Monthly Archives: July 2012

Daily Herald: Emanuel, Chicago raiding the suburbs without committing to “regional partnership”

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I posted Sunday about Chicago gaining Motorola Mobility and the suburbs (Libertyville) losing the firm. It is not too surprising that the Daily Herald, a newspaper serving Chicago’s suburbs, is not too fond of the move but they make a larger claim in an editorial: there isn’t much evidence yet that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is committed to “regional partnership.”

But today, Gov. Pat Quinn and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel play by a different set of rules. This isn’t the first time Emanuel has raided suburban business with no significant attempt to forge any sort of regional partnership.

And while we appreciate Quinn’s efforts and relative success at keeping Illinois businesses in Illinois, his favoritism toward Chicago at the expense of the suburbs, at least in this case, is clear.

Though he was under no obligation to do so, Quinn signed off on the agreement to transfer Motorola Mobility’s incentive package to its move to Chicago.

And the thing is, that didn’t happen five minutes before the deal was announced. Yet, suburban officials were kept largely in the dark until the deal was done.

This is an ongoing point of contention in the Chicago region. When I heard Mayor Daley speak at Wheaton College, I noted that he talked about regional cooperation but evidence of this happening for some of the biggest issues has been lacking. Mayor Emanuel has made some overtures about the need for regional efforts but it appears that theDaily Herald(and perhaps others?) don’t think this has truly happened yet.

I wonder what it would take for the two sides, Chicago and suburbs, to truly feel like the other side is cooperating. If everything was equal, say both sides got the same number of large firms, would they each be happy? The Chicago area has a long history of many taxing bodies (see the example of 45 mosquito abatement districts in DuPage County here) and it is difficult to get all of these groups working together. Here is my short-term prediction: I suspect both sides will appeal for regional cooperation when they need outside help or funds from other groups but it will be very difficult for them to acknowledge regional partnerships when they might lose something.

The extra-real sound of the Olympics

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For those interested in sounds, this is a fascinating read about how the sound from the Olympics sounds so (hyper)real:

For the London Olympics, Baxter will deploy 350 mixers, 600 sound technicians, and 4,000 microphones at the London Olympics. Using all the modern sound technology they can get their hands on, they’ll shape your experience to sound like a lucid dream, a movie, of the real thing.

Let’s take archery. “After hearing the coverage in Barcelona at the ’92 Olympics, there were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The thud and the impact of the target — that’s a no brainer — and a little bit of the athlete as they’re getting ready,” Baxter says.

“But, it probably goes back to the movie Robin Hood, I have a memory of the sound and I have an expectation. So I was going, ‘What would be really really cool in archery to take it up a notch?’ And the obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target. The pfft-pfft-pfft type of sound. So we looked at this little thing, a boundary microphone, that would lay flat, it was flatter than a pack of cigarettes, and I put a little windshield on it, and I put it on the ground between the athlete and the target and it completely opened up the sound to something completely different.”

Just to walk through the logic: based on the sound of arrows in a fictional Kevin Costner movie, Baxter created the sonic experience of sitting between the archer and the target, something no live spectator could do.

Television is supposed be able to bring you live events (I know this doesn’t necessarily qualify for the Olympics) – I know I don’t think much about what technology this requires. But this article suggests the sound is even better than real: there is no one at the Olympic archery range who is even hearing what televisions viewers can hear.

Does this make watching all of those Olympics commercials a little more bearable?

What I suspected: new homes might be slightly smaller but buyers want more amenities

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Here is a little evidence from the Hartford Courant of something I suspected might happen: people might buy smaller homes but this doesn’t necessarily mean they will be cheaper or have fewer amenities.

While “downsizing” may be the housing buzzword of recent years, not everybody’s doing it. And even those who are buying smaller homes are spending big on upgrades like granite countertops and hardwood floors, area builders say…

The houses may be slightly smaller than the 6,000-square-foot-plus “McMansions” of the past, but “people still want size,” according to Greg Kamedulski, president of the New England division of national builder Toll Brothers, which is building Weatherstone…

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be huge, the house,” said George Santos, sales and marketing director at Plainville-based By Carrier Inc. “A lot of people want new construction because they want to be able to customize the home the way they want it to be.”

“There has definitely been a shift in … the popularity of those very large houses in exchange for those relatively smaller homes but with the same amenities,” said Bill Ferrigno, president of Sunlight Construction, which recently completed Knoll Lane in Avon. Houses on Knoll Lane range from 2,700 to 3,700 square feet…

“People are very concerned with interior appointments — trims, a more sophisticated decorating package, numerous wall colors,” he said. “All these things cost more money, of course.”

So people know that having a home of a certain size is either unnecessary or is frowned upon (it may even be morally wrong) but having the nice interior features is still desirable. Perhaps this is because these interior appointments are not immediately apparent from the outside? Perhaps people now value their own experience of their home and what they want versus what they think people want to see on the outside?

This fall, more than half of college students will be living at home

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New figures suggest that more than half of American college students will be living at home during the fall 2012 semester:

For American students, heading off to college has traditionally also meant physically going away to college. But now, at a time when college costs are soaring, and when news of young people being saddled with burdensome student loan debt is unavoidable, today’s students are trying to trim college expenses in every way possible. More than half of students, in fact, will be living at home when the fall semester begins—up significantly from the 43% of students who commuted a couple of years ago…

The argument that a so-called “higher education bubble” really does exist—and may be in the process of popping—gets a boost especially because it looks like students in wealthier American families, who should be able to pay for pricey colleges, are choosing to stay home in increasingly higher numbers. As USA Today points out:

This year, 47% of students from high-income families, those making more than $100,000, are living at home, nearly double the 24% who did two years ago.

It would be interesting to see this broken down by type of institution. In other words, are students at pricier liberal arts and research schools living at home in greater numbers?

Are there studies that show the impact of living on campus versus commuting? Does it have any impact on learning? Does it have a demonstrable impact on social adjustment and well-being? I assume colleges and universities will have to do more to justify having students live on campus or having them pay so much…

h/t Instapundit

Does Motorola Mobility moving to Chicago weaken the suburbs?

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With the news this past week that Motorola Mobility will be moving from Libertyville to downtown Chicago, a question arose: is Chicago’s gain the suburbs’ loss? Here is part of the discussion:

Rather than a zero-sum game of moving jobs from the suburbs to Chicago, Motorola Mobility’s planned relocation from Libertyville to the Merchandise Mart next year has many upsides. For one it’s another step for the city toward its goal of being a tech hub. That will not only give the company access to a coveted savvy urban workforce but also help Chicago stand out in the increasingly competitive global economy.

“The marketplace for knowledge-based industries favors dense, urban areas — it’s a global phenomenon,” said urban affairs specialit Frank Beal.

“This is not a choice between the city and the suburbs,” added University of Chicago economics professor Austan Goolsbee, “it is between Chicago and some other metro area.”

Goolsbee is correct if one takes a metropolitan view: it doesn’t really matter to the Chicago area if the headquarters is in the Loop or Huntley as long as the jobs, tax revenues, and prestige stay in the region. Yet, this is not so clear from a local perspective: Libertyville loses 3,000 local jobs and Chicago gains them. The mayor of Libertyville is disappointed:

The mayor of north suburban Libertyville says he’s disappointed Motorola Mobility has decided to move its corporate headquarters to downtown Chicago…

The mayor of Libertyville, Terry Weppler, said there are no hard feelings against Emanuel.

“I’ll put our community up against Chicago any day, you know, for any type of amenity whatsoever,” he said…

He said his next plans involve brainstorming what could fill Motorola’s giant corporate campus once it empties out.

I’m not sure Libertyville would win that battle of amenities. And it is clear that Chicago leaders are pretty happy.

But this may be part of a larger trend of large companies seeking out the more exciting and younger life of big cities:

The move brings jobs downtown — part of a reversal of fortune in which the city is now snatching corporations from suburbia. And as a result, a building type with a future that once seemed rock solid now appears under threat. United Airlines vacated its 66-acre Elk Grove Township headquarters — it even has tennis courts — for downtown Chicago beginning in 2007. The campus, designed by SOM, won three different American Institute of Architects awards since its completion in 1968.

The United Airlines campus is for sale. And it isn’t alone. On any given week, the internet and the back pages of trade journals are filled with “for sale” ads for suburban office parks and headquarters. It wasn’t always this way. Much like suburban shopping malls, these corporate utopias — air conditioned, new, private and safe — were once very much the hottest thing around. From the 1960s through the end of the 20th century, corporations — Motorola, Sara Lee, and more — left Chicago for a new life in the ‘burbs.

But now things are changing. Corporations are downsizing and the new generation of workers does not want to toil in the suburbs. A story last week in the Boston Globe discusses how young workers in the tech and creative fields prefer working in cities and getting to work by public transit.
This would fit with recent data suggesting younger adults are not as interested in the suburban life of the Baby Boomers. But it could take some time for suburban communities to figure out what to do with these large office complexes (see an earlier post about the fight in Hoffman Estates about tax breaks for the incomplete Sears complex) , particularly in a down economy where many shopping malls and lifestyle centers are having difficulty.

Of course, the tax breaks to stay in Illinois are still intact with the move:

But Mobility executives pledged a year before the Google takeover to keep Mobility’s well-paying engineering, finance, marketing, design and executive jobs in Illinois so Mobility could benefit from statewide tax credits worth more than $100 million over a 10-year period.

Gov. Pat Quinn said at a news conference in Deerfield that he gave Google “permission” to move from Libertyville to downtown Chicago, since that was the location Google preferred.

Pat Quinn has to provide his permission?

In the end, I would say that moves such as these are not necessarily bad but they could have negative consequences for the community that large corporation is leaving. Just as the big cities of America were hurt by the move of corporations to suburban office parks after World War II, there are negative consequences for suburbs when the move is made in reverse. It will be interesting to see how these moves add to or re-energize urban life. For example, one could look at how many of the Motorola Mobility employees will move to the city after their job moves there. Similarly, is there a way to quantify how much better Motorola Mobility will do once it is located in the city rather than suburbs?

Using Twitter to predict when you will get sick with 90% accuracy

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A new study uses tweets in New York City to predict when a user will get sick – and does so with 90% accuracy.

Using 4.4 million tweets with GPS location from over 630,000 users in New York City, Sadilek and his team were able to predict when an individual would get sick with the flu and tweet about it up to eight days in advance of their first symptoms. Researchers found they could predict said results with 90 percent accuracy.

Similar to Google’s Flu trends, which uses “flu” search trends to pinpoint where and how outbreaks are spreading, Sadilek’s system uses an algorithm to differentiate between alternative definitions of the word ‘sick.’ For example, “My stomach is in revolt. Knew I shouldn’t have licked that door knob. Think I’m sick,” is different from “I’m so sick of ESPN’s constant coverage of Tim Tebow.”

Of course, Sadilek’s system isn’t an exhaustive crystal ball. Not everyone tweets about their symptoms and not everyone is on Twitter. But considering New York City has more Twitter users than any other city in the world, the Big Apple is as good as a place as any for this study.

While one could look at this and marvel at the power of Twitter, I think the real story here is about two things: (1) the power of big data and (2) the power of social networks that Twitter harnesses. If you have people volunteering information about their lives, access to the data, and information about who users are connected to, you can do things that would have been very difficult even ten years ago.

It is interesting that this study was conducted in New York City where there is a high percentage of Twitter users. How good are predictions in cities with lower usage rates? Are we headed toward a world where public health requires people to report on their health so that outbreaks can be contained or quelled?

Argument: Democrats opposed to suburbs

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A new book from a conservative writer suggests Democrats and President Obama are opposed to suburban life. Here are a short excerpt from the introduction:

While public attention has been riveted on high-profile congressional battles over the stimulus, health care, and the debt ceiling, Obama has been quietly laying the regulatory groundwork for a profound transformation of American society. The founders would not approve. From the Pilgrim fathers to the frontier settlers to the post-World War II exodus to the suburbs, Americans have enjoyed the freedom to move and to govern themselves as they have seen fit in their new homes. Yet the spirit of enterprise and self-government that made our country great looks very different to Obama.

In the eyes of Obama’s community organizing colleagues – close followers of Saul Alinsky, the leftist radical who founded the profession – America’s suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed. Moving to a suburb in pursuit of the American dream of an affordable family home and quality, locally controlled schools looks to Obama and his organizing mentors like selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.

Obama means to fix that with regulations designed to force Americans out of their cars and into high-density urban centers, squeezing the population into a collection of new Manhattans. Obama also aims to force suburbanites to redistribute tax money to nearby cities while effectively merging urban and suburban school districts so as to equalize their funding. If you can afford to move to a suburban all, there will no longer be a point. In effect America’s cities will have swallowed up their suburbs. The result: your freedom of movement, America’s tradition of local self-rule, the incentive to better your circumstances, and therefore national prosperity all will have been eroded.

Rush Limbaugh gets in on the conversation here.

So the Republican dreamland is the suburbs? It would be interesting to look at the history of this politically. Couldn’t more rural areas appeal more to conservatives where people truly have more space to spread out and live a more frontier life?

I don’t think there is much question that the Obama administration would like to promote some pro-urban policies such as improved gas mileage, better mass transit, and more integrated schools and neighborhoods. One could argue that the US government has spent the last 80 years primarily promoting suburban growth through the overhaul of mortgage system from the 1930s onward, federal funding for the interstate system, and more. And the move to the suburbs certainly has hurt cities even if the suburbanites themselves are happy about the moves – to argue that there are no negative consequences of suburbanization is simply silly.

But this is a larger issue for conservatives who also think that the UN is after the suburbs through Agenda 21.

h/t Instapundit

Harry Potter conference in Ireland cosponsored by sociology department

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The University of Limerick in Ireland this week hosted a Harry Potter conference. Interestingly, this conference was co-sponsored by the sociology department.

An International Academic Conference exploring the cultural influence of the Harry Potter books and films entitled ‘Magic is Might 2012’ took place at the University of Limerick this week.

The two-day event, which concluded on Wednesday, featured 20 presentations on papers showcasing international research on multiple aspects of the impact of the Harry Potter series from literature, to education, law to digital media. Speakers from over 10 countries presented their work on Harry Potter and the conference also included the live trial of controversial character Dolores Umbridge in the University of Limerick Moot Court exploring her crimes and debating the severity of her punishment…

“The characters’ relationships, the political and social systems, and cultural commentaries woven into Rowling’s writing are just some examples of what makes the Harry Potter series an exciting framework for academic discourse in a number of areas.  We will encourage intensive and lively discussion and debate around the papers. We are delighted that Wizards, muggles, established academics and postgraduate students have submitted papers, and we will put the collection of papers together into an e-book after the conference. We are also very excited to host the first Harry Potter conference to take place in Ireland” she continued…

The Conference was hosted by UL’s Department of Sociology in collaboration with UL’s Interaction Design Centre and the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems.

I’m sure this is not the first or last Harry Potter conference. Yet, I wonder why the sociology department was behind this. I know I don’t read or see all that sociologists publish but I haven’t yet run across any sociological works on Harry Potter. A few ideas why a sociology department might sponsor such a conference:

1. Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon and this is what sociologists study.

2. The sociology department liked the idea of being tied to an international phenomenon. In other words, this is good marketing.

3. The series itself has a number of sociological themes (though the same could be said about other media).

I’d be interested to hear more about the consequences for the sociology department…

Paris’ transit authority has new campaign asking local residents to be less rude

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The transit authority in Paris has a new campaign aimed at getting users to show more etiquette:

Likening Parisians to animals, it shows a variety of them horrifying onlookers with their selfish behaviour.

A hen is shown screaming into a mobile phone while sitting on a packed bus, a buffalo shoves his way on to a commuter train, and other shameless beasts are shown annoying people…

Sociologist Julien Damon, who helped carry out the RATP survey, said: ‘These types of bad behaviour have always existed, but what has changed is that we are less prepared to tolerate them.

‘Our behaviour is more and more geared towards cleanliness and hygiene, like spitting on the ground or smoking in a restaurant now both very frowned upon, and less about common courtesies like simply being polite and nice to each other.’…

The study comes two years after a separate survey of foreigners visiting Paris voted them the rudest people in Europe...

Cecile Ernst, French author of the sociological and etiquette essay ‘Bonjour Madame, Merci Monsieur’ argues that the shockingly loutish behaviour of France’s football team during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when the players went on strike, was a symptom of a broader social trend.

Two quick thoughts:

1. This seems to be motivated in part by perceptions of tourists. Since Paris is one of the top tourist destinations in the world, this is no small matter.

2. I wonder how successful this campaign will be as it utilizes shame and guilt. The posters shown here basically suggest that some current riders are acting like animals. Could a more positive campaign be more effective or would it not attract people’s attention effectively? Imagine if ads like these went up in a major US city…

Seeing urban growth from the Landsat satellite system

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Among other things, the Landsat satellites took pictures of big cities over time. Here are images of 11 of these big cities with roughly 30-40 years between each picture. A few thoughts:

1. I find several of the desert city images, such as Dubai and Las Vegas, to be most fascinating.

2. I’ve always liked overhead or satellite pictures of cities as I think it gives a helpful perspective where one can see the big picture rather than just the nearby area.

3. I’ve wondered several times how difficult it might have been for city dwellers who lived before the 19th century to truly adopt or imagine an overhead view of their city. Clearly, it could be done but it is one thing to imagine and another to see it from an airplane (or hot air balloon or dirigible) or really tall building.

4. I would be interested in spending some time with these images to see if there are discernible patterns. I assume the first thing people would notice is the expansion of development but I assume there are some other things in here such as important transportation corridors (highways and trains) and different kinds of development located in different places.

Bonus: here are some pairs/series of images from American locations.