Monthly Archives: March 2011

Mapping the field of science fiction and more

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I thoroughly enjoy maps and so was pleased to see this story about an ongoing “multidisciplinary physical and online art project” that includes a collection of maps:

Take “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science,” a multidisciplinary physical and online art project, running since 2005, that seeks to create a complete picture of “human activity and scientific progress on a global scale.” Curated by a group of librarians, information scientists, and geographers around the world, each exhibit features a handful of maps—an older word for infographic—along a theme. Previous years have exhibited maps designed to index information for policy makers, or for cartographers, or economic decision makers.

This year, the theme is the digital library.

One of the entries is a social network of the Bible. Another, “Seeing Standards,” is positively meta: It charts more than 100 widely used rule sets for collating data, and sorts them by strength, community, domain, function, and purpose…

One “Places & Spaces” map bucks the trend, imagining complexity in an entirely different way. The distinction? Ward Shelley’s “The History of Sci­ence Fiction” (full size version here) isn’t pulled from any server’s database. In fact, it’s charmingly analog.

Mr. Shelley is an artist and a teacher at Parsons the New School for Design. He has become known for what he calls “rhetorical drawings”—visual art pieces that draw on such traditionally linguistic markers as narrative and chronology to illustrate ideas.

This science fiction map is quite a work in itself in addition to the amount of information that it displays.  I like how it all comes back in the tentacles on the upper left to “fear” and “wonder.” And the “Stars Wars Effect” section in the bottom right corner is fun as well.

I wonder if someone has ever done something like this for sociology. If done well, it could be great.

Sociological involvement in Walmart Supreme Court case

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The Supreme Court is about to hear arguments in a large class-action lawsuit against Walmart regarding female employees receiving lower pay. Interestingly, a sociologist is in the middle of the case:

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in “social framework analysis.”

A central question in the case is whether he should have been allowed, in preliminary proceedings, to go beyond describing general research about gender stereotypes in the workplace to draw specific conclusions about what he called flaws in Wal-Mart’s personnel policies.

“Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make,” said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. “He hasn’t done the research.”

But a brief supporting the plaintiffs from the American Sociological Association said that Professor Bielby’s work explaining how Wal-Mart’s policies may have led to discrimination “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods.”

Read the full article to find out more about the academic debate over social framework analysis. It sounds like what is it at stake is whether Bielby can make claims about organizational culture and how it might relate to this case without specific data from Walmart.

You can read the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) amicus brief here. It looks like this is the first such brief filed by the ASA since a 2006 case regarding a challenge to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Digging a bit into the ASA amicus brief, the “summary of argument” provides some insights into what “social framework analysis” is:

“Social framework analysis” is not a sociological method, but rather a legal term for some kinds of research. What constitutes high quality “social framework analysis” continues to be vigorously de-bated among scholars. As such, the Court should assess the underlying social science methods, as practiced by social science researchers and vetted in the peer-reviewed journals of those fields, instead of the “social framework analysis” construct when deciding whether social scientific work is valid.

Systematic social science research has shown that corporate culture may affect individual-level decision-making in common ways. Corporate culture is a set of norms and values that convey messages to em-ployees about appropriate behavior. Corporations may actively try to engineer corporate cultures by implementing policies and practices that convey norms and values. Informal cultures also emerge in the workplace when employees interact, and may either reinforce or resist formal culture as well as promote other non-sanctioned norms. The extent to which corporate cultures, both formal and informal, influence individuals’ behavior depends on the strength of the cultures and also on the degree of discretion that company personnel policies give to individual decision-makers…

Namely, corporations have been shown to reduce gender disparities by instituting formal personnel policies, creating accountability processes for managers, and self-monitoring their employment patterns in order to highlight and address disparities. Extensive research in sociology and other social sciences has shown that these practices equalize gender dis-parities in the workplace by placing central checks on individual discretion that leads to biased decision-making, but do not eliminate all discretion from managerial practice. (pages 3-5)

It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides, even if they are just ruling on whether the large class-action suit can go forward.

Sociologist D. Michael Lindsay named new President of Gordon College

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Read an interview with D. Michael Lindsay, a sociologist formerly at Rice University, who was just named the new President of Gordon College. The interview questions note that Lindsay is “unusually young for a college president” (39 years old), well-regarded by Mark Noll (who calls him “the right choice for the right college at the right time”), and has “long been touted as a star in the making.”

Cabrini-Green site: from housing project to possible Target store

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Since the mid 1990s, the area around the Cabrini-Green housing project on the north side of Chicago has been changing (see an overview of this change here). As the high-rises have come down (with the last residents leaving just recently), new mixed-income neighborhoods as well as new commercial buildings have gone up in the area. News comes today that Target may be building a store on this site in the near future:

Target Corp., the cheap-chic discount chain, is in talks with the Chicago Housing Authority to build a store at the site of the former Cabrini-Green Housing Project.

The retailer’s proposal was brought up for consideration at a CHA board of commissioners meeting earlier this month, said Matt Aguilar, CHA spokesman. “We are in discussions and hope to help bring additional investment to the neighborhood,” Aguilar said.

Demolition of the last high rise at Cabrini-Green is scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The seven-acre complex, once among the most notorious housing projects in the nation, is just blocks away from Chicago’s glitziest shopping districts on North Michigan Avenue and close to the wealthy enclaves of the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park.

Target declined to comment on the proposal.

If Target does move forward with this, it would be the second high-profile space they have recently obtained in Chicago. (Read here about their plans for moving to State Street.)

As redevelopment of this space continues to take place, how long might it be until residents and shoppers of the area forget altogether that the Cabrini-Green complex was once there?

Another question: is a big box store in the city such as Target okay or the best move? Does it depend on which store moves in (see the long-running battle between Wal-Mart and the City of Chicago) or are big box stores okay in the city but not good in the suburbs because of their contribution to sprawl?

Two ways to deal with drug offenders

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Whatever your stance on U.S. drug policy, I think few people could disagree that courts deal with infractions very differently depending on who is breaking the law, as two recent news items painfully illustrate.

Way #1:  Throwing the Book at Them

This American Life has a podcast this week telling

the story of Lindsey Dills, who forges two checks on her parents’ checking account when she’s 17, one for $40 and one for $60, and ends up in drug court for five and a half years, including 14 months behind bars, and then she serves another five years after that—six months of it in [Georgia’s] Arrendale State Prison, the other four and a half on probation.

Listening to the hour-long program, I thought I had mistakenly swapped the podcast out for a Dickens and/or Kafka audiobook.

Ms. Dills is, needless to say, not particularly wealthy or well-connected…

Way #2:  Making Them Sing

…unlike the subject of today’s Daily Mail article:

Singer-songwriter and marijuana enthusiast Willie Nelson could have faced a lengthy jail term after he was arrested for possession in November.

But perhaps the Texas prosecutor has been smoking some of Willie’s special cigarettes, because he has agreed to let the 77-year-old legend avoid prison but only if he gives the court a song.

Hudspeth County Attorney Kit Bramblett said: ‘I’m gonna let him plead, pay a small fine and he’s gotta sing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” with his guitar right there in the courtroom.’

In addition to the injustice implicit in the wildly divergent outcome faced by Mr. Nelson, I have the same question for the prosecutor and judge as a commenter over at the ABA Journal website:

Isn’t there some personal benefit in the “command performance”?  Charges should be settled for the state, not the personal benefit of court officers.

Updated 3/30/2011: The Associated Press is now reporting that Willie won’t have to sing after all.  The prosecutor was just “joking”.

Will future historic preservation districts include McMansions?

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From the concluding portion of a recent column, it appears columnist James Lileks does not like McMansions. But, he also brings up an idea I recently described in discussing how a 1920s suburban home could now be considered authentic and worth preserving:

Everything is historic. Doesn’t mean it’s good; doesn’t mean everything must be preserved ,without exception. But what’s contemporary to you is history to your kids, and hence boring — and a relic of a golden past to the generation after that. Ah, to live long enough to see them fight for the preservation of a ghastly overscale McMansion. It’s the only example of substandard poisonous Chinese drywall we have left!

Just how long might it before McMansions are considered historic homes that are worth saving? And if they are not worth saving, what else might be done with them?

Sugrue: “It’s not clear that this new [black] migration [to the suburbs] is a positive step”

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Recent figures suggest more minorities are moving to the suburbs (see here and here). But looking at evidence from Detroit (see a related story here), historian Thomas Sugrue suggests blacks moving to the suburbs may encounter a lot of the same issues they faced in the city:

So far, Detroit’s black suburbanization has followed a well-trodden path. Those blacks heading outward from Detroit aren’t moving to all suburbs equally. Rather, they move into places with older houses, rundown shopping districts and declining tax revenues. Such towns also typically have poorer services and fewer job opportunities than wealthier suburbs — where, despite strong antidiscrimination laws, it is still harder for blacks to find housing.

It’s not clear that this new migration is a positive step, even if it allows blacks to escape the city and its troubles. For whites, suburbs have often been a big step up — but as long as most blacks find themselves in secondhand suburbia, the American dream of security, prosperity and opportunity will remain harder to achieve.

This term “secondhand suburbia” is an interesting one. Perhaps this term lines up with the concept of “inner-ring suburbs.” A number of commentators, notably Myron Orfield (in texts like American Metropolitics), have discussed how inner-ring suburbs, those closest to the big city, have many of the same issues of the city: large and growing minority populations, declining white populations, limited tax bases, crowded conditions and an older housing stock, crime, and more. Sugrue’s phrase, however, seems to emphasize the racial transition these suburbs, probably classifiable as “inner-ring suburbs,” are experiencing as he describes how these “second-hand” places are changing over from white to black. The implication is that these places are hand-me-downs: the whites used them up and are now using their wealth to move further from the city.

In the long run, if these suburbs don’t offer suburban opportunities but simply reproduce problems like residential segregation, has anything been gained?

The fair use dragon

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Justin Levine over at Against Monopoly points us to a controversy at the recent San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and reminds us that many content owners believe that fair use in U.S. copyright law is about as real as a mythical fire-breathing creature.

John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle explains:

"Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded," a compelling new documentary that critiques the portrayal of Asian women in U.S. visual media, has drawn protests from an unlikely quarter. It wasn’t from Hollywood, which was deservedly scoured for its depiction of Asian women in films from "Rush Hour 2" to "Sex and the City." It wasn’t from conservative commentators claiming political correctness run amok.

Instead, the objection to the documentary by Elaine Kim, a UC Berkeley professor of Asian American studies, emerged from six Asian American filmmakers just before its premiere last week at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Their complaint: that she used clips of their work without seeking their permission.

Never mind that fair use is written into the copyright statute and explicitly allows for “criticism” and “comment” and “scholarship.”  Never mind that Kim’s documentary seems to fall well within the guidelines laid out by the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use – and that four separate companies write errors-and-omissions insurance for filmmakers based on the Statement guidelines.

No, the owners of films being criticized by Kim want to get paid:

The documentary addresses images of Asian American women in film, and while that is a worthy subject for a documentary and we respect Ms. Kim’s skills, as filmmakers, we do not consider this "fair use." Every filmmaker knows that he or she has to ask permission before using any intellectual property not belonging to him/her.

Using a clip of our films for review or promotional purposes is standard; however, using it in a documentary to illustrate that filmmaker’s point of view is a creative choice by the documentarian and therefore not subject to fair use.…We feel that Ms. Kim should either license our film footage properly for use in her documentary or remove it before the documentary’s world premiere at the upcoming San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

The Chronicle reporter was shocked, though readers of this blog shouldn’t be (unfortunately):

For me, as a journalist and champion of free expression, the upshot seemed clear: You cannot give the targets of social commentary the ability to veto it. Does anyone think for a second that the copyright holders of "Rush Hour 2" [which includes a scene where Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan are presented with a buffet of scantily clad Asian women] would consent to allow scenes of that movie to appear in Kim’s documentary at any price?

Kim did end up screening the movie at the festival, but

Kim deleted the clip from "The People I’ve Slept With."

"We did not remove the clip because we were concerned it was not fair use," Kim emphasized in an e-mail. "We removed it because we do not have the time or resources to fight against a filmmaker that personally attacked us and was being unreasonable."

Given the brutal economic and personal realities of litigation, Kim probably made the “right” choice.  Even if she found lawyers to represent her for free, fighting this in court would probably consume a large portion of her personal time and energy for years.  I certainly don’t blame her for her apparently rational choice.

Nevertheless, let us be clear:  this is what happens when copyright law is written to give one side (i.e., copyright owners) sweepingly clear rights but the other side (i.e., fair users) only an amorphous defense.  You don’t get copyright as “an engine of free expression”, as the Supreme Court continues to think.  You get censorship by people who think that fair use is a fairy tale.

The origins of Oregon Trail

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While looking at a column that included some thoughts about the book American Grace, I stumbled across the story of how the computer game Oregon Trail became a sensation. Here is what happened in those early days:

Minnesota’s City Pages tells the story of the game’s early days, when it was an underground sensation, played only by Minnesota schoolkids through a teletype machine installed in a janitor’s closet.

The Oregon Trail — a computer game in which players go on a simulated wagon journey out West, making key decisions along the way (take the Donner Pass or go around?) — was invented by a group of nerdy, computer-programming public school teachers in 1971. It was originally conceived as a board game, but Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger (all Minnesotans) quickly realized its potential as a computer game, and spent two weeks programming it on a middle-school teletype terminal. Their students played the game without a screen, by taking turns pecking out commands on the console, which forwarded them on by telephone to a mainframe computer; the game’s prompts (“You have dysentery”) came out of a printer. In subsequent years, the game was accessed by kids statewide through the same method.

Everything changed in 1978, after a handwritten bid was submitted by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, then just two years old. Apple IIs were installed in schools throughout Minnesota, and the game was rewritten in the form in which millions of students have encountered it since then. Over the past 40 years, 65 million copies have been sold, making The Oregon Trail the most widely played educational game of all time. Nowadays, you can play it on your iPhone for 99 cents.

The Oregon Trail wasn’t just one of the first computer games — it was, as City Pages’ Jessica Lussenhop points out, “one of the first simulation computer games.” In fact the emphasis, for its creators, was on simulation. Looking back, one of the most striking things about the game is its accuracy: The programmers pored over actual settlers’ journals to figure out exactly how often players should break their wagon wheels, get sick, or meet helpful Native Americans, and painstakingly integrated those probabilities into the game. The Oregon Trail made pioneer history more fun — but it also made it more accurate.

Another innovation brought to you by Apple.

In conversations with other people my age, many of whom grew up playing Oregon Trail at school or at home, there is both joy and nostalgia when anyone brings up this game. Looking back it, it isn’t terribly complicated, the graphics were limited, and I’m not sure how much we actually “learned.” Perhaps it was the fact that it was a video game that one was allowed to play at school (along with other beloved games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?). However, I must ask: by playing this educational game and the others that followed, have students become more knowledgeable? Have these games contributed to rising educational achievement? (I think the answer to both of these is probably no or the impact is very limited.)

It is also interesting to see this idea that Oregon Trail was one of the first simulation games. I have long been a player of a few of these games, most notably Simcity, starting with a 386 version on a monochrome screen.

Status update: P2P still in litigation

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Nate Anderson at Wired reminds us that “the first file-sharing case in the US to go all the way to trial is still going”:

Filed on April 19, 2006 and progressing through a remarkable three trials, the recording industry case against Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset continues to burn through cash and judicial attention.

Thomas-Rasset was at first hit with a $222,000 fine in 2007, which was set aside in 2008. Another jury trial in 2009 ended with a $1.92 million judgment, which was set aside in 2010. In November 2010, a third trial ended with a $1.5 million verdict, which the judge is unlikely to allow (his previous orders suggested that a few thousand dollars per song would be the maximum permissible damages). At the moment, both sides are still arguing over the appropriateness of that $1.5 million damages award.

Almost five years.  Three trials (so far).  What a colossal waste of economic, judicial, and personal resources.