Monthly Archives: July 2010

Facebook: up or down?

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Stories about Facebook have been plentiful in recent weeks as the company apparently prepares to announce that it has 500 million members and the trailer for The Social Network has hit the web.

Wired suggests “Five things that could topple Facebook’s empire.” One interesting tidbit out of this article: the American Customer Satisfaction Index (from the business school at the University of Michigan) found that Facebook has ratings similar to cable companies and airlines. Also, Facebook is similarly rated to MySpace. Overall, “That puts the world’s most visited website in the bottom 5 percent of private sector companies in the survey.”

Looking ahead 40 years

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Smithsonian magazine celebrates its 40th anniversary by writing about “40 things you need to know about the next 40 years.”

Out of the 40 predictions, some of the ones that intrigued me:

4. New cars will be given away, free.

11. The heartland will rise again.

12. The top US social problem? Upward mobility.

13. By 2050, one out of three US kids will be Latino.

25. Artists will run the world.

27. Everyone will make his own music.

36. Good-bye stereo; hello, hyper-real acoustics

40. Reading will become an athletic activity

Learning from Flint, Michigan

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An article from Slate about Dan Kildee, a former politician in the Flint area and recent co-founder of a nonprofit dedicated to helping cities in trouble, and his ideas about turning around this hard-luck Michigan city. The general idea as the journalist describes it: “manifest-destiny-in-reverse for urban areas.”

Crime rates vs. perceptions of crime

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The Chicago Tribune reports on a recent Chicago area poll of 800 heads of household that found nearly half of Chicago residents think crime is up. The reality is that crime rates are pretty steady: homicides are up less than one percent compared to last year and overall crime rates are down.

One reason given for these perceptions: several high-profile shootings of Chicago police officers. According to one academic:

“Police officers are the embodiment of authority,” said Arthur Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago. “When officers are getting shot, that gives citizens a sense that the social order is completely collapsing. The average citizen, the regular guy and woman on the street, are going to think, ‘If they’re shooting police, what chance do I have?'”” Police officers are the embodiment of authority,” said Arthur Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago. “When officers are getting shot, that gives citizens a sense that the social order is completely collapsing. The average citizen, the regular guy and woman on the street, are going to think, ‘If they’re shooting police, what chance do I have?”

Another factor that is likely playing a role: media coverage. As a consumer of Chicago news, much of what I have heard about in the last few months is crime, shootings in particular. These may be stories that should be reported on but the coverage has been heavy. If one were just to watch or listen to the local news, I have little doubt many would think crime is up and perhaps even out of control.

Behind Blue Like Jazz

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Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller is profiled in a story by CNN. The story explains how Miller has sought for years for his missing father and how Miller sought to make friend and pastor David Gentiles proud. Of Gentiles, Miller said, “You could not love him like he loved you.”

Brian McLaren is quoted in the story saying Miller’s appeal is due to a “profound starvation for honesty.”

California Picture #5

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Looking down the mine shaft of the Empire Mine in Nevada County, California. This mine went nearly a mile below the surface and produced gold (according to Wikipedia, 5.8 million ounces) for over a century.

(My wife and I traveled to California for nine days in early July – this is part of a series of pictures from our trip.)

Social factors as part of a medical diagnosis

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This story from the Chicago Tribune tells of Dr. Saul Weiner who has been studying the effect of social circumstances, such as socioeconomic concerns, on medical diagnoses. After one of his own cases, Weiner decided to study the issue further:

Weiner arranged to send actors playing patients into physicians’ offices and discovered that errors occurred in 78 percent of cases when socioeconomic concerns were a significant factor, according to a paper published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Weiner recommends adding a “contextual history” to the physical history that physicians usually document with first-time patients.

Treating the whole person seems like it would produce better results for the patient.

California Picture #4

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Public art on a grand scale. This 60-foot piece, titled Cupid’s Span, opened to the public in 2003 and was designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.  Read more about it here.

(My wife and I traveled to California for nine days in early July – this is part of a series of pictures from our trip.)

Measuring happiness

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Forbes has released a list of the world’s happiest countries. The story discusses a few important factors in determining happiness, including income and feeling like one’s psychological and social needs are met on a daily basis.

According to the story, here is how Gallup measured happiness between 2005 and 2009:

First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a “life evaluation” score between 1 and 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their “daily experiences”–things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged.

It appears Gallup is working with two different dimensions of happiness:

1. Overall life satisfaction. Have you been able to meet your goals?

2. Happiness on a day-to-day basis. Are you relatively free to enjoy life each day?

It is interesting to note that relatively few people in any of the countries are categorized as “suffering.” Additionally, there is not a whole lot of variation in the daily experience index (1-10 scale).

Elite college admission practices

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Last year, two Princeton sociologists (T.J. Espenshade and A.W. Radford) published a book titled No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The book has drawn a number of comments in the blogosphere.

The book was mentioned in the New York Times this past Sunday as Ross Douthat wrote about “the roots of white anxiety.” Douthat summarizes the book’s findings:

Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

According to Douthat, these decisions have consequences: “This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike” and “Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland.”

Granted, this study was restricted to eight elite universities. But many Americans have an image of liberal academia that bears little relation to average lives of shopping at Wal-Mart, living in suburbia, and going to church.