Monthly Archives: August 2011

Predicting and preventing burglaries though statistical models in Indio, California

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In January 2011, I wrote about how Santa Clara, California was going to use statistical models to predict where crime would take place and then deploy police accordingly. Another California community, Indio, is going down a similar route to reduce burglaries:

The Indio Police Department with the help of a college professor and a wealth of data and analysis is working on just that — predicting where certain burglaries will occur.The goal is to stop them from happening through effective deployment or preventative measures…

The police department began the Smart Policing Initiative a year ago with $220,617 in federal funding from the U.S. Department of Justice…

Robert Nash Parker, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside and an expert on crime, is working with Indio.

On Friday, he shared his methodology for tracking truancy and burglary rates.

He used data from the police department, school district, U.S Census Bureau and probation departments, to create a model that can be used to predict such daytime burglaries.

Nash said that based on the data, truancy seems to lead to burglary hot spots.

A few issues come to mind:

1. Could criminals simply change up their patterns once they know about this program?

2. Do approaches like this simply treat the symptoms rather than the larger issues, in this case, truancy? It is a good thing to prevent crimes or arrest people quickly but what about working to limit the potential for crime in the first place?

3. I wonder how much data is required for this to work and how responsive it is to changes in the data.

4. Since this is being funded by a federal agency, can we expect larger roll-outs in the future? Think of this approach versus that of a big city like Chicago where there has been a greater emphasis on the use of cameras.

The morality of termination rights

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Raustiala and Sprigman over at the New York Times Freakonomics blog take on the morality of copyright termination rights, “an obscure provision of U.S. copyright law…[that] allows songwriters and musicians to…take back from the record labels many thousands of songs they licensed 35 years ago”:

In general, if you decide to sell or perpetually license a piece of property, you can’t later take it back, no matter how much you might want to. So If I sell my house and two years later the city decides to build a lovely public park in my neighborhood, the value of my former house may rise substantially. But no one contends that I can take the house back, or that I’m due a bonus payment from the lucky buyer.  A deal is a deal.

So why the exception for copyright owners?

I have to start somewhere, so it might as well be here:  it’s disingenuous to invoke a home-sy (literally) analogy, show that it fails, and use that failure to “prove” your point.  Raustiala and Sprigman note that “in general,” residential homes are sold outright.  So what?  Equally “in general,” commercial property leases for retail outlets (e.g., stores in shopping center developments) explicitly vary rent payments based on sales (i.e., higher store sales this month/year = higher rent).  Both systems are unobjectionable, assuming one simple fact:  the parties know what kind of deal they are making at the time they make it.

Thus, Raustiala and Sprigman’s analysis falls apart right off the bat.  Termination rights are not a recent phenomenon that nobody knew anything about until a year ago.  Unlike, say, Congress’ decision to re-copyright works that had already fallen into the public domain, termination rights have clearly been a part of U.S. copyright law since 1976.  They may have been “an obscure provision” to the general public reading the Freakonomics blog, but they certainly weren’t obscure to artists and labels.  Raustiala and Sprigman’s characterization is like calling the infield fly rule “obscure”–and then implying that a bunch of MLB players should be out because they didn’t know it existed or how it worked.

They go on:

Think for a moment about the economic effect of the termination provision on the behavior of parties to copyright transactions. Because buyers can expect, on average, to make lower profits when the law contains the termination provision, they will offer less in the initial transaction. Thus, sellers will be more willing to accept less, because they know that if a work later proves valuable, they can terminate and demand some additional payment. So the most likely effect of the termination provision is to force deal prices down across the board….Put differently, the termination provision is a regressive tax.  And in that light, the “fairness” justification for the termination provision is less than overwhelming.

Even assuming this is true, the record labels’ supposed “offer [of] less in the initial transaction” has already happened–35 years ago.  Changing the rules at this point to favor the labels over artists would also seem to invoke its own set of fairness issues.  To put it mildly.

Path for sociology PhDs: official demographers

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Amidst conversations that graduate programs could provide students more help in pursuing non-academic positions, I was reminded of this career path that sociologists can pursue: demography within the public sector.

Steve Murdock, the former head of the U.S. Census Bureau, will be the keynote speaker at the annual general assembly of the Golden Crescent Regional Planning Commission on Tuesday.

Murdock, now a sociology professor at Rice University, was also the first official state demographer for Texas.

He was named one of the 50 most influential Texans by Texas Business in 1997 and as one of the 25 most influential persons in Texas by Texas Monthly in 2005.

According to Murdock’s CV, he has spent much of his career in government, working at the Texas State Data Center, serving as Texas’ first state demographer, and heading the US Census Bureau in 2008 and 2009. This position also seems to have led to some notoriety. How many states have official demographers?

Between Murdock and his successor at the US Census Bureau, Robert Groves, the Census Bureau seems like a good non-academic place for sociology PhDs to land. I wonder how many current and past employees have sociology backgrounds.

More details of unethical US medical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s

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Research methods courses tend to cover the same classic examples of unethical studies. With more details emerging from a government panel, the US medical experiments undertaken in Guatemala during the 1940s could join this list.

From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research — paid for by the U.S. government — that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases…

The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts. It was hidden for decades but came to light last year, after a Wellesley College medical historian discovered records among the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who led the experiments…

During that time, other researchers were also using people as human guinea pigs, in some cases infecting them with illnesses. Studies weren’t as regulated then, and the planning-on-the-fly feel of Cutler’s work was not unique, some experts have noted.

But panel members concluded that the Guatemala research was bad even by the standards of the time. They compared the work to a 1943 experiment by Cutler and others in which prison inmates were infected with gonorrhea in Terre Haute, Ind. The inmates were volunteers who were told what was involved in the study and gave their consent. The Guatemalan participants — or many of them — received no such explanations and did not give informed consent, the commission said.

Ugh – a study that gives both researchers and Americans a bad name. It is also a good reminder of why we need IRBs.

While the article suggests President Obama apologized to the Guatemalan president, is anything else going to be done to try to make up for this? I also wonder how this is viewed in Central America: yet more details about the intrusiveness of Americans over the last century?

(See my original post on this here.)

Measuring colleges by their service to community and country

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Many publications want to get into the college rankings business and Washington Monthly released their own take today. The difference? They emphasize how the college gives back to society:

The Monthly’s list aims to be a corrective to the annual ranking of colleges published by U.S. News World & Report–the industry-standard roster that typically leads with well-endowed Ivy League schools that turn away the vast majority of applicants.

Instead, the Monthly ranks schools using three main categories: how many low-income students the college enrolls, how much community and national service a given college’s students engage in, and the volume of groundbreaking research the university produces (in part measured by how many undergraduates go on to get PhDs). To paraphrase the long-ago dictum of President John F. Kennedy, the Monthly is seeking, in essence, to ask not so much what colleges can to for themselves as what they can be doing for their country.

By that measure, only one Ivy cracked the top 10–Harvard. The University of California system dominated, with six of California state schools among the top 30 national universities. Texas A&M, which is ranked 63rd by U.S. News, shot into the top 20 in part because of how many of its students participate in ROTC. Meanwhile, Washington University in St. Louis plunged in these rankings to 112 from U.S. News’ 13, because only 6 percent of its student body qualifies for federal Pell grants, an indication that Washington’s students come almost entirely from upper- and middle-class backgrounds.

The U.S. News & World Report “relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige for its rankings,” Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris wrote. The U.S. News’ rankings take into account freshmen retention rate, admissions’ selectivity, high school counselors’ opinions of the school, faculty salary, per-pupil spending and the rate of alumni giving, among other things.

While the editor suggests these new rankings are not as influenced by status and wealth, I wonder if the measures really get away from these entirely. It takes resources to enroll low-income students, provide resources ground-breaking research, and perhaps extra time for students to be able to be engaged in community and national service. On the other hand, colleges make decisions about how to spend their money and could choose to put their resources into these particular areas.

I’m sure there will be questions about methodology: how did they measure impactful research? How much should ROTC count for and how did they measure community engagement?

New rankings also give more schools an opportunity to claim that they are at the top. For example, Northwestern College in Iowa now trumpets on their main page that “Washington Monthly ranks NWC third in the nation.” Read past the headline and you find that it is third within baccalaureate colleges. On the other side, will schools like Washington University in St. Louis even acknowledge these new rankings since they don’t look so good?

One problem area in Sociology PhD job market: a mismatch between advertised fields and PhD student’s interests

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MacLeans points out one of the issues raised by a recent ASA publication titled Moving Toward Recovery: Findings from the 2010 Job Bank Survey:

It’s not all good news, however. The report also surveyed PhD candidates and found some major mismatches between their “areas of special interest” and the jobs that were available in 2010.

One of the widest gaps is in criminology (a.k.a. social control, crime, law and deviance), which made up 31 per cent of all postings on the ASA’s job site in 2010, but was only listed as an area of special interest for 18 per cent of PhD candidates whom were surveyed by the ASA.

The opposite problem exists too. More people are interested in “inequities and stratification” than any other field — 35 per cent of candidates chose it as one of their special interests — but only 19 per cent of jobs advertised were in that area.

There’s also a shortage of jobs for those interested in teaching gender and sexuality. One fifth of students are interested in the subject, but only one tenth of advertised jobs were in that field.

The article misses one other subfield with a large difference: 8.4% of advertised jobs were looking for someone in the sociology of culture while 24.3% of students had an interest in this area.

Will the free market work this out? Who needs to change in this area: should students start pursuing these in-demand sub-fields or do graduate programs hold any responsibility, perhaps for encouraging students in subfields that reflect their faculty more than the jobs available in the field?

McMansion defender claims to be fighting against “green jihadists”

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McMansion is a term that can be used pejoratively. And in response to a proposed “mandatory energy star ratings” for Australian houses, McMansion defenders can use their own pejorative terms like “green jihadists”:

It seems rarely a month passes without some new assault on the lifestyle and housing choice preferred by the overwhelming majority of Australians – the detached suburban home.

Denigrated by a careless media as ‘McMansions’ or attacked as some archaic form of reckless housing choice which is ‘no longer appropriate’ (according to some planning or environmental fatwa), the detached home is under a constant assault of falsely laid allegation and intellectual derision…

But you get the strong impression, reading the constant digest of anti-suburban living which parades through mainstream media, that mainstream Australians are a reckless bunch of self-interested misfits whose behaviour and choices need to be controlled by people wiser than them.

And there’s one of the great ironies in all this: those who advocate denying housing choice and enforcing apartments over detached homes, public transport over private, inner city density over suburban expansion, invariably seem to do the opposite of what they preach. Next time you come across one of these green jihadists waging war on the suburban home (and the people who live in them), ask them if they live in a house or a unit, how many children they have, ask how many cars they own, and ask what their power bill is like.

Perhaps those using these terms might consider it fair after the way “McMansion” has been used over the years. Or perhaps some feel that this imposition on their preferred homes is simply crossing such a line that it should be equated with one of the most negative images one can throw around.

While I’ve written before on the meaning of the word McMansion, this might indicate another possible area of research: what sort of discourse McMansion defenders use. I would guess that a common argument, expressed in this piece, is that people are simply buying homes that they want and they shouldn’t be restricted from pursuing their tastes. Additionally, just like this piece, defenders will point at the hypocrisy of the other side.

Two versions of the ASA 2011 bingo card

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Sociologists at orgtheory put out the annual ASA bingo card several days before this year’s meetings. Interestingly, two other sociologists developed their own bingo card after the meetings, one they argue is “more positive”:

There was a popular “bingo card” for the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association held last week in Las Vegas. It poked a bit of fun at sociologists and the meeting itself. Nathan Jurgenson’s reaction was that the card itself revealed much about the sociological discipline and the problems with the annual meetings. He wrote a posthere on Cyborgology calling for a more positive bingo card that might be helpful to improve the conference experience rather than just complaining about what is wrong. It is easy to be annoyed, much harder to be constructive.

CUNY sociologist Jessie Daniels responded to this call, and, together, we have created a more constructive and useful Bingo card that looks specifically at how to improve a conference by augmenting one’s experience with Twitter.

The card describes how conferences in general benefit from engagement on both the physical and digital levels. Conversations taking place move onto the web, and discussions in the “backchannel” flow back into physical space. In fact, we noted this trend during the Theorizing the Web conference this past spring, calling it an “augmented conference.”

And just as I was wondering how much Twitter was actually used during the conference, the same sociologists have a summary. My quick thought: the Twitter use was pretty limited and I imagine it will be some time before Twitter is fully integrated into the conference.

I wonder if someone has a blogging summary about the conference.

On the whole, are sociologists ahead or behind the curve in adopting newer social technologies, like Twitter? Are the patterns tied more to age or education or some other factors?

The problems with white stereotypes in movies like The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird

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Here is an interesting take on how the presentation of white people in The Help (and To Kill a Mockingbird) obscures the existence of racial systems in the Jim Crow South:

This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists…

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

Turner is arguing that the Jim Crow South was a system supported by much of Southern society of all social classes. In contrast, movies can portray racism as being the opinion of particular individuals or of people of smaller social groups. This “whitewash” perhaps helps us feel better today – only bad people were racists – and also reflects our own moral calculus where racists can’t be good people.

But we know from American history that this was not exactly the case. Many “virtuous” and celebrated Southerners supposed slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the North is also complicit: “sundown towns” were the norm and segregation were quite high (and still are). Overall, racism and discrimination still takes place within systems that require beginnings and maintenance provided by people living within the systems and also those in charge.

Schaumburg’s rise due to relocation of Pure Oil headquarters in 1958

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Schaumburg may be well-known for Woodfield Mall but the Chicago suburb was helped on the path to becoming an edge city (see Joel Garreau’s 1991 book) when Pure Oil relocated from downtown Chicago to fields near Schaumburg in the late 1950s:

Frandsen knows it all started nearly 15 years earlier with the construction of the Pure Oil building on the opposite side of Golf Road — the same building that’s now Roosevelt University’s Schaumburg campus…

Though a corporation’s move from the city to the suburbs is a scenario that’s been repeated many times since, one difficulty at the time was establishing a fair and true price for land that had previously been purely agricultural, Frandsen said.

Along with the company’s move came its employees’ relocation to the suburbs as well. Frandsen and his growing family moved to Arlington Heights, one of the nearest residential areas to the office site which was then in unincorporated Palatine Township.

Unlike today, when the one-story building crouches behind a taller strip mall to the south and IKEA to the north, Pure Oil’s headquarters sat like an island among the fields that continued to be leased to farmers.

It is critical to remember that the post-World War II suburbanization boom in the United States wasn’t just about people moving to the suburbs: many businesses relocated as well. Businesses moved for a variety of reasons including being closer to employees, finding cheaper land and lower taxes, wanting to have more “campus-like” developments, and being closer to the homes of executives.

If Pure Oil really did help kickstart the corporate boom in Schaumburg, this story doesn’t sound too different than that of Naperville where the opening of a Bell Labs facility in the mid 1960s along the relatively new East-West Tollway led to a number of other firms also locating nearby. Both Pure Oil and Bell Labs were originally outside of municipal boundaries and were eventually brought into city limits through annexation. Both Schaumburg and Naperville were already communities prior to the coming of these firms and the arrival of new kinds of businesses pushed community leaders to pursue new opportunities. This shift toward office space and white-collar jobs transformed both suburbs.