Monthly Archives: August 2011

Seeking height variances for DuPage mosques

Posted on by

I’ve been keeping track of several proposals  for mosques in DuPage County (including one near Lombard) that have been working their way through the approval process. One issue has been the height of the buildings. A group looking to build a mosque near Willowbrook is going to seek an exception to existing regulations:

The Muslim Educational and Cultural Center of America is one of two Islamic groups to be denied a height variance request this year by DuPage.

County board members granted MECCA’s request for a conditional-use permit so it can build a roughly 47,000-square-foot mosque along 91st Street near Route 83. But in a separate action, they refused to give the group permission to exceed the height restriction of 36 feet so it could have a 69-foot dome and 79-foot minaret.

Mark Daniel, an Elmhurst-based attorney representing MECCA, said the group has reapplied for a shorter 50-foot dome and 60-foot minaret. A public hearing on the new height variance request is scheduled for November…

Board members who opposed the height variance said MECCA representatives failed to show the denial would result in a legal hardship.

While the lawyer for MECCA suggests that there are plenty of religious buildings nearby over 36 feet, the County says the new rules went into effect in 2005 and have been followed since.

I would guess that the 2005 regulations were put into place because of NIMBY concerns: residents didn’t want large structures dominating the sky near them. Since the steeple seems to be on the way out, perhaps having a tall building now indicates that the structure will be quite large, leading to the typical concerns of traffic and late night crowds. Looking at the Google Map satellite view of the intersection of 91st Street and Route 83, it appears there are a number of nearby residential neighborhoods.

If the County has applied these rules to all religious groups, perhaps MECCA could suggest that the entire regulation be examined. Thirty-six feet tall is roughly 3+ stories, somewhat sizable but not that tall. MECCA’s proposal is for about double that height. Indeed, another Chicago-area organization has suggested the height regulations are unfair:

In the meantime, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago this week issued a statement claiming that legal experts have questioned the method DuPage used to adopt its existing height limit. The council said the “potentially illegally adopted” restriction violates state law and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

It would be interesting to then hear from these legal experts.

ACT scores suggest most students not ready for college

Posted on by

The ACT has released a report that says the majority of students who take the test are not ready for college:

Only one in four college-bound high school graduates is adequately prepared for college-level English, reading, math and science, according to report released Wednesday by the ACT college admissions test.

Some 28 percent of the members of the high school class of 2011 failed to meet readiness benchmarks in any of the four core subject areas.

“ACT results continue to show an alarmingly high number of students who are graduating without all the academic skills they need to succeed after high school,” the report stated…

Readiness was defined as a student having a 50 percent chance of getting a B or a 75 percent chance of getting a C in first-year courses English Composition, College Algebra, Biology and social sciences.

Additionally, there are some pretty big gaps between racial and ethnic groups.

Here are some possible courses of action in response to this information:

1. Tell colleges that they need to offer more remedial classes and get students up to speed.

2. Add to the argument that perhaps college isn’t for all students.

3. Tell high schools that they need to keep their standards high and improve their ability to prepare students for college.

3a. Push the issue further down the educational ladder before high school.

4. Attack the ACT test. Perhaps it isn’t a great predictor of success, perhaps it is culturally biased, perhaps the students who take the ACT are not the same who take the SAT, etc.

I wonder how colleges will respond to this information. I would guess that this really doesn’t impact more elite schools who have their pick of students who have higher ACT scores. But where does this leave schools that accept a broader range of students?

“Opportunity hoarding” in suburban schools

Posted on by

Two education researchers argue that suburban schools have practiced “opportunity hoarding”:

While urban schools’ not keeping pace with suburban schools is an acknowledged problem, few have studied the causes of the discrepancies. John Rury and Argun Saatcioglu, professor and assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies, recently published an article in the American Journal of Education showing how some suburban school districts gained advantages, thereby excluding them from some others. “Opportunity hoarding,” a term coined by sociologist Charles Tilley, claims that a group that gains advantages tends to work to maintain them.

“Basically, it’s rules of exclusion,” Rury said of the term. “Many suburbs are almost a textbook case of people doing that. They are often marketed as ‘exclusive neighborhoods.’”

Suburban schools have not always had advantages over their urban counterparts. Rury and Saatcioglu studied census data from 1940, 1960 and 1980.

“In the ’40s, urban schools were it. They were the best schools,” Rury said. “Forty years later, it was just the opposite.”

This would fit with a larger story of suburbanites escaping the problems of the city after World War II.

This overview makes it sound like the researchers propose a zero-sum game: if suburban schools have more resources, city schools necessarily have less. Is this necessarily the case? And what evidence is there that suburban schools and communities don’t want to give up their school’s advantages – a resistance to forms of property tax sharing? How could suburbanites be convinced that giving up their own advantages, such as better schools, is worthwhile?

The comment about the switch from the good schools being in the city to the suburbs reminds me of the book Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education. This text looks at what changed in the Chicago Public Schools between 1940 and 1960, emphasizing the increasing segregation within these Northern schools.

Redoing Milgram’s degrees of separation experiment with Facebook

Posted on by

Stanley Milgram is best known for one particular experiment but another of his experiments is being replicated with new technology:

Yahoo and Facebook are setting out to test the hypothesis that anyone in the world is connected to anyone else in just six steps.

The experiment aims to prove or disprove that which was first suggested by Harvard sociologist Stanley Milgram when he asked 300 people to get a message to a Boston stockbroker using their personal networks.

Only about 60 of the messages reached their target, with the average number of steps in the chain being six – coining the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’.

Yahoo’s research department is aiming to replicate that experiment, this time using Facebook, which has 750 million users worldwide.

If you go to the official page, you can then choose to participate. But before you can, you have to agree to a “Terms of Use” and four other statements. This is essentially the “informed consent form” for the experiment.

Also, the “Terms of Use” provides this description of the project:

The purpose of this study is to test a long-standing theory in sociology that everyone on Earth is connected together in a giant social network. In this experiment, participants called “Senders” forward messages to their Facebook friends in an attempt to reach a given “Target” individual, about whom they are given certain identifying information, in the shortest number of steps possible.

I can’t say that I have heard this specific sociological theory but I would be interested to see the results.

If you want to read a short (several paragraph) description of Milgram’s initial experiment, find it here.

Since corporations like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and others are sitting on treasure troves of data, can we expect to see more experiments like this in the future?

Building libertarian cities in the middle of the ocean

Posted on by

This has been talked about for a while but here is a brief update on independent libertarian cities to be built in the oceans:

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”…

The Seasteading Institute’s Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.

While this sounds like some post-apocalyptic scene, these cities could provide an interesting Lord of the Flies situation. Even though these places will (or may) be built in order to escape regulations, they will have to adopt rules and norms of their own in order to survive. I will be interested to see what sort of society will develop in these new cities.

I also imagine that someone will try to control what happens on these islands. Although these places may be in international waters, I think there will be a discussion about how these rules should be altered. Won’t someone want to tax what happens on these islands or to make sure that they are not national security threats?

Changes in the Census Bureau’s data collection between 2000 and 2010

Posted on by

While certain parts of the dicennial Census have remained the same, a sociologist outlines some data collection changes between 2000 and 2010:

In 2000 the short form included only eight questions for the householder and six for every person living in the household. These were the same basic questions that would be asked in 2010 about sex, age, relationship to the householder, race and Hispanic status.

About one in six households received the “long form,” which included some 53 questions. In addition to the basic questions in every census form, this survey also contained questions on a whole panoply of characteristics, including housing, moving in the last five years, employment, detailed income sources, military service, disability status, ancestry, place of birth and education.

Until 2010, the long form and short form were distributed in tandem, but then the government split them. Beginning in 2005, the Census Bureau began to collect data for the American Community Survey, which is very similar to the old long form. That survey gets responses from about 2 million households and residents of group quarters (prison, dormitory, institution) every year, and tracks the same sort of data that was produced by the long form sample. The survey takes place all year and interviews, where necessary, are conducted by permanent staff — not the temporary workers who interview for decennial census.

The Census Bureau releases three sets of data each year from the community survey: the one-year, the three-year and the five-year files. The one-year file is released for areas of at least 65,000 in population, the three-year file for areas of at least 20,000 and the five-year file for all of the areas for which the long form was released (block-groups, tracts and higher). The census releases data only for certain locations with larger populations at one and three-year intervals. This is because, since the ACS is a sample, its reliability depends on sample size.

So on Dec. 14, 2010, the Census Bureau released the first five-year file from the American Community Survey, including all the data that used to be released from the census long form. This totaled 32,000 columns with 675,000 rows of data. These data are comparable to what was compiled from the 2000 Census and allow one to answer many questions at the neighborhood level, where data are needed beyond the few questions in the 2010 census.

In summary, two things have changed:

1. The Census has been moving toward more frequent data collection for a while. Some of the stuff that used to be asked every 10 years is now being asked more frequently, providing more up-to-date information.

2. Beveridge goes on to explain a couple of issues with the American Community Survey data, one good and one bad. On the bad side: although it may be more frequent, the sample size is not as large as a decennial census, meaning that we can’t be as certain about the results. On the good side: the Census will no longer have to rely on large teams of temporary staff every ten years but will have trained professionals collecting data year after year. In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how researchers treat these new figures.

Overall, this is a reminder that official figures don’t simply happen. They are the product of particular methodologies and definitions and when these protocols change, so can the data.

Additionally, the data is easily accessible (here are the 2010 figures). I’m sure it will continue to get easier to access and analyze the data. This is good for democracy as it is relatively easy for citizens to see the current status and changes in their nation. I wish more people could or would use this data frequently to better understand their surroundings.

Quick Review: Universal’s Islands of Adventure & The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

Posted on by

We recently were in Florida and spent a day at Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure. While this is more of a theme park than the regular Universal, it also includes the 1 year old Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Here are some thoughts on this park with pictures:

1. I’ll start with Harry Potter. This area was a lot of fun: from the ride (more of a Universal type ride than a roller coaster) to Hogsmeade to seeing Hogwarts from a distance, it was exciting. By far the best overall area of the park. In addition to the main ride (which was fun but we only did it once), there are two dueling roller coasters, the Hungarian Horntail and the Chinese Fireball, that were the second and third best rides in the park (and I went on each of these twice).

We spent a good amount of time in Hogsmeade. The scene of a small village in the snow looked good even on a 90 degree day and Hogwarts looks imposing off in the distance. While Olivander’s wand shop was overrated (and the longest wait of the day at 45 minutes), Zonko’s, Honeyduke’s, and The Three Broomsticks were worthwhile. The butterbeer was tasty.

This was the most crowded part of the park and we went there at least four separate times to try to avoid some of the crowds.

2. The best roller coaster in the park is The Incredible Hulk. While it is not the tallest or fastest coaster in Florida, it has some good features: you are shot out of the tunnel, the first turn/corkscrew is great, and it has an interesting part where it goes through some mist and under a bridge. The waits weren’t that long and I rode three times.

3. The park has three water rides which we rode all in a row. The Jurassic Park ride was entertaining (an extended big boat ride with the big drop at the end). The best was Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls which was whimsical, wet, and had a couple of small gotcha drops.

4. Other parts of the park I liked:

-Perhaps other parks have this now but all of the rides had lockers that were free and locked/unlocked by your fingerprint. We didn’t have to pay anything for this all day, the lockers were conveniently located near every ride, and we didn’t have to worry about a key.

-The Dr. Seuss area was fun to walk through but the rides are for kids. Humorously, we saw a brochure in the Orlando area that claimed one of the tram rides from this area was actually in Disney World.

-Spiderman was okay – a typical Universal ride with lots of noise, lights, a 3-D screen. Doctor Doom’s Fearfall could have been taller but at least the line was short.

-We saw three shows: the BMX/skateboarding/motorcycle stunt show was fun while Poseidon’s Fury and the Eighth Voyage of Sinbad were lame.

-The food wasn’t bad. We ate at The Three Broomsticks for lunch and Mythos for dinner. Mythos claimed to be at the top of theme park food and I can’t say that I disagree.

5. Some things I would change:

-There are a few areas that need to be spiced up: Jurassic Park and The Lost Continent. Perhaps this has changed recently with more resources and space going to Harry Potter but these areas were noticeably lacking.

-The park needs one or two good rides to be fantastic. Another roller coaster would be fantastic. We had ridden all three roller coasters (and The Hippogriff kiddie coaster doesn’t count) and all three water rides within four hours of being in the park.

6. A note: we stayed in a Universal hotel the night before and it seemed to pay off. Though the hotel was pricey, we were able to get into the park an hour early (and therefore had no line for the Harry Potter ride) and also had an Express Pass so we could bypass some of the lines. The longest wait we had for a ride all day was probably twenty-five minutes and this was to be in the front row of The Incredible Hulk.

On the whole, we enjoyed the day. All amusement parks these days are expensive but I found this to be more interesting than Disney World, Epcot, or the regular Universal Park. Compared to the other nearby options, this park has exciting rides and doesn’t have to rely on characters, tradition, and tricks. With a little bit more, this park could be fantastic and I would then enjoy returning.

Here is the official website and the Wikipedia overview.

(Side note: the Harry Potter souvenirs were flying off the shelves including wands and school robes. With this success, how come some park hasn’t shelled out big bucks for a Lord of the Rings theme?)

“Mandatory energy star ratings” for Australian houses

Posted on by

I’ve asked before whether McMansions can ever be green. Australia is proposing energy star ratings for homes and such regulations would especially affect McMansions:

The Federal Government aims to introduce, by as soon as next year, mandatory energy star ratings for homes being sold or rented out…

Housing experts said most McMansions would score very poorly on the ratings system, which would be similar to the methodology used to identify the energy efficiency of whitegoods…

There are significant financial implications for owners of these homes – and most older dwellings which are also likely to rate lowly.

Owners would need to either spend up on going green or face the prospect of a lower sale price.

This is one way to push homeowners to improve the efficiency of their homes. This isn’t terribly surprising considering that many consumer goods or appliances these days are rated along these grounds (from electricity cost to miles per gallon). But at the same time, I can’t imagine these sorts of regulations being instituted in the United States anytime soon unless it was solely limited to new construction.

Sort this out: poll of 39 economists suggests “30% chance of recession”

Posted on by

Polling economists about whether the country is headed for a recession does not seem to be the best way to make predictions:

The 39 economists polled Aug. 3-11 put the chance of another downturn at 30% — twice as high as three months ago, according to their median estimates. That means another shock to the fragile economy — such as more stock market declines or a worsening of the European debt crisis — could push the nation over the edge.

Yet even if the USA avoids a recession, as economists still expect, they see economic growth muddling along at about 2.5% the next year, down from 3.1% in April’s survey. The economy must grow well above 3% to significantly cut unemployment…

The gloomier forecast is a stunning reversal. Just weeks ago, economists were calling for a strong rebound in the second half of the year, based on falling gasoline prices giving consumers more to spend on other things and car sales taking off as auto supply disruptions after Japan’s earthquake faded. In fact, July retail sales showed their best gain in four months.

But that was before European debt woes spread, the government cut its growth estimates for the first half of 2011 to less than 1%, and Standard & Poor’s lowered the USA’s credit rating after the showdown over the debt ceiling.

Here is what I find strange about this:

1. The headline meant to grab our attention focuses on the 30% statistic. Is this a good or bad figure? It is less than 50% (meaning there are less equal odds) but it is also double the prediction of predictions three months ago. Based on a 3 in 10 chance of a recession, how would the country and individual change their actions?

2. This comes from a poll of 39 economists. One, this isn’t that many. Two, how do we know that these economists know what they are talking about? How successful have their predictions been in the past? I see the advantages of “crowd-sourcing,” consulting a number of estimates to get an aggregate figure, but the sample could be larger and we don’t know whether these economists will be right. (Even if they are not right, perhaps it gives us some indication about what “leading economists” think and this could matter as well).

3. How much of this is based on real data versus perceptions of the economy? The article suggests this is a “stunning reversal” of earlier predictions and then cites some data that seems to be worse. These figures don’t determine everything. I wonder what it would take for economists to predict a recession – which numbers would have to be worse and how bad would they have to get?

4. Will anyone ever come back and look at whether these economists got it right?

In the end, I’m not sure this really tells us anything. I suspect it is these sorts of statistics and headlines that push people to throw up their hands altogether about statistics.

Sociological findings of Academically Adrift in Doonesbury

Posted on by

The findings of Academically Adrift stirred up a lot of discussion. (See an earlier post here.) Eight months after the book was released, its findings made it way to the Sunday comics (August 14) as Doonesbury picked up on the information.

Neither colleges or emerging adults look too good here.

It would be interesting to hear Gary Trudeau talk about how he discovered this information and what he wanted to say in this particular comic strip.