Monthly Archives: September 2010

Venkatesh discusses five myths about prostitution

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Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh quickly dissects five myths regarding prostitution. Here are the myths: “prostitution is an alleyway business,” “men visit sex workers for sex,” “most prostitutes are addicted to drugs or were abused as children,” “prostitutes and police are enemies,” and “closing Craigslist’s “adult services” section will significantly affect the sex trade.”

Two quick thoughts:

1. It is difficult to tackle a social problem if people don’t know what is really going on. If Venkatesh is right about the role of Craigslist, then lawmakers and officials are just dealing with symptoms of the problem.

2. One common argument against the need to study sociology is that everything about the social world is “just common sense.” Venkatesh is suggesting based on research of his own and from others that much of the accepted wisdom about prostitution is inaccurate.

Measuring Presidential popularity with merchandise

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There are traditional ways to measure Presidential popularity: polls that in some way measure approval or disapproval. Here is another possible way: sales of Presidential merchandise.

I’ve always wondered why Presidents or other political officials allow such merchandizing using their figures and words in order to make money. Perhaps it is simply publicity (even if it is in opposition to them). Or perhaps they don’t want to appear to be the politicians who cracks down on such things. Or perhaps by running for or entering public office, there is a tacit understanding that they are now in the public eye and can be used for money-making purposes.

And what does it mean culturally to reduce any politician to a piece of merchandise?

Rubble clearance in Haiti proceeds at a slow pace

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Eight months after a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, most of the rubble in Port-au-Prince has still not been removed:

By some estimates, the quake left about 33 million cubic yards of debris in Port-au-Prince — more than seven times the amount of concrete used to build the Hoover Dam. So far, only about 2 percent has been cleared, which means the city looks pretty much as it did a month after the Jan. 12 quake.

Government officials and outside aid groups say rubble removal is the priority before Haiti can rebuild. But the reasons why so little has been cleared are complex. And frustrating.

Heavy equipment has to be shipped in by sea. Dump trucks have difficulty navigating narrow and mountainous dirt roads. An abysmal records system makes it hard for the government to determine who owns a dilapidated property. And there are few sites on which to dump the rubble, which often contains human remains.

Also, no single person in the Haitian government has been declared in charge of the rubble, prompting foreign nongovernmental organizations to take on the task themselves. The groups are often forced to fight for a small pool of available money and contracts — which in turn means the work is done piecemeal, with little coordination.

This is a reminder that while large disasters such as this often prompt quick and widespread relief efforts, these efforts may be needed for long periods of time. After the initial needs are taken care of (water, food, medical care, etc.), there is often even more work to do in order to rebuild.

The opening of the NFL season last week provided another reminder of this in New Orleans. While that city has made some progress, there is still a long way to go and the necessity of these efforts often receive little attention from broader society.

h/t Infrastructurist

The world of oil changes: severe driving, oil analysis, and stickers

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I’ve read many times that newer cars don’t need oil changes every 3,000 miles. But in an article from the New York Times regarding oil changes and the optimal miles between changes, I learned some additional oil change information including what might be considered severe usage, companies that analyze oil, and how oil change businesses might change their stickers.

-Drivers with severe usage need to change their oil more frequently, roughly around 5,000 miles. And what is considered severe? The kind of driving that many people do: short trips under 10 miles.

The different types of driving are usually known as severe and mild (which is also sometimes called normal), Mr. Sutherland said, which seems counter-intuitive since most of us probably don’t think we drive in severe conditions. But we do.

The reason, he said, is that if you take a trip of less than 10 miles or so, the engine and the oil are not completely warmed up. And if the oil is still cool, he said, it cannot absorb the contaminants that come from internal combustion as efficiently.

-There are companies that analyze car oil for consumers and tell them what is in the oil and then what might be wrong with their car:

[Y]ou can send your engine oil out to be analyzed. Blackstone Laboratories in Fort Wayne, Ind., one of the best-known places for engine oil analysis, will send you a free kit.

You send back an oil sample and for $25, they’ll tell you all sorts of things about your car.

“We would compare what your oil looks like compared to the average Mazda5 of that year,” said Kristen Huff, a vice president at Blackstone. If there is a lot more lead in my oil than in a typical Mazda5, for example, it means I have a bearing problem, she said.

Her lab runs about 150 samples a day and a fair percentage of those are consumers looking to find out how often they need to change their oil, Ms. Huff said.

-Based on these changes in cars, companies like JiffyLube will soon begin using new stickers that leave the mileage between oil change decisions to consumers:

But Jiffy Lube, the largest quick oil change company in North America, is now under pressure to change its automatic 3,000-mile recommendation.

For about a year, the company has run a pilot program with some franchises across the country suggesting that instead of a blanket recommendation, mechanics tell customers what the manufacturer recommends under mild or severe driving conditions.

“By this time next year, every Jiffy Lube will do it,” said Rick Altizer, president of Jiffy Lube International. And the little sticker on your windshield will no longer simply state when the next oil change should occur, but, “I choose to change my oil” at a specific mileage.

“It’s so it’s not some arbitrary technician saying this,” Mr. Altizer said, but the consumer’s decision.

I wonder how many consumers would feel better/more secure if the sticker did say when they should get an oil change. That way, they wouldn’t have to make a decision about a machine they may not feel comfortable around.

Users spend more time on Facebook than Google’s sites

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According to figures from August, web users in the United States now spend more time per day on Facebook than Google’s sites (which includes YouTube). This can’t be good news for Google – but it shows the power of Facebook:

In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9% of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6%, people spent on all of Google Inc.’s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.

U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo Inc. sites, or 9.1% of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms of time spent browsing. In July, Facebook crept past Yahoo for the first time, according to comScore.

Facebook appears to be growing more and more popular. Google can’t figure out a way to introduce social connectivity throughout their sites – whatever happened to Google Wave?

Strong copyright enforcement in a corrupt world

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There is an ongoing scholarly debate within U.S. legal circles about just how vigorously copyright violations should be pursued and punished.  In the U.S., this debate often takes the form of whether 6- or 7-figure judgments should be levied against single moms or 20-something grad students who copy music.

In more authoritarian countries, however, the stakes for alleged copyright infringers are often much higher.  Clifford J. Levy over at the New York Times recently posted this interesting piece entitled “Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent” highlighting the plight of an environmental group which

fell victim to one of the [Russian] authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.

Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.

Such self-serving enforcement will always be a danger in copyright enforcement.  Copyrights protect non-rivalrous goods:  users can duplicate a copyrighted work without disturbing the author’s own enjoyment of the work.  This is in direct contrast to tangible property, which is rivalrous:  if I steal your laptop, I now benefit from your laptop and you suffer from its lack.  Put another way, my theft of a rivalrous good has not created two laptops the way (illegally) copying a non-rivalrous good (say, Windows 7) creates two fully functional copies.

This is not to say, of course, that copyright owners are not harmed when their works are pirated.  Indeed, owners do lose revenue to the extent that, in a parallel universe without the piracy, they might have been paid for the additional copies of their work (assuming the now non-existent pirate prefers to pay the market price rather than simply to go without).  Many scholars argue that copyright exists precisely to allow authors to benefit fully from every copy made of their works.

It is important to remember, however, that such vigorous protection comes at a privacy cost.  If I steal your laptop, a physical act has occurred that leaves you tangibly and noticeably poorer, and the police have something specific (i.e., a laptop) to recover.  If I copy Windows 7, no physical act of theft need occur (perhaps I obtained the first copy from Microsoft legitimately), and the police have nothing concrete to pursue.

As a result, law enforcement is left with two broad strategies when pursuing copyright infringement:  (1) incentivizing whistleblowers and (2) conducting fishing expeditions.  Within the U.S., (1) is encouraged and (2) is usually legally suspect.  In countries with fewer legal protections and more corruption, however, (2) presents a convenient excuse for harassment and intimidation whenever needed.  Robust copyright enforcement in such a context thus comes at an astronomically high privacy cost.

An interesting social experiment: restrict social media access at a college for a week

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Social media is ever-present on college campuses. It appears that some institutions are thinking about ways to encourage thinking about using social media – by restricting it:

Professors have experimented with assigning technology fasts for their students—by discouraging gadget use for five days, for example, or rewarding extra credit for a semester without Facebook.

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is going one step further with a “social-media blackout.” Starting Monday, the Pennsylvania institution will block Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace on the campus network for a week. Faculty and staff members will be affected as well as students.

“Telling students to imagine a time before Facebook is like telling them to imagine living in a world with dinosaurs,” said Eric D. Darr, Harrisburg’s executive vice president and provost. “It’s not real. What we’re doing is trying to make it real.”

Ah, equating life with no social media with the age of dinosaurs – this is quite funny (though probably accurate).

When I first saw this headline, I thought this school might be doing this to help students to use the time they might spend on social media in other ways. To discover the world outside of Facebook. Alas, the school has other aims:

Mr. Darr said his hope is that people…would take the week to reflect on outside-the-box ways to use social media—such as for entrepreneurship or political advocacy.

So the goal in restricting social media use is to help people think about social media use? And I was hoping for a social experiment where students might discover other virtuous things to do with their time…

Reasons for using The Wire in class

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Two Harvard professors, one is sociologist William Julius Wilson, explain why they have built a course on urban inequality around the television show “The Wire.” In addition to how the show illustrates how the chances of the urban poor are limited by institutions, the professors argue “The Wire” is unique in its abilities to show the complexities of the real world:

“The Wire” is fiction, but it forces us to confront social realities more effectively than any other media production in the era of so-called reality TV. It does not tie things up neatly; as in real life, the problems remain unsolved, and the cycle repeats itself as disadvantages become more deeply entrenched. Outside the world of television drama, sociologists aim to explain what causes certain social conditions and then assess the merits of competing theories. The solutions, however, are usually less clear. “The Wire” gets that part right, too.

In my experience, television shows and movies are often terrible at depicting the real world. Perhaps it is difficult to avoid following a typical narrative arc or the need to entertain wins out. However, I’ve always thought that real life situations are usually more interesting than created stories.

When reviewing this show back in June, I mentioned about this course at Harvard and added thoughts about the sociological value of the show.

Quick Review: Lost Season 6 special features

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I was excited to check out the final disc of Lost Season 6 to see the special features. Alas, I was disappointed – here’s why:

1. The feature I was anticipating the most was “The New Man in Charge.” This roughly 10-minute epilogue featured Hugo Reyes as keeper of the Island with Ben Linus working for him. While this feature provided a few answers about the overall story, it didn’t do enough. And since it didn’t do enough, it didn’t seem very necessary.

2. What I found more interesting was the roughly 8 minute feature titled “See You In Another Life, Brotha.” While this is probably my favorite phrase from the TV show, it featured the producers and cast talking about how they interpreted the sideways story arc that distinguished season 6. The sideways world was meant to represent a better side of the characters, what they could have been if they had not encountered the Island.

3. The feature titled “A Hero’s Journey” quickly showed how the show’s story arc followed Joseph Campbell’s outline of the hero’s journey. This was not terribly useful, particularly if you had been reading Doc Jensen in the final season where he already made this connection.

4. The making-of featurette, “THE END: Crafting a Final Season,” was an opportunity for the producers, writers, cast, and others to explain a little what it was like to film the last season. The writers and producers said they felt the pressure to produce the perfect ending (which I do not think they did – this will be the subject of a future post) and they were satisfied with the final product. They all said the things you might expect: we all became a family, I really enjoyed the opportunity, and so on.

5. The blooper reel and deleted scenes were fairly worthless.

My opinion: the special features were not that special. I was hoping for more answers to questions about the Island but the answers were not given. Instead, the overall theme was that the producers and writers (and the cast went along with it with seemingly few complaints) wanted to end by focusing on relationships.

One thing positive that did come out of watching these features: I want to rewatch the final episode of the series. I’m looking forward to this task and seeing if I feel differently after watching it another time.