Monthly Archives: January 2011

Projecting the Muslim population in 2030 around the world

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Pew has a new report on projecting the Muslim population around the world for 2030. You can look at separate reports by region and there is a lot of interesting information. If you look at the data for the United States, the prediction is that there will be 6.2 million Muslims by 2030. This is still a relatively small percentage compared to the total population though this would be a 140% increase. The numbers for Europe are quite different: the projection is France, Belgium, and Russia will be more than 10% Muslim.

Lots of good data here on everything from fertility rates to migration to age breakdowns.

Mosque proposed for unincorporated site in DuPage County

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The Chicago area has experienced several proposals in recent years for mosques to be built in the suburbs. Several proposals have been in DuPage County where communities or the County have rejected plans. There is a new proposal being brought forward now for an unincorporated site near Lombard, meaning it will be under review by DuPage County:

Proclaim Truth Charitable Trust is seeking a conditional-use permit that would allow it to demolish a 65-year-old single-family house along Highland Avenue and construct a new 5,200-square-foot mosque.

Sabet Siddiqui, the group’s representative, stressed to members of DuPage County’s zoning board of appeals Thursday night that the proposed mosque would be used by about 100 families who live in the area and currently attend services in Villa Park.

“Unlike other mosques and synagogues and churches that you folks have heard in the past, this is a different scale and different scope,” Siddiqui told the board. “It’s a small neighborhood mosque.”…

Siddiqui said he believes the mosque would be “a perfect fit” for a neighborhood that already has two churches and a synagogue. He said the brick and masonry structure is designed to “match the surrounding residences as much as possible.”

Almost all the residents who attended Thursday night’s public hearing voiced support for the plan, including a representative from neighboring Congregation Etz Chaim.

In comparison to some of the other cases, it sounds like this particular proposal is experiencing a stronger welcome from residents in the neighborhood.

It would be interesting to do a study of these cases that have popped up in recent years. Do Christian churches experience the same kind of process and complaints that mosques do? How exactly do nearby residents voice concerns – it is typical NIMBY material like traffic, parking, and noise or are there broader issues brought up in the cases of the mosques? Is the support or concerns about the proposed mosques tied more to the size of the mosque or is it more about the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood?

Tactics of Egyptian protesters in a pamphlet

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News from Egypt is trickling out. The Atlantic has translated part of a pamphlet that supposedly was distributed to protesters in recent days. While it is unclear how many protesters might have these, it is an interesting look into the tactics of protests and social movements.

Some thoughts:

1. There is information here on the broader goals of the movement plus more specific information about how to combat riot police. The end goal of the protests is to take over government buildings.

2. The final translated portion has some warnings about not letting the pamphlet fall into the wrong hands, particularly not posting it on the Internet or sharing it through Twitter. (Since the Internet has been shut down in Egypt, this may not be an issue now.)

2a. Could we get to a point where Internet usage is considered a human right? Should governments be able to ever shut it down or restrict access?

2b. If The Atlantic can get its hands on this, surely the Egyptian government already has.

3. This pamphlet must have taken some time to put together. Where did it come from and who put the time into it? This suggests people were preparing for this moment.

4. It must have been an interesting editorial discussion regarding which portions of this to translate in order “to balance the historic nature of the document and protest with the safety of protesters. Publishing this excerpt was the compromise at which we arrived.”

Ageism the latest prejudice to be studied?

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A sociologist at Virginia Tech suggests ageism is now receiving more scholar attention:

Ageism is the latest form of prejudice being studied, although certainly not new in American culture, according to Toni Calasanti, professor of sociology in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. Her research is the lead story in the winter 2011 Virginia Tech Research magazine.

We tend to resist signs of aging and want to keep passing for younger, Calasanti said, since being old affects our social status. She conducts interviews and studies Web pages, past scholarly articles, and other research to look at ageism. While people, including academics, do not want to think of themselves as growing old, “ageism oppresses the people we will become, cuts off our options for collective action now, and arms us for battles we cannot win alone, while leading us to ignore that which binds us,” she said.

With America’s emphasis on youth, I’m sure social scientists could find plenty of examples of this. It seems like there are plenty of anecdotal stories as well from the recent economic downturn with workers getting laid off.

Demographic trends suggest many Western nations will have a large proportion of older residents in the next few decades. If ageism continues, it will be actions made against a growing segment of society.

Scorecasting: Freakanomics for the sports world

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A movement has been growing in the sports world in the last few decades: the use of lots of data in order to make decisions. Some of this data goes against “conventional wisdom” such as ideas of whether players can be “clutch” (some good stuff on which NBA players you would want to take the final shot with the game on the line) and what should actually be valued in free agents (MLB’s shift toward statistics like on-base percentage over home runs and RBIs).

A new book, Scorecasting, tackles a number of sports issue from a quantitative perspective. Read an interview (including a few examples from the book) with one of the authors here.

It will be interesting to see just how mainstream these sorts of ideas become. Does the average sports fan, or even the average sports broadcaster, want to rely on these kinds of data as opposed to their intuition or their feeling? Numbers may provide a better explanation – but numbers have all sorts of perceptions tied to them including the idea that people are just twisting the data to fit their explanation and that numbers about sports are developed by geeks who can’t play sports (or something along these lines).

I, for one, would like to have more quantitative data available to me when watching sports. Information like the batting average of a batter for particular parts of the plate (usually split into nine segments) or on a particular count would be useful. The data might seem overwhelming but ultimately, I think it helps people see the patterns underlying their favorite sport. For example, a home run hit on an 0-2 count in the 9th inning to win the game is impressive in its own right. But to know how rarely home runs are hit on the 0-2, even more so for some batters, adds to the feat.

Quick Review: Babies

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I watched the film Babies recently with the hopes that I might use a portion of it to illustrate the idea of socialization in my Introduction to Sociology course. I didn’t end up using the film but I still have a few thoughts about this 2010 film:

1. The film follows four babies: one each in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and San Francisco. Between the four of them, there were some contrasts. But I’m not sure there was enough variation in these cases. Outside of the Namibian baby, the other three families were fairly Westernized. The Japanese and American baby seemed to experience similar things. If the goal was to draw attention to how babies develop in similar stages yet do so in unique cultural settings, I think this could have been improved. This is a problem that also plagues case studies: cases need to be selected in such a way that they have variation on the key variables of interest (culture in this instance).

2. The movie has no narration – it is a compilation of scenes tracking their development and there is some instrumental music. This leads to a lot of “awww” moments but the film struggles to say something larger.

3. Some of the scenes were quite well put together. The shots of the Mongolian child seemingly out in the wilderness on his own (a constant backdrop of mountains and cattle) were impressive.

4. I know this is an inherent problem in a film that attempts to follow four children through several years of life but I didn’t feel like we had a good understanding of the broader context the babies were in. There was little or no information about their parents or families. I felt like we saw a lot of scenes meant to show the different stages of development but little of the full story. Since the film was somewhat short (just under 80 minutes), ten or fifteen minutes of this information could easily have been added though it would have altered the approach.

Overall, this was an engaging film as it is interesting to watch the children grow up. There is much potential in these scenes but the film as a whole struggles to make a larger point.

(This film was okay in the eyes of critics. According to RottenTomatoes.com, 69% of critics – 67 out of 97 – said the film was “fresh.”)

Blacklisting the Bluebook

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The Yale Law Journal recently published Judge Richard Posner‘s hilariously scathing review of The Bluebook (the standard manual for legal citation forms) in which Posner compares the growth of the book from 26 to 511 pages over nineteen editions as a type of cancer:

The analogy of cancer to The Bluebook’s growth comes quickly to mind, as does the distinction between the multiplication of cancer cells in the organ in which they first appear and their eventual metastasis to other organs. For the growth of The Bluebook has stimulated the creation of supplemental citation and style guides at a number of law reviews….[L]egal citation form has become the subject of a vast academic literature. There is even a 180-page book called Understanding and Mastering The Bluebook.

After suggesting that the publishers of the Bluebook may just be out to make money by multiplying editions, Posner suggests a more interesting reason for The Bluebook’s growth:

The growth in the size and complexity of The Bluebook may also reflect the reflex desire of every profession to convince the laity of the inscrutable rigor of its methods….But unlike the genuinely professional methods used by the modern medical profession to diagnose and treat disease, the core method of the lawyer and the judge is “legal reasoning,” and it lacks scientific rigor; indeed, at its best, it is uncomfortably close to careful reading, to rhetoric, and to common sense. An unconscious awareness of the limitations of legal “science” drives the search for rigor into unlikely places, such as the form of citations, and has given the profession a 511-page book that it does not need.

The only thing I would like to add is that The Bluebook also serves a purpose within the obsessive-compulsive profession itself:  The Bluebook’s endless forms allow us to think that we are getting something difficult done.  In reality, of course, we are just manipulating mindless bits of text on a computer screen (and avoiding the truly difficult bits involving reading, rhetoric, and common sense, as Judge Posner puts it).

Hat tip:  Above the Law.

Plans for real megalopolis in China

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The idea of a megalopolis dates back to the middle 1900s when people started thinking that collections of large cities, such as the large American cities on the Eastern seaboard including Boston, Hartford, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., such be considered as a larger grouping. But even this good example has cities separated by decent distances.

China is planning its own version of a megapolis near Hong Kong. The plans including merging nine cities with a combined population of 42 million:

The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas,” said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.

This sounds like a sizable project. The article suggests that this is being done for several reasons: to achieve economy of scale in certain things (like medical services) and the ability to create unified policies for the region (including transportation and pollution initiatives). And this grouping of cities could conceivably grow even larger if Hong Kong was ever added to this mix.

The article calls this a “mega city” but I think it would fit the definition of a megalopolis perfectly. In fact, compared to most examples of a megalopolis, this one would be much better suited to the idea: the cities are relatively close and will be highly connected. Additionally, the cities are laid out more in a circle pattern rather than a line, allowing a variety of connections between urban centers.

I wonder how many planners around the world would approve of such a project. Combining certain infrastructure has its appeal as planning can be done on a broader scale and without cities constructing competing systems.

Interestingly, there are no plans to give the region a new name: “It will not be like Greater London or Greater Tokyo because there is no one city at the heart of this megalopolis.” Will future residents identify themselves as residents of the region or their specific city?

Shuttering harassment of photographers

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The New York Times’ Lens Blog is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has recently issued a directive reminding its officers “of the public’s general right to photograph the exteriors” of federal buildings:

The three-page bulletin reminds officers, agents and employees that, “absent reasonable suspicion or probable cause,” they “must allow individuals to photograph the exterior of federally owned or leased facilities from publicly accessible spaces” like streets, sidewalks, parks and plazas. Even when there seems to be reason to intercede and conduct a “field interview,” the directive says:

Officers should not seize the camera or its contents, and must be cautious not to give such ‘orders’ to a photographer to erase the contents of a camera, as this constitutes a seizure or detention.

As an avid photographer, this warms my heart.  I remember attempting to photograph the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) in downtown Chicago a few years after 9/11 during an architectural photoshoot of the loop and being chased away by security guards who claimed I could not take pictures from the public sidewalks.  Personally, I haven’t run into too much opposition since then, but it will be nice to have documentation of my photographic rights on my person when I’m out shooting photos.

A variety of opinions on Obama’s “sputnik moment”

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One particular historical reference in President Obama’s State of the Union address has attracted some attention. Amidst a section urging America to innovate, Obama said (according to the White House transcript):

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon.  The science wasn’t even there yet.  NASA didn’t exist.  But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.  Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race.  And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal.  We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology -– (applause) — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

Some liked this reference, others did not. The Atlantic sums up some of the reaction here.

This is the problem with historical analogies. On one hand, Sputnik stirs up certain emotions and memories for the American public. American history books suggest this was a consequential moment as America altered its course to keep up with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, this moment was over 50 years ago, it came during a unprecedented period in American history, and there is no more Soviet Union.

It would be interesting to see poll data on what viewers thought of the Sputnik reference. Is this something that resonates with a majority of Americans? Does this idea of an outside threat (whether it is the Soviet Union, or Japan, or China) motivate people?