Monthly Archives: July 2011

Nevada opens path to driverless cars

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Even though driverless cars are not a common product yet, Nevada has opened a legal path for driverless cars on the road:

Assembly Bill 511, the first such legislation in the country, allows the state’s Department of Transportation to draw up rules that would authorize driverless cars. The regulations would include safety standards, insurance requirements and testing sites.

A driverless car is defined by the bill as using “artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.” That includes technology such as lasers, cameras and radar…

Stanford University robotics professor Sebastian Thrun, a project leader on Google’s effort, said that nearly all driving accidents are due to human error rather than mistakes by machines.

“Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn’t rely on human precision on staying in the lane but on robotic precision, and thereby drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes and do away with all traffic jams on highways,” he said in a speech at the TED 2011 conference this spring.

So how long until this becomes a reality? It seems like we have been hearing about these possibilities for years. Here are a few things that could be holding up the process:

1. The legal side of things. Perhaps Nevada is really a pioneer here and will get the ball rolling.

2. The technology is not quite ready yet. It doesn’t sound like this is the issue.

3. We were waiting for a few companies to really push this. It is interesting that Google seems to be getting a lot of the attention. Obviously, their main business is not driverless cars but they had the resources and interest.

4. The cultural side: are people ready to see driverless cars on the road? Even if they are proven to be safer, will people accept them quickly or will it take some time?

“Hedonistic sustainability”

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Perhaps going green doesn’t require having to give up much if one subscribes to “hedonistic sustainability:”

Award-winning architect Bjarke Ingels of BIG seems to think so. He believes the way towards sustainability is not by inconveniencing people, but rather by re-engineering the structures of society to make them less wasteful.

From the Guardian:

I work with the idea of hedonistic sustainability, which is sustainability that improves the quality of life and human enjoyment. The fact that Copenhagen is so clean you can actually jump in the harbour [water] in the city centre is almost a miracle. The city is sustainable but doesn’t become synonymous with making lots of sacrifices.

–Bjarke Ingels

Ingels’ latest project is a giant waste-to-energy plant that doubles as a ski slope. The incinerator will be Copenhagen’s tallest building and will send a giant smoke ring into the sky every time a ton of CO2 is released, in order to remind the city’s residents of greenhouse gas emissions…

I agree that revamping infrastructure, city planning and government projects do more than market-based solutions like buying organic cola or putting solar panels on your McMansion. But the idea that we can carry on consuming and enjoying in the rich world without consequence – believing that scientists, engineers and architects will solve the Earth’s problems for us – seems a bit optimistic and kind of reminiscent of what got us in into our current eco-mess in the first place.

I’ve asked this question before: could McMansions be made “acceptable” if they were green? Making a trash incinerator into a ski slope sounds pretty good.

I’ll be curious to see if this term catches on and who wants to use it.

A sociological view of science

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A while back, I had a conversation with friends about how undergraduate students understand and use the word “proof” when talking about knowing about the world. Echoing some of our conversation, a sociologist describes science:

I am a sociologist and read philosophy guardedly. As a social scientist, I tell my students again and again that while a theory or a sparkling generalization may be beautiful, the real test is always an “appeal to the empirical.” A proposition may be very appealing and may seem to provide powerful and enticing descriptions and understandings. However, until we gather evidence that shows that the proposition can be supported by information confirmed by the senses we must hold any proposition as one possibility among other competing explanations. Further, even when a theory or a set of ideas has been measured repeatedly against the empirical world, science never leads to certainty. Rather, science is always a modest enterprise. Even at its best and most rigorous, science is inherently “probabilistic” — we can have varying degrees of confidence in a finding, but certainty is not possible. As humans, our knowing is contingent and limited. Even the best designed scientific tests carry with them the possibility of disconfirmation in later tests. Science at its best offers acceptable levels of persuasiveness but cannot offer final conclusions.

Several things stand out to me in this explanation:

1. The appeal to data and weighing information versus existing explanations.

2. The lack of certainty in science and a probabilistic view of the world. Certainty here might be defined as “100% knowledge.” I think we can be functionally certain about some things. But the last bit about persausiveness is interesting.

3. Human knowledge is limited. There are always new things to learn, particularly about people and societies.

4. Scientific tests are undertaken to test existing theories and discover new information.

This sounds like a reasonable sociological perspective on science.

Sociologist makes academic action figures

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Is it ironic for a sociologist to create action figures of academics?

Very few universities have had realistic “action figures” made of their faculties and staff. One exception is the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas, where Dr. Jesse Weiss (Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies) has produced a collection of them.

The professor hatched the idea via his hobby of customizing action figure models from manufacturer Jakks Pacific. Classics so far include Ozarks President Dr. Rick Niece [pictured below], along with Associate Professor of Biology Dr. Sean Coleman, and Assistant Professor of English Dr. Brian Hardman.

“All it takes is a dremel tool, model paint, and Sculpey modeling compound for the hair, beards, glasses – and time,” explains the artist. (Unfortunately Jakks Pacific no longer make the requisite base figures, but the professor has a large plastic bin and drawers filled with spare parts.)

Does the action figure come with a small explanation of the cultural importance of action figures along with commentary on the gender stereotypes such figures promote? (Check out the muscles on those academics!)

Another thought: what are the most common curios academics keep on their desk or in their offices?

World rankings of sociology departments

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If ranking sociology departments in the United States is not enough (see here and here regarding the NRC rankings), now one can look at world rankings. Seven of the top ten programs are in the United States as are eleven of the top twenty. It also appears there is quite a bit of variation in the “employer” score for schools in the top ten with a range of 41.7 to 100.0

At the bottom of the page: “Since 2004 QS has produced the leading and most trusted world university rankings. Focusing globally and locally, we deliver world university rankings for students and academics alike.” Does anyone pay any attention to these world rankings?

Lynched Mexicans in the United States between 1880 and 1930

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In reading this piece which highlights the demographic change taking place in the United States, I was intrigued to read this passage from Wikipedia:

The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest has long been overlooked in American history. This may be because most historical records categorized Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims as white. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black.The actual known amount of Mexicans lynched is unknown. It is estimated that at least 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928 (this is a conservative estimate due to lack of records in many reported lynchings).Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic is second only to that of the African American community during that period, which suffered an average of 37.1 per 100,000 population.Between 1848 to 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population. These lynchings cannot be excused as merely “frontier justice”–of the 597 total victims, only 64 were lynched in areas which lacked a formal judicial system.

This is one of those little-known stories, like that of northern sundown towns, that is a reminder of America’s troubled past. Additionally, these lynchings took place in the same period of the expansion of sundown towns, suggesting the lynchings were part of a larger American turn against non-whites during this period.

Read the academic article behind the Wikipedia figures here.

Defining the poverty line in Indonesia

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One statistic that tends to generate discussion, including in the United States, is where to draw the poverty line (see a quick overview here). The issue is also drawing attention in Indonesia:

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), based on the one-dollar-a-day poverty line, there are about a million fewer poor Indonesians this year. The new BPS statistics released on Friday showed that the poor now constitute 12.5 percent of Indonesia’s population, down from 13.3 percent last year. BPS says this translates to 30.02 million poor Indonesians, as opposed to the 31.02 million in March last year. ..

BPS head Rusman Heriawan said this drop was recorded even though the government raised the poverty line to Rp 233,740 ($27.35) per capita per month from Rp 211,726 last year.

Despite the raised figure, the definition of poverty still worried experts. “The poverty line indicator is the minimum income for people to survive,” said Bambang Shergi Laksmono, dean of the University of Indonesia’s Social and Political Science Faculty.

Statistics are rarely just statistics: they are numbers politicians and others want to use to shed light on a particular issue. Here, the government wants to suggest that poverty has been reduced. On the other side, academics suggest there are plenty of people living in difficult situations and the poverty threshold doesn’t really doesn’t measure anything. Who is right, or at least perceived as right, will be adjudicated in the court of public opinion.

While it appears that the number in people living in critical poverty has been reduced, this is also a reminder that one needs to look behind claims of progress to see what exactly is being measured and whether the measurements have simply changed.

Racism the reason for the lack of black soccer managers

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Two English academics examined an issue that is reminiscent of similar issues in the United States: what explains the relatively low proportion of black soccer managers in England?

More than half the respondents to an online poll of 1,000 soccer fans including current and former players believe racism is the reason for the lack of black managers in English soccer…

“The number of black and minority ethnic managers in English professional soccer has been stable for nearly 10 years,” Cashmore and Cleland wrote.

“There are usually between two and four (out of a possible 92). Yet black players regularly make up more than a quarter of professional club squad.

“The findings indicate 56 percent of respondents believe racism operates at the executive levels of football, i.e. the boardroom.

“While some accuse club owners of directors of deliberate discrimination, most suspect a form of unwitting or institutional racism in which assumptions about black people’s capacities are not analysed and challenged and continue to circulate.”

Soccer has tried to combat racism throughout the game for years – see the ever-present slogan “Say No to Racism” in the new FIFA commercials playing during the Women’s World Cup and my FIFA 2010 video game. But negative stories pop up from games time to time and I imagine that this study doesn’t please those in charge. Even if racism is not present at matches, the perception is that it is still in the sport.

I was intrigued to see that these conclusions are drawn from a web survey. Here is some of the methodology for the study:

This method did not suffer from the kind of sampling error that can bias more traditional sampling: participation was completely voluntary and confidential. It was self-selecting. The only possible bias would be a skew toward those with access to the internet. We believed this was an acceptable bias in the circumstances. To elicit the necessary data, both authors engaged in club fans’ forums across the United Kingdom (from the Premier League down to non-league). A large number of forum editors were formally contacted by email and in those forums where permission was granted (over fifty), a paragraph about the research and a link directing fans to complete the survey was included. As the research was anonymous, at the end of the survey the participants were reminded that by clicking submit they were consenting for their views to be used in the research.

This study doesn’t have the “kind of sample error that can bias more traditional sampling”? Self-selection is an issue with web surveys. This may not matter as much here if the authors were most interested in obtaining the opinion of ardent fans. But it might even be more powerful if the average citizen held these opinions.

Can anyone stop globalization?

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In the middle of a story about politics within a troubled world economy, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman poses an interesting question:

“The big question is whether any political force is capable of stemming the tides of globalisation – of capital, trade, finance, industry, criminality, drugs and weapon trafficking, terrorism, and the migration of the victims of all these forces,” writes the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has spearheaded much of the thinking in this area. “While having at their disposal solely the means of a single state.”

This highlights two key features of globalization:

1. It is much bigger than any single state, even though there might be winners and losers, posed as the United States and Haiti, respectively, in this article. Without close cooperation between nations or a binding and/or effective international authority, the issues Baumun cites are difficult to deal with.

2. Of course, I can imagine some asking whether globalization should be stopped at all. But, Bauman also provides a reminder that globalization includes the spread of negatives as well as positives.