt, the vocalist was escorted down the Little White Wedding Chapel's aisle by a hotel chauffeur. Spears and Alexander, who wore baggy pants and a zippered sweater, soon were wife and husband.
Almost as soon, their marriage was annulled. Clark County Judge Lisa Brown accepted Spears's request and ruled that "There was no meeting of the minds in entering into this marriage contract, and in a court of equity there is cause for declaring the contract void."
The revolving-door couple's 55 hours of marital bliss were based neither on love nor shared commitment, but because "they took a joke too far," explained Spears's label, Jive Records.
I hardly think that any social conservative was happy or even ambivalent about this, or the hundreds of other daily examples of the denigration of marriage in this society. But to suggest that gay marriage is a-ok because at least it’s not as bad as a 3 day Vegas marriage is ridiculous. Should the parent of a child with brain cancer stop making him wear his seatbelt?
It's also a logical fallacy to suggest that because someone is not as vocal about subjects similar to their pet causes, that their arguments can just be dismissed out of hand. In fact, there is actually legimate reason for conservatives to object more to gay marriage than Spears' marriage. Spears is actually admitting to the public that her marriage was a mistake.
I note that this commentator and his peers didn’t go around asking people if Spears’ marriage affected their own marriage before assuming that it would affect traditional marriage. Some things are just obvious.
Posted by illuminaria at 12:33 PM | Comments (5)
May 06, 2005
Is Jim West Really a Hypocrite? I'm Not Convinced.
Note for people from liberal blogs surfing in today: I don't know anything about West, other than what I've read in these stories about him. I find his soliciting 18 year olds, while not illegal, creepy, and certainly a reason to not vote for him. I find some of his past legislation stupid beyond words and definitely a reason to not vote for him. The only issue I am writing about here is if it is possible for his sexuality and his political record given in the Spokesman-Review to not be at odds. I think it is, and I think people are jumping to conclusions in that regard. Typically these seem to be people who think being conservative and gay is an oxymoron. That doesn't mean I'm "readying the smokescreen to protect one of [my] own," affirming his opinions, or expressing my "latent homosexual tendencies." Seriously, people, you can think someone's an ass and still not believe everything said about him. Try actually respectfully reading something and taking it at face value for once.
Over at Wizbang they have the story of Spokane, WA mayor Jim West who has recently been outed by the Spokesman-Review. In one part, they compare his supposed homosexuality with the legislation he’s supported over the years, seemingly to imply that he’s a hypocrite. Is he? Let’s take a look.
In February 1998, West voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a ban on gay marriage. Gov. Lowry vetoed the measure, but the veto was overridden and Washington became the 27th state to enact such a ban.
First of all, I’d like to point out that West has said that he’s not gay, and in fact it was revealed that one of his chat room nicknames was “RightBi-Guy.” That does change things somewhat. Depending on where he falls on the “Kinsey scale,” it may not be that he’s more attracted to women than men, meaning that he wouldn’t care much about marrying a man. Even if he was completely gay, it doesn’t make him a hypocrite to not support gay marriage.
In 1986, he supported a bill allowing criminal background checks for jobs involving children. The measure was necessary because child abusers “often try to gain a position of trust and authority,” West said in a Spokesman-Review interview at the time.…
Their 1986 bill, which failed, would have barred gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day-care centers and some state agencies. It called for screening prospective employees for sexual orientation and firing employees whose homosexuality became known.
The implication is that this is hypocritical because West himself is a state employee. However, even if true, this isn’t hypocritical because West is not a state employee who works with children. (Update: some people seem to think this point isn't terribly important. I don't see why. There's many people, especially in the 80's, who may not have cared if someone was gay, but didn't want openly gay people working with children. My mother is a strong liberal, but she herself has expressed this opinion to me before. Also, I'll point out that it's presumably talking about openly gay people here, not closeted gays like West.)
I'm suspicious as to whether the summary is accurate or not. Try as I might, I can’t find a single story on this on Lexis-Nexis, search engines, or Washington newspaper archives. I think the story is just too old for a lot of the smaller newspaper archives to go back that far. You’d think if it really was outright calling for the firing of homosexuals working with children, there’d be some mention of it in one of the bigger newspapers, or even a national newspaper. The “criminal background checks for jobs involving children” part is obviously not hypocritical, and indeed sounds like a great idea. I will continue to look, but I remain suspicious of Spokesman-Review’s summary. Especially considering this next gaffe.
In an April 9 Internet chat, West sent his photo to “Moto-Brock,” the person he believed was an 18-year-old Spokane high school senior. Instead, Moto-Brock was a forensic computer consultant hired by the newspaper to verify the mayor’s identity and presence on Gay.com.…
During a 1990 hearing on AIDS education, West proposed that teen sex be criminalized.
The bill, written by the abstinence group Teen Aid, would have made sexual contact – not just sexual intercourse – a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger. It defined sexual contact as “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person.”
Since he was hitting on supposed 18-year old boys, which he doesn’t deny, this would indeed be hypocritical, if true. Let’s go to Lexis-Nexis…
The Seattle Times January 19, 1990, Friday, Final EditionIn what many are calling a misguided effort to prevent the spread of AIDS, some influential state senators have proposed making "sexual contact" illegal for anybody younger than 18.
There would be an exception for minors who are married.
Ok, so it’s younger than 18, not 18 and younger. Nice job, Spokesman-Review. Sorry, afraid this isn’t hypocritical either, even if it is pretty stupid.
In 1986, West voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex. He said such instruction “is something people go buy at dirty bookstores.”
I’m afraid this isn’t hypocritical either. It is possible, and indeed quite understandable, for a gay person to want to keep sex out of the public sphere as much as possible.
In 1995, when allegations of sexual harassment involving Democratic Gov. Mike Lowry and a female aide were published in an independent counsel’s report, West called on the House to launch impeachment proceedings against Lowry.“The governor should not be held to any lower standard than anyone else in our society. Governors cannot and should not flout the law,” West said
This would indeed be hypocritical if the allegations that West had molested two boys over twenty years ago were true. However both of the men making accusations are convicted felons and there’s no corroborating evidence. Plus, people who molest boys usually don’t stop. If he was a child molester, you’d think they’d have been able to find something more recent. I’m sure they looked. However, it is possible, so we’ll put this one into the maybe category.
If it was true, though, he's a bastard and I don't care whether or not he's a hypocritical and a bastard. One's enough for me.
As Spokane’s mayor, West recently said he’d veto a proposal to extend city benefits to unmarried domestic partners at City Hall, citing its cost. But the City Council last month approved the measure on a 5-2 vote, enough to withstand a mayoral veto.
Again, it’s legitimately possible to be gay and not care about gay marriage. Plus West cited the costs, not the sexual issues. Again, not hypocritical.
There’s also several small snippets about West’s opposition to abortion “rights.” I really fail to see how that’s hypocritical. What about being gay would require someone to support abortion? Heck, unplanned pregnancies are not even something gay people often have a problem with.
So in summation, we have 1 “maybe-depending-on-the-uncorrobrated-testimony-of two-felons" and 6 “no”s to the question as to whether West is a hypocrite. Not quite enough to get in a tizzy about. I do agree that some of this stuff was pretty stupid and I wouldn't be jumping around to elect him if I lived in Washington, but I’m not convinced that he’s a self-hating closeted gay. (Update: Just to clarify, I think West is a stupid creepy guy. I wouldn't vote for him. The only issue being discussed here is whether or not his record proves that he is a hypocrite, especially well enough for the newspaper to be writing the story that they did. I think not.)
Read the rest of the story. It’s chock-full with your typical liberal rhetoric that any gay conservative must be a conflicted, angry, and hate himself and that it’s their right to out him because “It’s really hurting a lot of people, especially gay youth." This comment is also really great.
“For a politician to be (privately) gay and to be so anti-gay is an abuse of power,” Reguindin said.
Um, OK. An abuse of power…sure. Them gay-outin' liberals sure are smart.
More at Say Anything, who also isn't impressed with West in general.
Update: Success! The Seattle-Post Intelligencer has archives going back to 1986 (registration required). In May of 1986 Rep. Glenn Dobbs proposed Initiative 490 which “would prohibit knowingly employing homosexuals and other "sexually deviant" people in schools, day-care centers, foster care programs and other government employment that involves contact with children, the elderly, people in detention and mentally or physically handicapped people.” It needed 151,133 signatures to put it on the ballot, which it failed to get, so it never even got close to passing. Not a single one of the 10 stories that mentioned the Initiative mentioned Jim West in any way shape or form.
The reason given for the bill was that homosexuals are more likely to be child molesters. (This was presumably in response to a story I found several months earlier about a day care worker accused of abusing 5 children.) Of course the old meme that most child molesters are heterosexuals was pulled out. This is of course true, but most people are heterosexual so that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If we take the number from the article that 20% of child molesters are homosexual and 4% of the population is homosexual (which may be a slight overestimate is anything), then we can calculate what your chances are that you’ll be a child molester if you are gay. Let’s take the population of the US as 296 million and the number of child molesters as 4 million. In that case, if you’re heterosexual, you have a 1.1% chance of being a child molester, whereas if you’re homosexual, you have a 6.8% chance of being a child molester. Therefore, you’re over 6 times more likely to be a child molester if you’re a homosexual. Of course the numbers overall are low enough that I don’t think homosexuals should be banned from working with children for that reason.
Now as to the question about whether this proves West is a hypocrite, it’s still up in the air. We have determined that such an animal exists, (although, Spokesman Review, it was an initiative, not a bill) but we haven’t determined exactly what West said about it. I would at least like to see his entire quote to the Spokesman Review. More later, perhaps, as I look at more newspapers. (There’s only one webpage in all the internet that mentions the initiative, and then only in passing with no details.)
Just as a reminder, the Spokesman Review says
In 1986, he supported a bill allowing criminal background checks for jobs involving children. The measure was necessary because child abusers “often try to gain a position of trust and authority,” West said in a Spokesman-Review interview at the time.
So did West just support the background check part, or was he in favor of the whole thing? We'll see.
Posted by illuminaria at 02:48 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
How Big Is The Wage Gap Really?
I got another email from Friends of Hillary today.
In honor of Equal Pay Day on April 19, Hillary and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT) announced that they were introducing the Paycheck Fairness Act to strengthen equal pay laws and address the pay gap between men and women. "Equality works for all us. Now is the time to make sure that we all work for equality," Hillary said.
The act, which can be found here, extends the Fair Labor Standards Act to apply to applicants rather than just employees. It better defines the allowable factors to validate wage differentials. It extends the non-retaliation provision to say that employers may not retaliate against workers who discuss/disclose their wages or the wages of others. It enhances the penalties. It says that employers may not reduce wages to achieve compliance.
I don’t really have a problem with any of those things, except for the last one. If an employer has a certain budget to pay workers, then it may be impossible to meet that budget and equalize pay without reducing the wages of some people.
It also has a few other interesting sections. For instance, section 5 lays out the ability for the Secretary of Labor to make grants to organizations to teach salary negotiation skill training. I suppose this isn’t bad in theory, but in practice I’m sure it will be taxpayer money being thrown down the hole.
Section 7 says
The Secretary of Labor shall develop guidelines to enable employers to evaluate job categories based on objective criteria such as educational requirements, skill requirements, independence, working conditions, and responsibility, including decision-making responsibility and de facto supervisory responsibility.
This is sort of interesting. Following the guidelines will be voluntary, but still, I doubt that general guidelines of this sort prepared by the government will be all that useful to specific employers with different needs.
Section 8 establishes the “Secretary of Labor's National Award for Pay Equity in the Workplace.” Who wouldn’t love to have that award. It even comes with a medal.
Overall it’s not a bad bill, but I question the need for it. Typically in discussions of this sort, you hear that women make between .62-.76 cents on the dollar in comparison to men. Just on the top of my head, I can think of about a dozen reasons for that number to exist other than employer discrimination. First of all, those numbers compare every single woman to every single man. Since you tend to find more women in certain jobs that tend to be lower paying than similar jobs, this does not necessarily reflect discrimination. For instance, there are more female nurses and more male physicians.
Other reasons include education level, marital status, children and choices about maternity leave, experience, willingness to work more hours, etc. etc. Some of these reasons might be due to discrimination in general, although not all I think, but none of these are factors that employers have much control over. (See my discussion on being a woman in graduate engineering.)
Some of these things, such as willingness to work more hours, have more of an effect in certain areas, such as the medical and legal fields. That is probably why there is more focus on the wage gap in these areas, as this fact sheet from the National Women’s Law Center shows by highlighting the fact that though the overall wage gap is .27 cents (women earn .73 cents for every dollar a man earns), the wage gap for physicians is .42 cents.
You never actually hear what the wage gap is when you control for all those factors, so I set out to find some numbers on it.
(Check out the Hillary Watch catagory for more stuff Hillary Clinton has been up to.)
I found a 1999 study, which was mentioned mentioned in a fact sheet from the National Women's Law Center, called New Evidence On Sex Segregation And Sex Differences In Wages From Matched Employee-Employer Data (which, incidentally, was done right here at MU.)
The study uses data from the 1990 census. (Seeing that the data is 15 years old, we can certainly take the results with a grain of salt.) They control for education, marital status, race, and location. They also attempt to control for experience and maternity choices, although they have to extrapolate a estimate of those effects based on the number of children and age since the census does not ask about those things specifically, so we can not be confident that those things are properly controlled for. Using these controls, they say
Overall, our estimates indicate that from about one-quarter to one-half of the sex wage gap takes the form of wage differences between men and women within narrowly-defined occupations within establishments.
Further, when they restricted their study to women under the median age of 40, they found that not only was there less of a wage gap (.26 versus .38), but that a smaller percentage of that wage gap was due to the individual’s sex (20 and 31%).
Since these are women under the age of 40, they presumably entered the workforce around 1968 and later. Since things that happen early in your career have lasting effects throughout your life, a lot of the women being studied in this case probably had more effects of discrimination and family choices than women entering the workforce today, so we should still take these numbers with a grain of salt.
The two different percentages are due to making comparisons using a different number of occupations. Using 13 occupations gives the 31% figure, whereas using 491 occupations gives the 20% figure. Since these occupations cover a wide range of industries, including manufacturing and non-manufacturing jobs, It would not be hard to understand that using more occupations would probably give a more accurate figure. Even within, for instance, a software company, there are many different delineations that would have an effect on salary.
If we go ahead and use these numbers anyway, despite the possible problems and the fact that they are 15 years old, we find that the amount of wage gap due to solely gender and not to education, experience, gaps in career etc., is about .05, meaning that women make 95 cents on the dollar compared to men. That’s a lot different from the numbers you usually hear. And, as the study says,
We do not attempt in this paper to determine the underlying forces that cause men and women to have different wages within narrowly-defined occupations in the same establishments. Our results simply suggest that there is still research to be done in order to identify these forces. In particular, our results leave open the possibility that within narrowly-defined occupations and establishments, men and women are performing essentially the same job but are not being paid equally–a violation of the Equal Pay Act. Further research into the sources of within-establishment, within-occupation sex wage differences is therefore much more important than previously thought.
Therefore, it’s impossible to tell how much of the estimated 5 cent wage gap is directly attributable to employer discrimination and how much is attributable to other factors, such as, for example, willingness to work overtime when needed. It doesn’t seem to me to be something to get in such a tizzy over that we need to pass a new bill when we already have one to address this problem.
Of course people that fought genuine discrimination tend to be unable to let it go once the problem has been mostly fixed, and politicians are always willing to use that, so I suppose this bill is not too much of a surprise. I don't think it would be too out of line to suggest that Hillary is using this bill to appeal to her base and make up for for things her base don't like, such as the religious discrimination act she has been working on with Kerry and her recent comments on abortion.
Update: This Town Hall column points out that women who have never married or had children make .17 cents more on the dollar than their male counterpoints. He also points out that "any half decent businessman would bend over backward to hire women if they were doing equal work so cheaply." I remain unenthused about the terrible wage gap problem.
Linked at Outside the Beltway
Posted by illuminaria at 07:25 PM | Comments (1)
September 11, 2004
Killian Memos and Kerning
Hosted at the request of RainaBear.orgNote: Before you read this, I know that what I'm talking about in this article is not technically kerning. What I'm talking about here has been called character spacing, psudo kerning, first degree adjustment, etc. etc. I don't care what you call it. The point is, it's there in Word and the memos and not in the IBM Selectric Composer text.
Note number 2: One of the amusing things about having this up and getting lots of hits is that I can follow referrals and see what people are saying about me. Mostly it has been enlightening and helped me to fix some errors and explore some other questions. However, I really enjoyed this sniping little argument going on over at forums.appleinsider.com. It was quite amusing, thanks guys. And just to clear up some points for those people who come over with any sort of partisan blinders on, I actually consider myself to be a libertarian but I'm pretty young and I'm still settling down into my political views. I've been a flaming liberal and a staunch conservative at different times in my 24 years.
As to who I am, I'm a 24 year old woman with bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. I'm currently working on a masters in Electrical Engineering. I don't have any formal experience in typesetting or word processing or anything, but like most people I have eyes and a brain, as well as an interest in technical issues. I don't think the questions here are so complex that you have to be an expert to think about them. Trusting only in experts and not in our own faculties leaves us completely at the mercy of the experts, and what happens if they don't agree? Apparently then some people just agree with the expert who happens to be on their political side. Certainly this doesn't mean that I'm not going to listen to experts, but I'm going to look at their arguments and reasoning, not just their conclusions. In this case, the experts certainly seem to be coming down on the side of forgeries anyway.
And finally, as some have laughingly hinted at, I'm not Karl Rove or some other black Republican conspirator who has started this blog for some sneaky reason. This blog is something that a friend of mine has intermitently been working on coding for about three months, and since he has more bandwidth than I do, I asked him to host this entry of mine, which was originally on my website rainabear.org, which I have been using to write intermintant completely non-political journal entries in for about 2 and a half years. You can go there and check and send me email to that address or whatever.
I don't usually talk about politics in my journal, but I just can't help it in this case. This CBS forged memos thing is just absolutely hilarious and sickening at the same time. I've been glued to the computer over the past few days reading everything there is to read.
I've been very interested in all of the technical explanations and the many examples of comparisons between the memos, including the exact match between one of the memos and the exact same thing typed in Microsoft Word and the inexact match between one of the memos and the exact same thing typed on an IBM Selectric Composer.
Through all of this, there's been much talk about kerning, which is where pairs of letters in a certain order are closer together than they are when they are in the opposite order. However, no one has actually done an analysis of the document with pictures to prove that there is kerning, so I decided I'd try it in Photoshop.
I downloaded the documents from CBS, and opened up the one dated August 18, 1973. Then I picked a letter pair that kerns in Microsoft Word, but doesn't kern (or at least not as much) in the opposite order. I found several instances of each letter pair in the document and pasted them into a new document so that they would line up. Here are the results:
Both of the ta sets were lined up by the leftmost line on the t and the right most line on the a . This was somewhat difficult because the document has been copied so many times that all of the letters look slightly different. However, I'm certain that it is exact enough to prove my point.
Likewise the three at sets were lined up by the rightmost curve of the a and the rightmost line of the t .
Then the leftmost characteristic, the slash of the t on the ta pairs and the curve of the a on the at pairs, of the two different sets were lined up with one another. Then a line was lined up with the rightmost characteristic of the ta pairs to see if it lined up with the rightmost characteristic of the at pairs.
Obviously it does not. The line actually intersects with the next letter after the at pairs. The at pair is thinner than the ta pair. This is kerning.
As an example, I did the same thing using 12 pt Times New Roman font in Microsoft Word.
Here again, it is obvious that there is kerning. Since this image has not been copied over and over, we can see the source of the kerning: the tail of the a is under the slash of the t . If you look at the at pair in " coat " from the memos, you can also see that the tail of the a is under the slash of the t .
NO TYPEWRITER CAN KERN because the typewriter does not know what letters are next to the letter you are typing when you type it. A word processor on a computer can do that, because it makes adjustments to what you have typed previously as you go. A typesetter can also do this because they can have sets of letters on the same block.
No typewriter wrote this memo. The only other options are that the document is a forgery, or that Killian sent out his personal memos to file to a typesetter.
Yet another nail in the coffin.
By the way, I also wanted to do an analysis of some typewritten text from an IBM Selectric Composer to prove (for absolute morons) that typewriters can not do kerning, but I can't find an example in good enough quality that has both the at and ta pairs. If anyone comes across anything, email me at raina at rainabear dot org.
Update: While there are no at and ta pairs to compare on the text typed on the IBM Selectric Composer, there are at pairs. I looked at the at pairs on the memo compared to the text typed by Gerry Kaplan.
The set typed on the typewriter certainly do not look kerned. However, it is also noticeable that the a 's on the typewriter do not have the tail sticking out as far as on the memo. This takes out the possibility of kerning for this letter set altogether, since the tail can't go under the cross of the t and still be readable. I expect this is precisely the main difference between the Press Roman and Times New Roman, and the reason why the spacing here is not much different between the memo and the typewritten text. However, there are enough differences to tell that they aren't the same.
Update: Okay, I'm confused. Everyone has been talking about how kerning is turned off in Microsoft Word automatically. I just typed the same sentence twice in Microsoft Word and then turned the kerning option on for the second sentence. They look exactly the same.
Apparently then the whole kerning option objection is a red herring. The Times New Roman font must be kerned automatically. Anyone else want to try this and see what they think?
Also, someone said that it only looks kerned because some of the characters overlap. I did another experiment in Word where I typed a character and then left the cursor right after it so I could see where the character ends.
The f does indeed overlap, or hang over into the next space, but the a does not, which is the one we're concerned with here.
Update: Some have been complaining about the smudging in the Word at/ta pic above. Here it is again without smudging. (That was something Photoshop was doing automatically when resizing.) Clearly the width is different.
