Monthly Archives: August 2011

College students don’t know how to use Google

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I recently heard about this study at a faculty development day: college students have difficulty understanding and using search results.

Researchers with the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries project watched 30 students at Illinois Wesleyan University try to search for different topics online and found that only seven of them were able to conduct “what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search.”

The students “appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school,” Lynda Duke and Andrew Asher write in a book on the project coming out this fall.

At all five Illinois universities, students reported feeling “anxious” and confused when trying to research. Many felt overwhelmed by the volume of results their searches would turn up, not realizing that there are ways to narrow those searches and get more tailored results. Others would abandon their research topics when they couldn’t find enough sources, unaware that they were using the wrong search terms or database for their topics.

The researchers found that students did not know “how to build a search to narrow or expand results, how to use subject headings, and how various search engines (including Google) organize and display results.” That means that some students didn’t understand how to search only for news articles, or only for scholarly articles. Most only know how to punch in keywords and hope for the best.

Such trust in technology. Wonder where this came from?

I like how anthropologists were involved in this study. Including an observation component could make this data quite unique. I don’t think many people would think that ethnographic methods could be used to examine such up-to-date technology.

Several other thoughts:

1. How many adults could explain how Google displays pages?

1a. If people knew how Google organized things, would they go elsewhere for information?

2. Finding and sorting through information is a key problem of our age. The problem is not a lack of information or possible sources; rather, there is too much.

3. Who exactly in schools should be responsible for teaching this? Librarians, perhaps, but students have limited contact. Preferably, all teachers/professors should know something about this and talk about it. Parents could also impart this information at home.

4. I’m now tempted to ask students to include all of their search terms in final projects so that I can check and see whether they actually sorted through articles or they simply picked the top few results.

New proposal for “bus rapid transit system” for Chicago

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A new proposal calls for a “bus rapid transit system” in Chicago:

That’s one reason to like a new proposal by the Metropolitan Planning Council (pdf) that outlines a major bus rapid transit system for the city of Chicago. The system would be pretty expansive. Its 10 routes would wind through roughly 95 miles of windy city. It would link up to Chicago’s existing transit lines and thereby increase transit trips throughout the region by 3 percent, with as many as 7,000 daily drivers converting to public transportation…

More importantly, the proposed system would also be relatively inexpensive. Whereas light rail can often cost around $35 million a mile to build, bus rapid transit can be done for about $13 million, according to the council’s report. Still, modest as the plan is, it might not be modest enough. Currently Chicago has plans for only three fast bus lanes, with another three to come in the future — “BRT light,” as one official put it. A spokeswoman for the city’s transit authority told the Tribune the money for more lines just isn’t there:

“Given the funding constraints, our plan for three routes is an aggressive, reasonable and workable plan,” CTA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said.

This looks like an interesting proposal, including the livability scores calculated for each bus route. If I had to sell someone on this, I would say that the proposal argues that these buses deliver light-rail like performance without the additional infrastructure costs. The proposed routes seem to be targeted at areas that are not easily served by the El, particularly along several key north-south corridors.

Several questions come to mind:

1. The proposal includes several small case studies of BRT (bus rapid transit) in action in cities like Portland, Johannesburg, and Las Vegas. Is it reasonable to ask that such proposals include city systems that were not terribly effective?

2. Could this find its way to the suburbs? Suburban buses always present difficulties due to limited service over a wide areas and consistent funding issues. But rapid buses that cover well-trafficked routes might be worth considering.

3. The funding issue is a big deal. Is the City of Chicago in any position to approve new mass transit considering its financial state? The proposal suggests this would be beneficial because it would encourage development, improve mass transit, and make the city more livable but would this also provide cost savings? It would be interesting to hear from a panel of experts as to whether Chicago “needs” light rail or BRT. In other words, is this a luxury or a necessity?

Naperville, Aurora mayors among those who voted for Illinois toll increase

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Amidst news that Illinois tollway directors voted today to raise tolls for a $12 billion capital project (see my earlier thoughts here), I noticed that Naperville Mayor George Pradel is involved:

But a majority of Illinois State Toll Highway Authority leaders said the move is crucial to repair existing roads and build some new ambitious projects such as the long-delayed Elgin-O’Hare Expressway extension into O’Hare International Airport and a western bypass road around the airport. The capital plan will create about 120,000 permanent jobs and ease congestion, officials said.

“My heart goes out to those going through tough times and that have lost jobs. One side effect of this is that it will enhance the economy in northern Illinois over 15 years,” said Naperville Mayor and tollway director George Pradel, who voted for the toll increase.

The decision didn’t come quietly — one board director called the move too hasty and proposed a scaled-back version.

Director Bill Morris of Grayslake, the only dissenter in today’s vote, thinks the toll authority could carry out a 10-year capital plan with a 15-cent increase at a 40-cent toll plaza now with more hikes expected later.

You can see the profiles of the Illinois Tollway Board of Directors here. Having never looked at these profiles, I was intrigued: Pradel is joined by the current mayor of Aurora as well as well a number of businessmen and two female public servants (one from education, one from Cook County government). On the whole, it seems like the directors bought into the economic development argument: good tollways, whether that means improved roadways or new roadways, will help northeastern Illinois prosper.

But looking at the backgrounds of this group, I wonder how many also were influenced by how better roadways might help their community or business interests. While this is not necessarily bad – indeed, northeastern Illinois needs businesses and jobs – it is a different perspective than the common driver might have. (And since this is Illinois, I assume there is some political process behind this board. Still, no “citizen” members?) Take Mayor Pradel: was his vote solely for northeastern Illinois and/or is this quite beneficial for Naperville? The regional argument is interesting (and I’m sure the job and economic estimates could be debated) but I would be interested in hearing about how local interests affected this vote.

The large homes of politicians

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While this gallery of photos doesn’t offer “proof” that most or even many politicians have big homes (and it may just be a play to pull in Internet visitors and clicks), it is an interesting subject to think about:

1. What exactly is the causal relationship here? Did they have bigger than normal homes before they were politicians (meaning they were wealthy when running for office) or are the big homes in part because of their political office?

2. Are there large homes any different than other people within their income brackets?

3. How should the public think about this? Should there be outrage that public servants don’t live like public servants? Do we not usually care because it is their private home and many Americans would buy bigger homes if they had the opportunity? Occasionally, this becomes part of a campaign – John Edwards took some grief for this and his haircuts – and others like Al Gore can be mocked.

4. How much time can a politician even spend in these homes with duties and homes elsewhere?

5. Would a politician who lives in a McMansion (and the implications regarding bad taste, etc.) be considered worse off than one who lives in a mansion?

Toll Brothers, former McMansion builder, near completion of luxury condos in NYC

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During the housing boom of the 1990s and 2000s, Toll Brothers was well-known for its large homes that they often called “estate homes” and critics called “McMansions.” But now Toll Brothers is branching out into new kinds of construction, including luxury condos in New York City:

The kinder, gentler Toll Brothers are debuting new luxury condos at 205 Water Street in Dumbo next month, and to support that image, the 67-unit “modern loft” building just got a huge PR boost from a Wall Street Journal preview calling it “unerringly contextual, but also elegant, and even at some points, whimsical.” Unlike Toll Brothers’ previous, shinier attempts in Brooklyn, the seven-story scale of 205 Water fits right in with its landmarked historic district (zoning allows up to 12 stories) and the rusty steel and concrete facade by architects GreenbergFarrow takes cues from the nabe’s industrial past. Adhering to the LPC’s requirements meant constructing 205 Water out of reinforced architectural concrete, a “temperamental material rarely used anymore as the primary material in new buildings” that projects a “world-weary sort of workingman’s facade” to the street. Upper stories are clad in cor-ten steel, a lighter material also seen on the Ford Foundation headquarters in Manhattan.

I wonder if the people at Curbed are disappointed since it sounds like Toll Brothers is building fewer homes they would view as McMansions and instead built contextualized structures that fit in more urban neighborhoods that maybe could even be considered green. Could Toll Brothers turn their image around?

Sociology: helping us move beyond common sense (and individualistic) understandings of the world

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This overview of the recent book Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us does a decent job in explaining why sociology helps us move beyond common sense understandings of the world:

This thought-provoking book challenges the universal belief that management decisions based on common sense – rooted in best practices, hunches and experiences – often lead to the best outcomes.  According to the book, the reality ends up being quite different.  Relying too much on common sense often leads well-intentioned and intelligent people to make poor strategic and tactical decisions in areas such as capital investments, product introductions, new market entry and advertising decisions.

Watt’s supposition is that people give too much credence to their prior and accumulated experiences, history in general and what they perceive as best practices when making decisions.  According to the research, a person’s common sense is faulty for a number of reasons:  it contains intrinsic bias; it is based on unproven or wrong assumptions and; it is too difficult to deduce clear-cut conclusions and action steps from an environment that is overly complex or unclear…

Relying on common sense for decisions or to make predictions has dangerous implications.  For one thing, reality is usually very different from what was first imagined.  The future is quite complex and rarely reflects the same conditions that earlier decisions were based on.  As a result, it is highly unlikely positive outcomes will repeat themselves if the individual relies solely on history.  In my consulting experience,  the higher degree of uncertainty around a decision or potential outcome, the more likely senior executives will rely on subjective criteria like common sense or best practices as a basis for decision making.

I’ve made a similar argument to students: we tend to operate on a day-to-day basis by seeing things in terms of how we have seen or experienced them before. We make patterns out of things (we are pattern-making creatures) that have happened to us regardless of the amount of information to back up our conclusions. New information is then filtered through these older constructs. When confronted with new information that doesn’t “fit,” we have to ignore it, fit it into our old constructs, or develop new constructs.

Thinking sociologically means that we move beyond this individualistic level in a couple of ways:

1. We try to take a broad overview, recognizing that the world is complicated and many things are related. Instead of just thinking about how something affects us, we look at how systems are connected and social processes take place. The question is more “how does the whole affect the individual” rather than “how does the individual fit within the whole.”

2. Conclusions should be based on data that is collected and analyzed in ways that minimize individual level bias. Though we often are unable to create perfect models or understanding, we can make good estimates.

I may have to try out this description with my students to see what they think.

C. Wright Mills influences movie about white-collar cubicles

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A new movie about white-collar cubicle workers is influenced by the work of sociologist C. Wright Mills:

In his 1951 book “White Collar,” the sociologist C. Wright Mills acknowledged the powerlessness of the white-collar worker while also understanding his importance within a larger context: “Yet it is to this white-collar world that one must look for much that is characteristic of twentieth-century existence … They carry, in a most revealing way, many of those psychological themes that characterize our epoch, and, in one way or another, every general theory of the main drift has had to take account of them.”…

Mills’s thinking was a major inspiration for the filmmaker Zaheed Mawani, who documents the resigned reality of the cubicle-coralled white-collar worker in his new film “Three Walls” (you can watch a clip here). Mawani’s film brings to the screen what numerous long-term studies have shown: that a lack of autonomy over one’s daily tasks leads to boredom (at best), utter despair and even increased mortality rates. Yet, time and again, proposed solutions ignore these deeper issues and focus instead (see last month’s column) on the furniture.

Mawani has used the cubicle to explore larger issues in the world of work. As he and I both discovered, passions run high around the most seemingly banal piece of furniture: it has its arch defenders, its resigned occupiers and its rigorously vocal critics. Mawani was interested in examining what the cubicle has come to represent, as he explained in an e-mail to me, “in terms of the shifting nature of white collar work: the lack of job security, increase in temporary workers, our detachment to work (the fact that we no longer stay in the same job for more than a few years and the ramifications of no longer having that employee-employer bond). It’s also about our relationship to technology, the lack of physicality in work.”

Is there really much more to say about the cubicle, a piece of office furniture that has received much criticism over the years? For many, the cubicle has come to represent a temporary space where workers are simply replaceable cogs in corporate machines that tend to benefit some wealthy owner somewhere else.

This discussion reminds me of the design firm IDEO which has been featured in a number of places for creating a different type of workplace: no walls, open desks, lots of toys, lots of collaborative space, and a lot of interaction between workers of different backgrounds in order to take advantage of everyone’s ideas. For an example of how they operate, I’ve had students watch this old ABC Nightline clip about how the company went about designing a new grocery cart. This sort of office seems to appeal to a younger generation and IDEO argues that it is much more effective. (Humorously, here is IDEO’s attempt to build “Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle.”)

The idea that office furniture can reveal deep-seated cultural themes is intriguing. I’m afraid to ask what someone might be able to see if they had time to observe my office…

Too many farmer’s markets in the US?

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This piece in the New York Times suggests that there may now be too many farmer’s markets. I wonder if this is the case because too many communities want them to boost economic development:

Farmers in pockets of the country say the number of farmers’ markets has outstripped demand, a consequence of a clamor for markets that are closer to customers and communities that want multiple markets.

Some farmers say small new markets have lured away loyal customers and cut into profits. Other farmers say they must add markets to their weekly rotation to earn the same money they did a few years ago, reducing their time in the field and adding employee hours…

Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has jumped to 7,175 as of Aug. 5; of those, 1,043 were established this year, according to the federal Agriculture Department. In 2005, there were 4,093 markets across the country.

While the main argument here seems to involve supply and demand, I’ll throw out another possible factor. More and more communities (or city neighborhoods) desire farmer’s markets because they are relatively easy ways to attract residents and visitors to a community. Because they usually don’t require buildings (with good weather being a helpful feature), can easily be moved around, can make use of unused or underutilized parking lots (a common suburban issue), and can offer some goods that are more difficult to find elsewhere, farmer’s markets can be a “quick fix.” This has developed as a popular strategy in nearby suburbs where such markets bring in people to an older downtown that might not typically come otherwise. Before such markets became popular, these could help a certain community apart from others. If we think about it in reverse, perhaps it is not only communities or neighborhoods that drive this trend: residents could desire a farmer’s market not only for convenience but for status.

It is not uncommon for communities to adopt similar economic strategies but this sounds like one where not everyone may be able to win. Any chance that some national regulatory board or group might develop to help space out farmer’s markets?

h/t Instapundit

The problem with using averages as illustrated by the average salaries of NBA players

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In negotiations between NBA owners and players, the topic of the “average player salary” has come up. This discussion illustrates some of the issues involved with  using averages and medians:

Here is the “average player salary” for each of the major U.S. professional team sports, based on a variety of sources using the most recent data available:

NBA: $5.15 million (2010-11)

MLB: $3.34 million (2010)

NHL: $2.4 million (2010-11)

NFL: $1.9 million (2010)

From the public’s view, these numbers are high in all four sports. But players and agents argue that these averages obscure important distinctions including the value of certain positions over others (the quarterback in the NFL versus the punter) and the size of the roster (fewer NBA players, more NFL players).

One common solution to problems with averages is to instead use a median. Here is how this might change the discussion in the NBA:

“It’s the median salary that’s more important,” NBA agent Bill Duffy said. “Look at the Miami Heat as an analogy here: You’ve got three guys making $17 million and probably six guys making $1.2 [million]. So that’s a little misguided, that average salary.”…

It is not unlike, Duffy said, news stories that cite the “average” U.S. household income as opposed to the median. The latter figure, according to the most recent U.S. census, was $50,233. If you were to average in the dollar amounts pulled down by Wall Street bankers, Ivy League lawyers, certain public-union employees and yes, professional athletes, that number would jump considerably.

Curiously, neither the NBA nor the NBPA seems to make much use of a median player salary.

“We use [average] because it’s the most commonly used measure and best reflects the amount of compensation that the NBA provides to players across the league,” an NBA spokesman said this week. “In addition, it’s the measure that both we and the union agreed upon in the CBA.”

In the NFL, the median salary is approximately $770,000 — about 40 percent of the average.

In the NBA, using USA Today salary figures for the 2009-10 season, the estimated median salary was about $2.33 million. That’s still about 46 times what the median U.S. household earns, but it is less than half what the max-salary-bloated “average” is.

What happens in these sports is this: a small number of star athletes make huge amounts of money, pulling the average for all athletes up. If you use the median instead, where 50% of the players make more and 50% more make less, it suggests that more of the athletes in each sport make less. Particularly in the NFL which has bigger rosters, the difference between the average and the median shows that many players make very little.

It is interesting that the NBA spokesman said the two sides had agreed in their Collective Bargaining Agreement that they would use the average salary figure. Was this really a point of contention negotiations or did no one really think about the consequences? What was the thinking behind this for the players? If the union was focused on helping all of their members, perhaps they would focus on the median, suggesting that they are strongest when all of their members are well taken care of. This lower figure might also look more palatable to the public though it is unclear whether public perceptions have any influence on such negotiations. However, if the union was more interested in making sure that individual athletes could receive the biggest possible payouts because of their athletic exploits, then perhaps the average is better.

Two takeaway points:

1. Averages and medians are both measures of central tendency but they are open to different interpretations. People need to be clear about which they are using and which interpretation their number interprets.

2. It will be interesting to see if the new CBA is based on average or median salaries.

American politicians push small town values in a suburban country

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America is a suburban nation: more than 50% live in the suburbs, roughly 30% live in cities, and about 20% live in small towns or rural communities. Despite these demographics, this article suggests that politicians still frequently draw on the idea of small town values:

American politics may live in the cities and suburbs — but it dreams in small towns.

More than a century after the American people migrated from the farms to the cities and then to the suburbs, the image of small-town America endures as the birthplace of solid character and sound values. In the gauzy image of politics, as in popular culture dating back more than a century, small-town America is a place where the people go to church, work hard and help one another in ways unknown in the cities and suburbs of America…

Still, politicians love to wrap themselves in the sentimental image.

“The people still have the same spirit in Waterloo that Iowans have always come to exemplify. We work hard. We don’t spend more money than what we take in,” Bachmann said in Waterloo, where she was born.

Perry wears his childhood in Paint Creek, Texas, as a badge of honor. “Doesn’t have a zip code. It’s too small to be called a town,” he said during a recent visit to Waterloo. “What I learned growing up on the farm was a way of life that was centered on hard work, and on faith and on thrift.”

Obama can’t claim a childhood in a small town — he was born in Honolulu. But he, too, reveled in small-town values during his recent Midwest bus tour.

So while Americans may no longer live in small towns, they want to hold on to particular characteristics such as hard work, community, and religious values. These are symbolic values, perhaps even more so than actual actions that people carry out. (There is often a disconnect between what people say they believe and what they actually do.) And, of course, people may want to hold on to these values but they don’t necessarily want to live in the places where these values arose.

This reminds me of a theory I have had about the popularity of American suburbs: they are a uniquely American adaptation that combines some of city and rural life. This is about perceptions. On the rural side, suburbs still offer lawns, single-family homes, good schools, safety, and community life. On the city side, suburbs have easier access to the city, more cultural amenities, more jobs, are more open-minded, and more opportunities over all. Suburbs don’t really offer the best of either of these worlds but offer some of both, allowing Americans to straddle these two worlds.

A question: how difficult is it for Americans to elect urban politicians to higher office (particularly compared to more rural candidates), candidates who would portray themselves solely as a city dweller and act like city dwellers? Perhaps Barack Obama is the closest we have come to this but because of political realities has primarily tried to appeal to working and middle-class suburbanites who may just swing the election.