Monthly Archives: October 2012

Waiting in line across cultures

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Waiting in line works in different ways across the world:

Different societies, of course, exhibit different queuing cultures, according to sociologist David R. Gibson of Princeton University. Here are some of Gibson’s observations, anecdotal and otherwise:

* “The Brits are famous for their lines Southern Europeans much less so.”

* “A friend from Israel tells me that Israelis fall into the queuing-challenged category.”

* “Sometimes there are other procedures for determining who gets served first. I once had a student from Pakistan who told me that in mixed-sex lines, women get served first … and old men second, out of respect for their seniority.”

* “In high school lunch lines social status, especially tied to athleticism, sometimes trumps order of arrival.”

This may seem like a more inconsequential social norm but people spend a lot of time waiting in line. I remember being struck by the waiting in line procedure for the BART in San Francisco. Unlike Chicago where the trains stopped at different points and people massed around the doors to board with little regard for who was first, the trains there stopped at marked spots on the platform and people lined up respectfully on these spots and waited their turn. Or think about merging in traffic when lanes are reduced; this is a form of waiting in line where drivers can act very aggressively. Or think of some of the current debates about health care; do Americans want to have “wait lists” for medical procedures as some claim will happen with nationalized medical care? Or some of the somewhat controlled chaos that ensues when Americans line up at midnight for Black Friday sales. During my experience last year lining up several hours before midnight at Best Buy, we spent more than three hours in line (over one outside the several, around two inside the store waiting to check out and/or order on-sale items) just for some consumer savings.

If I were asked to describe American patterns for standing in line, I’m not sure I could really describe it. Generally first come, first served. Most of the time people really do not like the idea of others cutting or budging in line. We generally don’t like waiting in line because we think our time is really valuable and that organizations should work more efficiently to meet our individual needs.

A new process to designate historic districts in Salt Lake City

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After a contentious recent debate over a possible historic district, Salt Lake City decided to redesign the process:

The goal of the whole exercise is to preserve historic neighborhoods or just plain nice, older neighborhoods from demolitions, outsized remodels and McMansions. The new process can lead to a historic district or landmark site, or it can lead to something less restrictive called a character conservation district.

In both cases, property owners can start the ball rolling by circulating a petition. If 15 percent of property owners within the proposed district sign petitions within six months, the Historic Landmark Commission and the Planning Commission write reports and hold hearings. Ballots would then be mailed to all property owners of record, who would have 30 days to vote for or against the district. If a simple majority supports designation, then a simple majority vote of the City Council could create it. If less than a simple majority of property owners favors a district, then a two-thirds vote of the City Council would be required to create a district.

As you can see, this is not a pure democracy. The City Council could create a district even if a majority of property owners voted against it. But zoning by referendum is not a good idea, either, because sometimes the public interest should trump the wishes of property owners.

A petition to designate a district also could be started by the mayor or by a majority of the City Council, but the same signature and voting processes for property owners would apply.

Lots of communities with established neighborhoods struggle with this issue: how to balance the concerns of property owners and neighborhood residents? This new process seems to put the onus on the voters who have an interest in each neighborhood; if they have a strong opinion about a historic district, they have time to vote. And it seems like the process recognizes the potential for another common issue that arises in communities: how to get enough people to participate in order to reach a consensus? The threshold for moving a petition to the City Council only requires 15% of property owners to be involved and later, the Council can approve a historic district with less neighborhood involvement.

I would be interested to see how well this new procedure fares. These sorts of cases between communal and personal interests are not easy to sort out, particularly when the potential large teardown McMansions are involved. Neighborhoods do change over time but local residents who bought into or who are used to a particular atmosphere or character can be quite resistant.

Does demolishing buildings in Chicago actually reduce crime rates?

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Chicago has pursued a policy of tearing down vacant buildings to help reduce crime but one expert doesn’t think it is making much of a difference:

Today, the city of Chicago demolished its “200th dangerous building” since July 12, according to the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The mayor stated in a press release that demolitions are “preventing criminal activity in our neighborhoods.”

Is this true? “We’ve been knocking down houses since the 1930’s and it’s not clear if this has a significant effect on crime rates,” says Bradford Hunt, a sociology professor at Roosevelt University who studies Chicago housing issues…

The city murder rate has since declined, even still the number of homicides this year has surpassed 2011’s 435 total murders. Last year’s murder rate was the city’s lowest since 1965.

Chicago has traditionally been “more aggressive in doing tear downs than other cities,” Hunt says, citing Detroit as an example of a city that does not allocate crime resources to building demolitions.

In the late 1990’s, crime went down in Chicago during a spree of building teardowns, including public housing projects. But Hunt notes that the ebbing of the crack cocaine epidemic was the main cause for the 90s crime drop. Teardowns and subsequent displacement of residents have not been clearly linked to either an increase or decrease in crime.

Emanuel’s demolitions are concentrated in a few South Side and West Side police districts with high crime rates. DOB spokeswoman Susan Masell says her department works with the police department to pick buildings for demolition, looking at edifices that get a lot of 911 or 311 calls and are “structurally compromised.”

Knowing Chicago’s past regarding demolishing public housing (such as Cabrini-Green as I wrote about here and here), the continued lengthy wait lists for public housing, how the sites for public housing were chosen in the first place (generally located in already-downtrodden areas), and the shortage of affordable housing in Chicago, I suspect this is more to this story. Getting rid of these buildings might be reducing the potential for crime but it also helps clear out unsightly buildings that have little potential for redevelopment. Such buildings might take a long time to rehab or remove otherwise but suggesting they are part of a crime problem makes them an easier target.

If knocking down such buildings is so effective for fighting crime, why aren’t more cities pursuing this option?

The financial reasons The Woodlands, Texas does not want to incorporate

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Many communities want to incorporate so they can control land use as well as fund and provide local services. But The Woodlands, Texas has resisted incorporation for financial reasons:

For one, The Woodlands is one of the nation’s best case studies when it comes to weighing the costs and benefits of incorporation. According to Bruce Tough, Chairman of the township’s seven-member Board of Directors, his community boasts an unprecedented level of success when it comes to governance, public services, and environmental excellence. Just 20 years after it was founded, the township had won a Special Award for Excellence from the Urban Land Institute and a LivCom Nations in Bloom Gold Award. Residents enjoy more than 190 miles of hiking and biking paths. A little over 20 percent of the township’s acreage is set aside for green space, greenbelts, and golf courses…

Unlike similarly successful (and now former) townships including Irvine, California, The Woodlands has reliably refused to incorporate as either a standalone city or part of Houston, even as the issue is raised every few years by developers, residents, or the city of Houston, which provides municipal services such as waste removal, water, and local law enforcement from the sheriff’s department. Tough points to the township’s one-of-a-kind public service provider agreement with Houston and the fact that the township is run more like a business than a municipal government as the primary reasons why The Woodlands doesn’t need to incorporate. Houston agrees not to annex The Woodlands during the next 50 years. In exchange, The Woodlands continues to make service payments to Houston.

Among residents, the question of incorporating is primarily a financial concern. Research indicates that becoming a standalone city could raise property taxes in The Woodlands from 32.5 cents up to anywhere from 58.14 cents to a staggering 81.5 cents per $100 valuation. (By comparison, the property tax rate in Houston hovers around 63 cents.) The costs would include road maintenance, setting up new sewage and water provisions, and establishing a separate police department. Estimates for just those few basic services reach into the hundreds of millions, costs residents fear would be added to their annual tax bills…

For now, The Woodlands residents can relax. For its population, the township has one of the lowest tax rates in the United States but more and better services than similar counterparts. There is no local income tax charged in The Woodlands, and Texas is one of seven states without state income tax. The bulk of their tax money comes from sales tax levied against visitors who flock to the downtown promenade and amphitheater.

This is an interesting case but it sounds like the primary reason The Woodlands has not incorporated is because it can afford not to. In other words, it can afford to contract with Houston for municipal services and it can rely on visitors to provide a lot of revenue rather than having to tax its residents at a higher rate. The community of over 93,000 residents has a median household income of $103,229, is 88.4% white, a poverty rate of 5.1%, and 59% of residents have a college degree. Many communities do not have this luxury.

More evidence of a racist North: disparities in incarceration rates by race existed in late 1800s

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There is a disparity across racial groups in incarceration rates in the United States today. But this is not a recent phenomenon: a recently published sociological study argues this dates back to the late 1800s.

Since 1970, the percentage of Americans in prison has skyrocketed; the incarceration rate is especially pronounced among blacks. Though it’s often assumed that the racial disparity came along with the surge in incarceration, a recent study by a sociologist at Harvard suggests that the disparity originated earlier, with the emigration of blacks from the South. Not only was the racial disparity in incarceration higher in the North to begin with, but it rose sharply in the North after 1880, even while dropping sharply in the South after 1900. What exacerbated the racial disparity in the North was the fact that blacks were competing with lower-class immigrants from Europe, many of whom—particularly the Irish—had come to dominate law enforcement and were looking for any excuse to arrest blacks. In a sense, the Irish—who, ironically, had gotten a reputation as troublemakers when they first immigrated—traded places with blacks. “As the incarceration rate of Irish immigrants and their children in Great Migration states declined from 245 to 158 people per 100,000 between 1880 and 1950, the nonwhite incarceration rate leapt from 203 to 594.”

Muller, C., “Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880–1950,” American Journal of Sociology (September 2012).

This is more evidence that the North has had a long history of issues over race after the Civil War. The typical narrative often doesn’t allow for this; the story often goes that the South was the racist and discriminatory part of the country and the Jim Crow laws prove this. But the North may not have been much better. In addition to these differences in incarceration rates, there is evidence of:

1. Increasing levels of residential segregation between whites and blacks emerging in many Northern cities in the early 1900s. As the Great Migration picked up, blacks were pushed to live in black areas, not in white neighborhoods. For example, the thousands upon thousands of blacks who entered the city were forced into the Black Belt. See the book American Apartheid, among other research.

2. Many smaller Northern communities had “sundown laws” that did not allow blacks to stay in the community after dark. While blacks had unprecedented residential mobility in the two decades after the Civil War, these new sundown rules pushed blacks back into major cities. See the book Sundown Towns.

Obligatory sociological reminder that there is little evidence of Halloween candy tampering

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Every Halloween, sociologist Joel Best reminds people that there is little  evidence of Halloween candy tampering:

For decades, parents have been warned to check sweet-wrappers for signs of tampering, chocolate bars for hidden needles, and apples for surreptitiously inserted razor blades when their children return home from knocking on strangers’ doors. But Dr Joel Best, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Delaware, has researched every reported case of so-called “Halloween sadism” in the past 45 years, and has concluded that not one of them was genuine…

Dr Best has discovered 90 cases of alleged poisoning reported by newspapers or hospitals since 1958 but he says that none can be attributed to random attempts to harm kids. Most are pranks by children seeking attention; some are murkier attempts by parents to gain compensation…

The myth picked up speed in the late 1960s, as the popularity of Halloween also increased. At the time, many Americans apparently believed that hippies might get a kick from adding LSD to the sweets of unsuspecting children.

The phenomenon peaked in 1970 and 1971, when there were 10 and 14 reported incidents respectively. There was another mini-peak in 1982, when 12 alleged cases occurred. None have ever been confirmed, but the myth of “Halloween Sadism” nonetheless endures. Over the years, America’s National Association of Confectioners, for whom 31 October is crucial, have attempted to persuade the nation that trick-or-treating is safe. But Dr Best’s research, which has informed a book called Threatened Children, leads him to believe they face an uphill struggle.

Some urban legends live on. Here is what might contribute to the longevity of this particular story:

1. Journalists who are looking for such stories. If most of these cases did not pan out, did these same media outlets report this or issue a correction or retraction? Even if they did, the harm was likely already done.

2. Parents who are generally scared for their children in lots of areas, not just candy received on Halloween.

3. Are there any movies, books, or TV shows that have perpetuated this storyline? I can’t think of any but I wouldn’t be surprised if such works exist.

4. It seems like it could be plausible, perhaps even more so than cases like the unsolved 1982 Tylenol cases in Chicago (see a recent oral history here).

5. The holiday of Halloween lends itself to such stories. It is hard to imagine similar stories emerging out of Easter or Christmas, both holidays that involve candy and gifts that could be tampered with.

When the economic crisis hits Naperville, life there is still better than in many places

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The Chicago Tribune looks at how the economic crisis has led to a “recalibration” for some in the large and wealthy suburb of Naperville:

For Naperville, in some ways the quintessential suburb for middle-class strivers, the latest census data show that the median household income of $101,911 is nearly double the Illinois median. Nearly two-thirds of the adults 25 and older have attained at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30.3 percent statewide.

Young families have flocked to the suburb about 30 miles west of Chicago since the 1980s, attracted by good schools, jobs along the Interstate 88 corridor and public transit to Chicago. With a population of 141,853 in 2010, Naperville was the fifth-largest city in the state. The local government pays attention to details, from maintaining well-manicured parks to coordinating the traffic lights in downtown Naperville during rush hour to ease traffic congestion…

But there are signs that more residents are struggling to get by in a stagnant economy…

People in their 40s and 50s with school-age children felt the brunt of the last recession through the destruction of home equity values and the loss of value in 401(k) accounts. Meanwhile, median family income has fallen substantially over an entire decade for the first time since the Great Depression. And health care costs have grown sharply during the same period.

I think I understand the purpose of the article: the economic crisis is even affecting wealthier communities like Naperville where it seems like many had reached the American Dream. On the other hand, I’m still not sure this article accomplishes its purposes. People the Tribune talked to have suffered setbacks but they are still doing okay compared to many Americans. One family was affected when the husband lost his well-paying job so the wife returned to full-time work. But the husband found a job again and the wife is now not working again. Another family owns a comedy club where business has been tight. However, business is now picking up and they still have their substantial investment in the club. More Napervillians are saving more or focusing more on their families but they can still generally afford to do this.

I’m not downplaying the troubles many in Naperville have faced. However, Naperville residents are not the ones who have been hit the hardest among Americans. Indeed, the median household income, the number of jobs, the quality of life, and the low levels of poverty and crime still make Naperville an unusually well-off place in the United States. Naperville and its residents will weather the storm better than many as long as the community is able to retain its strong white-collar employment base.

Foodism as the newest part of high culture

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A commentator in the New York Times suggests “food [has] replaced art as high culture“:

But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

Young men once headed to the Ivy League to acquire the patina of high culture that would allow them to move in the circles of power — or if they were to the manner born, to assert their place at the top of the social heap by flashing what they already knew. Now kids at elite schools are inducted, through campus farmlets, the local/organic/sustainable fare in dining halls and osmotic absorption via their classmates from Manhattan or the San Francisco Bay Area, into the ways of food. More and more of them also look to the expressive possibilities of careers in food: the cupcake shop, the pop-up restaurant, the high-end cookie business. Food, for young people now, is creativity, commerce, politics, health, almost religion…

Like art, food is also a genuine passion that people like to share with their friends. Many try their hands at it as amateurs — the weekend chef is what the Sunday painter used to be — while avowing their respect for the professionals and their veneration for the geniuses. It has developed, of late, an elaborate cultural apparatus that parallels the one that exists for art, a whole literature of criticism, journalism, appreciation, memoir and theoretical debate. It has its awards, its maestros, its televised performances. It has become a matter of local and national pride, while maintaining, as culture did in the old days, a sense of deference toward the European centers and traditions — enriched at a later stage, in both cases, by a globally minded eclecticism.

Just as aestheticism, the religion of art, inherited the position of Christianity among the progressive classes around the turn of the 20th century, so has foodism taken over from aestheticism around the turn of the 21st. Now we read the gospel according, not to Joyce or Proust, but to Michael Pollan and Alice Waters.

This is intriguing but I wonder if it is as pervasive as this commentator suggests. I’m thinking of Bourdieu’s ideas that certain cultural tastes became part of a habitus for different classes. Thus, something like food or art or music has to be part of a lifestyle and is often formally taught. For example, high culture as art and music (and perhaps film and more popular music these days – and we might throw in literary classics) is taught in many colleges. Do the same colleges formally teach about food in the same way? Do lower levels of school teach about food? Foodism might be present in many social circles and is increasingly so in the media but I wonder if it has reached the same level of formal training just yet.

Also, if foodism has really ascended to this level, what does this say about the current state of art?

A company offers to replicate research study findings

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A company formed in 2011 is offering a new way to validate the findings of research studies:

A year-old Palo Alto, California, company, Science Exchange, announced on Tuesday its “Reproducibility Initiative,” aimed at improving the trustworthiness of published papers. Scientists who want to validate their findings will be able to apply to the initiative, which will choose a lab to redo the study and determine whether the results match.

The project sprang from the growing realization that the scientific literature – from social psychology to basic cancer biology – is riddled with false findings and erroneous conclusions, raising questions about whether such studies can be trusted. Not only are erroneous studies a waste of money, often taxpayers’, but they also can cause companies to misspend time and resources as they try to invent drugs based on false discoveries.

This addresses a larger concern about how many research studies found their results by chance alone:

Typically, scientists must show that results have only a 5 percent chance of having occurred randomly. By that measure, one in 20 studies will make a claim about reality that actually occurred by chance alone, said John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who has long criticized the profusion of false results.

With some 1.5 million scientific studies published each year, by chance alone some 75,000 are probably wrong.

I’m intrigued by the idea of having an independent company assess research results. This could work in conjunction with other methods of verifying research results:

1. The original researchers could run multiple studies. This works better with smaller studies but it could be difficult when the N is larger and more resources are needed.

2. Researchers could also make their data available as they publish their paper. This would allow other researchers to take a look and see if things were done correctly and if the results could be replicated.

3. The larger scientific community should endeavor to replicate studies. This is the way science is supposed to work: if someone finds something new, other researchers should adopt a similar protocol and test it with similar and new populations. Unfortunately, replicating studies is not seen as being very glamorous and it tends not to receive the same kind of press attention.

The primary focus of this article seems to be on medical research. Perhaps this is because it can affect the lives of many and involves big money. But it would be interesting to apply this to more social science studies as well.

Encourage research collaboration by overlapping daily walking paths

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Lots of academics are talking about interdisciplinary research and teaching and a new study helps point the way forward: make sure different groups have overlapping daily walking paths.

Researchers who occupy the same building are 33 percent more likely to form new collaborations than researchers who occupy different buildings, and scientists who occupy the same floor are 57 percent more likely to form new collaborations than investigators who occupy different buildings, he said.
One of these assumptions is that passive contacts between inhabitants of a building—just bumping into people as you go about your daily business—makes it more likely that you’ll share ideas and eventually engage in formal collaborations. This assumption is based on the work of ISR researcher Leon Festinger, who studied the friendships that developed among dormitory residents in the 1950s.
Owen-Smith and colleagues examined the relationship between office and lab proximity and walking patterns, and found that linear distance between offices was less important than overlap in daily walking paths. They developed the concept of zonal overlap as a way to operationalize Festinger’s idea of passive contact. “We looked at how much overlap existed for any two researchers moving between lab space, office space, and the nearest bathroom and elevator,” Owen-Smith said. “And we found that net of the distance between their offices, for every 100 feet of zonal overlap, collaborations increased by 20 percent and grant funding increased between 21 and 30 percent.”
Owen-Smith and colleagues also found that the likelihood of passive contacts can be more simply assessed by using a measure of “door passing”—whether one investigator’s work path passes by another’s office door.

This sounds like a more small-scale study but it ties into the broader concept of compulsion of proximity. Put people in spaces where they are more likely to run into each other and they are more likely to interact face-to-face. This would go for making friends on a dorm floor in college (random assignments lead to college long or life-long friendships), finding marriage partners through social networks , and apparently works for researchers.