Monthly Archives: January 2011

Why we talk so much about the weather

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The headline at ChicagoTribune.com: “Blizzard may be ‘life threatening.’” There were similar headlines throughout the day on the front page of Yahoo! (with the latest version of the story here). Yes, there are predictions for a big storm but why do we talk about the weather so much?

My own thoughts: for the average American adult, the weather is perhaps the only constant in our days that we feel we can’t control. With a certain level of income, most Americans can handle day-to-day matters pretty easily: food is easy to obtain, we have generally large and nice shelters, transportation (by car) is available to many, jobs are decent and give us something to do (even with recent higher unemployment figures). Wars are distant and we know that many in the world face much tougher conditions. But we can’t control the weather. A blizzard bearing down on us reminds us that there are some areas in life of which we can only respond. There is a Christian theme in here if we take a moment to ponder it: we are ultimately not in complete control of our lives, this is okay, and perhaps we should remind ourselves of this more often.

(Additionally, the weather is a common, safe topic that can pull people together. It is hard to be offensive or rude when bringing up the weather. Since we all have to deal with it, it can help bring about group solidarity if we have a neutral topic to fall back on.)

The morality of going to the gym

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The adult life is often made of up little tasks that must be done to live: go to work, prepare and eat meals, do laundry, and various other activities. Perhaps there is another activity that must be added to this list: getting exercise and/or going to the gym.

“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”

The message that perspiration is a gateway to, and reflection of, higher virtues is captured in health club slogans like ones used by the Equinox chain over recent years: “Results aren’t always measured in pounds and inches.” “My body. My biography.” “It’s not fitness. It’s life.” The same idea is encoded in the language of personal improvement. A “new you” usually means a trimmer, tauter version, not someone who has learned to speak Mandarin or picked up woodworking skills.

And the pectoral is political. The current president and his predecessor have made ostentatious points of their commitments to fitness routines. Whatever the differences in their ideologies, intellects and work habits, George W. Bush and Barack Obama both let voters know that they carve out time almost daily for cardio or weights or both. And while that devotion could be seen as evidence of distraction (Bush) or vanity (Bush and Obama), each politician safely counted on a sunnier takeaway. In this country, at this time, steadiness of exercise signals sturdiness of temperament, and physical leanness connotes mental toughness…

To be unfit is to be unfit: a villain of the culture, indeed.

An interesting commentary. More broadly, these ideas seemed tied to American ideals of youth and health. We like politicians and athletes and movie stars who are physical specimens. We argue that disciplining the body is indicative of discipline in other areas of life. Being healthy is not just being an appropriate weight or eating right or limiting stress: it should include muscles and toning.

Some questions follow:

1. Do other cultures have similar ideas or are we unusual in this regard?

2. When or where did the emphasis on muscles, beyond just “being fit,” arise?

3. For the average American, how much of this judgment regarding exercise and going to the gym comes from people around them versus comparing themselves to media produced images?

4. How much have professional sports contributed to this? If you look at athletes in the 1950s and 1960s, they did not train as much. Today, being an athlete is a full-time, full-year job in order to stay in shape.

The sun never sets on legal un(der)employment

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John Flood, a U.K. legal scholar and sociologist, comments on the well-documented travails of recent U.S. law graduates, noting that their U.K. counterparts are facing similar difficulties as globalization changes the practice of law the world over:

What we’ve seen in the UK is a disjunct between the numbers of law students coming into the academy and the numbers of jobs available. For many the problem is that the academy is producing too many law graduates and should be more sensitive to job availibility rates….[T]here is also a big rise in the use of paralegals and I don’t mean those trained to be paralegals. Rather the unemployed would-be lawyers are turning to paralegaling in the hope that a training contract might open up while they are there.

What will entrench the stratification of the market is the opening up (de- and re-regulation) of the legal services market that’s now taking place. Fewer jobs will need to be done by fully-qualified lawyers. They can instead be carried out by a range of people qualified for certain legal and quasi-legal tasks. This is where corporatized law meets Tesco Law. [Tesco is a U.K.-based retailer similar to Wal-Mart.]

The US legal profession still thinks it can maintain a headlock on the control of the profession. How long for? At the expense of a cheap shot, [Egyptian President] Mubarek is finding a 30-year rule coming to end; [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair only lasted for 10 years before he was ejected. Permanent monopoly becomes increasingly hard to justifiy, especially in a global market.

Flood also references a recent Above the Law article, which noted that Thomson Reuters recently

announced that it was exploring the sale of BAR/BRI, its bar exam prep business, and purchasing Pangea3, a legal process outsourcing company. That’s a strong message that they think there’s more of a future in hiring people to do low-end legal work, work that technically doesn’t constitute “practicing law” under legal ethics rules, than in training the practitioners of the future.

I’d like to see a quantitative analysis backing up some of Flood’s assertions, but his general points are well taken:

  • There are more lawyers than jobs.
  • Many law jobs do not, objectively speaking, require lawyers.
  • Much legal work can be done at a distance–even across international borders–as a back-office service.
  • In the long- (and maybe even the short-) run, the established legal cartels are no match for these forces of globalization.

Comparing pollution in cities versus suburbs

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The Infrastructurist sums up a new study that compares pollution generated in cities versus that produced in the suburbs:

To illustrate this point, the authors of the new report examine per capita emissions rates in three locales in the greater Toronto region. The lowest per capita emissions rate (1.31 tons of carbon) belonged to the inner-city neighborhood of East York, home to dense apartments within walking distance of a commercial center and public transit. The highest rate (13.02) was found in Whitby — pictured at the top of this post — a sprawling suburb whose residents rely on automobiles to reach the shopping districts. Splitting the difference was Etobicoke (6.62), an area full of single-family homes but still accessible to the downtown core via public transportation.

The authors conclude:

The most important observation is that there is no single factor that can explain variations in per capita emissions across cities … .

An equally important observation, I might contend, is that the conversation about reducing emissions shouldn’t stop at the city limits.

It would be interesting to know what the authors then recommend.

But the larger issue still seems to be how to convince suburbanites that this pollution and emissions issue is a big enough one that they should change their behavior. Is some more pollution worth it to have the personal freedom and autonomy of living in a suburban, single-family home where you can drive in your car from place to place?

Vast worlds of discovery

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In case you thought the age of discovery was over, Wired’s Threat Level blog is reporting that a 21-year-old hacker George Hotz who released the PlayStation 3 jailbreak has been ordered to surrender

any and all computer hardware and peripherals containing circumvention devices, technologies, programs, parts thereof, or other unlawful material, including but not limited to code and software, hard disc drives, computer software, inventory of CD-ROMS, computer diskettes, or other material containing circumvention devices, technologies, programs, parts thereof, or other unlawful material.

As Hotz lawyer put it,

The information sought at issue [the jailbreak code] is less than 100 kilobytes of data. Mr. Hotz has terabytes of storage devices….Impounding his computers, it’s like starting a forest fire to cut down a single tree.

Though the court’s order does seem like overkill, it is unfortunately a typically broad discovery request.  Sony may simply be trying to harass Hotz and/or hamper any future work, a theory especially plausible insofar as the court also ordered that Hotz “shall retrieve” the jailbreak he posted.  Given the number of websites that have re-posted Hotz’s original code, this would seem to be impossible.  As Hotz’s lawyer rather cogently quipped, ““Mr. Hotz can’t retrieve the internet.”

Wired has posted the judge’s order here (PDF).

A growing number of “encore careers”

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Retirement is an interesting topic these days in the United States: can people retire after the losses in the recent economic crisis? How will society pay for Social Security and medical benefits when all those Baby Boomers retire? How will states (and other organizations) pay for pensions that have been underfunded?

One answer: have those who have retired enter an “encore career.”

Daly is part of the growing “encore careers” movement — an effort to match older workers who can’t or don’t want to retire with public service jobs that benefit society. The movement, begun in the late 1990s, has spawned non-profit groups and programs from Boston to Portland, Ore., aimed at helping older workers find new work. Many of the programs are run by people who have made the transition.

At a time when 77 million Baby Boomers ages 46-65 are moving toward traditional retirement age, analysts say the movement could grow exponentially in the coming decades. A 2008 survey by MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures, a national think tank on boomers and work, found more than 5 million Americans in encore careers. Half of those ages 44-70 expressed interest in them.

Moving from one career to a more altruistic job late in life isn’t easy, however. Analysts say there aren’t enough of those jobs yet, the pay is usually low and employers often favor younger applicants.

It seems to me that there is a larger issue underlying these practical obstacles: as a society, do we value the kinds of contributions older citizens can make? Those who have retired or are nearing retirement have a wealth of experience, related to jobs and working but also a variety of important life lessons and skills,  that the rest of society could benefit from. But if we are a society that tends to value youth and novelty, then these encore careers might not be something we encourage.

Ultimately, a movement like this could end up being a nice solution to some of the demographic and financial issues that face the country in the next few decades. If the number of these jobs could grow, those who have retired can share their experiences and wisdom while also earning some money in order to ease the financial burden on broader society.

More info on how Internet helped movement in Tunisia

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There have been a number of news stories that have suggested that the Internet played a role in the recent political movement in Tunisia that ousted the government. In an interview with Wired, the director of the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) gives more information about what happened:

During its 15-year existence, the ATI had a reputation for censoring the internet and hacking into people’s personal e-mail accounts. All Tunisian ISPs and e-mail flowed through its offices before being released on the internet, and anything that the Ben Ali dictatorship didn’t like didn’t see the light of day…

The revolution began Dec. 17 in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, when 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the humiliating tactics of local officials. The suicide jolted Tunisians. They began to protest in the streets — and clash with police.

Around 100 people died throughout the country. The media, controlled by Ben Ali’s advisers, reported only that criminals were looting.

But videos of the protests, riot police and their victims appeared on Facebook, and bloggers began reporting the daily events with first-hand accounts, photographs and videos. This information helped drive the uprising, and the government responded by allegedly hijacking Tunisian Facebook passwords.

At the same time, hackers began to attack the Tunisian government’s control over the internet. They bombed the ATI’s DNS and website, and tried to bomb the e-mail centipede gateway. The National Computer Security Agency — which fights hacking, phishing, viruses and fraud — took on the activists who tried to overload government websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks.

“When the hackers did DDOS they did a good job, and Anonymous did a good job,” Saadaoui says, smiling. “But not on everything. They weren’t able to take down the DNS, they weren’t able to take down the main servers or the network, but they were able to DDOS websites. They were able to bomb Ben Ali’s website.”

And there is some interesting talk about the future of the Internet in Tunisia: completely open or will the government still have some control in order to block sites that go against conservative Islamic teachings?

So it sounds like the Internet was used in two ways by those in the revolutionary movement:

1. The spreading of information through sites like Facebook. This would help keep people coordinated as well as alert the outside world to what was happening.

2. A number of hackers took the opportunity to attack the government’s Internet infrastructure. They had some success though they couldn’t bring the whole system down.

Is this the way future social movements will happen: through quick information spreading (Facebook, Twitter, whatever comes next) plus hackers trying to disrupt government activity? It would be interesting to know more about these hackers: have they attacked the government before, were they just waiting for an opportunity like this, were they coordinating their actions with those of protesters on the street?

A student’s inside view of the Sociology of Lady Gaga course

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Several months ago, the Internet was worked up over a new sociology class being offered at the University of South Carolina: Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame. I read numerous articles about this with a number asking some variation on the question, “How exactly is this proper material for a college course?”

A student in the course offers an inside view – and it sounds like they are doing what the course title says: sociology.

I’m four classes into “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame,” and every day, someone new demands, “What are you doing in there?” Maybe, like Cosmo, they envision that I clothe myself in bubble wrap and lunch meat as part of my pre-class ritual…

This is a serious course about the sociology of music. What it does not cover: The coded symbolism behind “Alejandro”; Gaga’s decision to wear a dress made of Kermit the Frogs; whether she has a disco stick for real. This is, as my professor underlines, a class about the social conditions that contribute to the fame of Lady Gaga.

And here is the description of the final project for the class:

At this point, we will turn in research papers detailing a single social condition contributing to Gaga’s fame – and then, we will analyze her fame. The findings of our papers will have an effect on the direction of discussion because, as Deflem argues, fame is as much about the fans that popularize the famous as it is about the artist.

Although the subject matter and the title are aimed at gaining attention (it seems to have worked to some degree as the student says some students are in the class because they are curious – though I doubt the school could have guessed at the number of outside people who ended up commenting on the class), the class sounds like a fairly normal sociology class: to explain why social life happens as it does.

And the headline, “Why Lady Gaga Class Is Not Sexy,” seems misleading as the student suggests she keeps coming back to class to see “where this semester is going and just how Gaga we’re going to get.”

About that New Jersey radio ad running in Illinois and asking businesses to relocate

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On the drive home from work last week, I heard a new radio advertisement where New Jersey governor Chris Christie appealed to Illinois businesses to take advantage of New Jersey’s business-friendly climate. The typical appeal was made: possible tax breaks or incentives, proximity to New York City and other notable cities, and an able work force await in New Jersey. Hear the ad here. (And New Jersey is not the first state to make an appeal in Illinois since Illinois raised its personal income and business tax rates.)

On the question of whether such radio advertisements actually do draw businesses to another state: I would guess that the success rate is low. In fact, perhaps the main goal is not to attract businesses from Illinois but rather to alert New Jersey residents that the state government is doing all it can to attract businesses and jobs and that it has a good business climate compared to other states. States have certain options by which they can attract jobs or make direct appeals to businesses and an opportunity like this, where a state notably raises taxes, presents an opportunity to make a comparison.

A few other pieces of information would be helpful in interpreting this advertisement:

1. How exactly does New Jersey’s business climate compare to Illinois in areas like the tax rate, labor force, etc.? How many businesses have moved back or forth in recent years?

2. Is Christie’s ad politically motivated? Here is a chance for a Republican governor to tweak a Democratic state.

h/t Instapundit

Trying to figure out whether to support Mubarak or the people in Egypt is not the first time the US has been in this position

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In the United States, part of the coverage of the happenings in Egypt involves how the United States should respond. As has been noted by many, the US is stuck in a difficult position: we have generously supported Mubarak but we also claim to be about freedom and democracy. How can we balance these two approaches, particularly when our larger strategic goals in the Middle East region are tied to Israel and Egypt’s long-term support of this country?

It would be helpful is this difficult position would be put in some historical context. This is not the first time this has happened for the United States (nor is it likely to be the last time). Since the end of World War Two when the United States emerged as a superpower, we have ended up in this position numerous times in countries around the world. Look at Iran. Look at Chile. This has occurred in recent years in Palestine – does the United States support open and democratic elections if it means that Hamas is voted into power? In order to further our strategic interests, we have ended up supporting dictators. Some commentators have said Egypt presents the same conundrum: support Mubarak or open it up to the possibility that the Muslim Brotherhood could come to power?

When American presidents speak about advancing freedom (President George W. Bush did this openly for years when talking about Afghanistan and Iraq), could people around the world take them seriously? On one hand, we claim to be a beacon of light in the world. On the other hand, we act in ways that seem at odds with the interests of “the people” in other countries.

All of this could lead to some interesting long-term discussions in the United States about approaching global politics.

(As an aside, it has been interesting to watch live coverage on the Internet from Al Jazeera English. I just heard an anchor openly argue with an official in Mubarak’s ruling party about whether the people in the streets were mobs or not – the official said they were looting and burning and creating disorder, the anchor kept saying that the protesters were peaceful and just wanted democratic elections. This perspective is quite different from coverage in the United States.)