Monthly Archives: November 2011

NPR reports on the state of American hipsterdom

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NPR sums up the state of the American hipster scene:

On the streets of Franklin and Nashville and almost every town throughout America now, hipsters scuttle by on scooters, zip around in Zipcars or Smart cars, roll by on fixed-gear bikes or walk about in snazzy high-top sneakers and longboard shorts. They snap Instagram photos of each other — in black skinny jeans and T-shirts with funky epigrams like “If You Deny It, You Are A Hipster” — and turn the pix into iPhone cases. They buy cool-cat snuggle clothes at American Eagle and down-market monkey boots at Urban Outfitters. They drink cheap beer, listen to music on vinyl records and decorate their lairs with upcycled furniture.

They follow indie bands and camp out at Occupy movements. They work as programmers and shop clerks, baristas and bartenders. They are gamers and volunteers, savvy entrepreneurs and out-of-work basement dwellers.

In case you haven’t noticed, hipsters — and those who cater to them — are everywhere. And that really galls some hipsters…

You might think that as hipsterism ripples out, in concentric (and eccentric) circles farther and farther from its big-city epicenters, the ultra-coolitude would lose its authenticity, Furia says, “but the opposite may be true. Cities are known for setting trends; hipsterism is about anti-trends. It sounds funny, but hipsters in Omaha may actually be cooler than hipsters in New York City — everyone knows about New York City.”

I don’t know that this report adds much to what has already been noted about hipsters – see an earlier example here. Here is the question I would really love to hear people answer: what comes after hipsters? How long until hipsters are no longer cool and another group takes over? What’s the next “cool” group?

Designer parking garages in Miami

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Parking garages tend not to have good reputations as they are often functional blocks of concrete that are measured by how many cars they can fit. But, Miami apparently has a number of “designer” garages including a proposed parking elevator for a new high-rise:

The $560 million Jetsonesque tower will rise in Sunny Isles Beach as part of a collaboration between Germany-based Porsche Design Group and a local developer, Gil Dezer. It likely will be the world’s first condominium complex with elevators that will take residents directly to their units while they are sitting in their cars…

Here is how it will work: After the resident pulls over and switches off the engine, a robotic arm that works much like an automatic plank will scoop up the car and put it into the elevator. Once at the desired floor, the same robotic arm will park the car, leaving the resident nearly in front of his front door. Voila, home!

The glass elevators will give residents and their guests unparalleled views of the city or of the ocean during their high-speed ride, expected to last 45 to 90 seconds…

The car elevators are the latest twist on Miami Beach’s burgeoning passion for designer parking garages. The highly acclaimed 1111 Lincoln Road designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron opened in 2009; also planned are garages by London architect Zaha Hadid, Mexico’s Enrique Norten and Miami’s own Arquitechonica.

Being able to live in a luxury condo that is greatly enhanced by parking right outside of your door sounds like a uniquely American prize. This is another reminder how American culture is dominated by the automobile.

At the same time, this could also be seen as an architectural or design issue: how can one successfully design parking garages so they are aesthetically pleasing? While these garages in Miami might be for more luxurious residences, there are other options. One option that seems to be growing in popularity is underground garages. While this is great in dense urban spaces where valuable land can’t be wasted on a separate parking structure, it can also be found in denser suburban developments where the goal is to allow condo or townhome owners to park directly below their units and to keep the garage out of sight. After all, large houses with prominent garages may be called “snout houses” in reference to the overarching emphasis on where the garage is going to be parked.

This reminds me of one of the parking decks in Naperville. The Van Buren structure features a stained glass window memorializing the “Cars of the Century.” Also, Wheaton has done a nice job of hiding their downtown garage behind more traditional looking structures.

Interpreting Abraham Lincoln through a 21st century lens

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A new sociological book explores how Americans have interpreted Abraham Lincoln for their own purposes:

Jackie Hogan, sociology chair at Bradley University in Peoria, writes that, by now, nearly 150 years after his assassination, the way we think about Abraham Lincoln says more about us than about him.

“In the years since that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre, fact and legend have become so intertwined in the Lincoln story that it now may be impossible to know the man as he really was,” Nolan writes in her new book, “Lincoln, Inc.: Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America.” “Instead, we are largely limited to 21st-century interpretations of what 20th-century historians wrote about 19th-century recollections of the man. We are reduced to standing in a historical hall of mirrors, trying to discern the original from its countless reflections.”

This blog has covered, tongue mostly in cheek, a lot of the phenomena Hogan deflates in far more scholarly fashion, like Geico’s “Honest Abe” commercial and Lincoln as science-fiction hero. Although I confess I didn’t know that Abe has also starred in romance novels. (Irving Stone once wrote that Mary admired “the powerful muscles and the indestructible male strength of him” … whew, what an image.)…

Hogan is particularly good in her examination of how people have marketed Lincoln over the years, how they’ve  used Lincoln to market themselves, and how Lincoln is often appropriated for modern political purposes — there’s a whole chapter titled “What Would Lincoln Do?”

Why worry about the actual history if you can use the figure for your own marketing ends?

This sort of work on collective memory can be quite fascinating. Of course, we are far removed from Lincoln’s life so there is a lot of room for distortions and various interpretations. What is important today is not just what Lincoln actually did but what we think he actually did. For example, our current president has used Abraham Lincoln as an example numerous times in order to help get his points across. This is probably a fairly good tactic for a leader from Illinois: is there another figure that comes anywhere close to matching Lincoln’s stature? (Michael Jordan probably has a broader popularity around the world but it is of a different kind.)

This reminds of a local story that involves Lincoln. For years, the suburb of West Chicago was thought to be a site of an unplanned Lincoln-Douglas debate. This story went that Lincoln and Douglas were nearby to each other because of some train difficulties and the two decided to debate in West Chicago on property just southeast of the corner of modern-day Route 59 and Washington Street. This story was corroborated by a number of eyewitnesses who submitted their testimony in affidavits to prove their veracity. Alas, the story is not true:

Bombard says Lincoln and Douglas probably did come to The Junction, as West Chicago was known in those days, because it was a rail crossroads.

“To go anywhere, you had to come to The Junction,” she said.

In fact, Bombard said a man from Batavia remembers seeing Abraham Lincoln at The Junction, once when he was 8 years old and a second time on the funeral train.

But Lincoln experts largely agree, Bombard said, that it’s impossible that the two were together on Aug. 28, 1858, the day the debate supposedly took place, because the places Lincoln was known to have been on Aug. 27 and Aug. 29 would have made it impossible for him to be in West Chicago on Aug. 28.

Still, the story featured prominently in the history of the community for a number of years.

Describing “suburban bliss” while also pursuing urban planning and living

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A student at Columbia discusses her feelings of wanting to become an urban planner and live in the city while also retaining a warm spot in her heart for the suburbs:

Coming to New York from more suburban hometowns, it’s not uncommon for us to miss our cars, big box stores, and front yards. But for me, the conflict between urban and suburban living is more than simple nostalgia for my hometown. It is a question of ideology, and one that concerns my professional future.

I’ve known I wanted to be a city planner since the tenth grade, when I happened to pick up a copy of Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” while doing homework at the Scotch Plains Public Library. I devoured the book in a few days. It was a revelation for me—someone put into words the vitality of urban streets I so eagerly took in anytime I visited New York. As an urban studies major at Columbia, I’ve studied cities in sociology, political science, history, and architecture classes. My studies have confirmed what I felt the first time I read Jane Jacobs: Urban living is the best kind of living.

I’ve read about the racial discrimination that stopped non-white Americans from taking part in the suburban American dream, the urban renewal projects that devastated working class neighborhoods with expressways, the disinvestment in urban centers that led to riots—all the mid-century injustices that remind us of the true cost of our driveways, lawns, and cul-de-sacs. I understand the environmental danger of car (and oil) dependence, low-density housing, and sprawl. I understand how unfulfilling it can be to live in a socially homogeneous town with little street life or walkability. I feel so strongly about these issues that I even want to go to graduate school to learn how to begin solving them.

Yet I really, really like coming home to my car and to my favorite strip mall restaurant on Route 22—a highway that severely isolates my own neighborhood from the rest of my town. In my time here at Columbia, despite my urban-centric curriculum, I’ve also learned that the suburbs are here to stay, and there’s no sense wishing they didn’t exist. I might end up a city planner with a very urban lifestyle, and I most certainly won’t be moving back to New Jersey, but there’s no reason I can’t relish a trip to the mall. Of course it’s not terrible, I told my friend. Home—with all its unsexy suburbanity—always makes me happy, too.

This piece contrasts a professional ideology versus personal emotions. The key here is that the suburbs are equated with home. I wonder if her viewpoint will change after years of living in the city or, perhaps more interestingly, years of working within the field of urban planning where she may not find too many people willing to defend the suburbs.

Of course, this doesn’t always have to be a dichotomous choice: we certainly need people to do urban planning in the suburbs. In fact, one of the complaints opponents of sprawl often have is that it looks like there was little foresight into how suburban developments, subdivisions or big box stores included, affect their residents and how different types of development do or don’t work together. And if the wave of the future is indeed a denser suburban landscape, particularly in desirable locations, there may be room for a number of planners to bring together city and suburb.

A new statistic to measure chemistry in basketball

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Team chemistry is an elusive concept to measure but three “quantitative traders in the financial world” have developed a new statistic they say tackles the subject:

We introduce a novel Skills Plus Minus (“SPM”) framework to measure on-court chemistry in basketball. First, we evaluate each player’s offense and defense in the SPM framework based on three basic categories of skills: scoring, rebounding, and ball-handling. We then simulate games using the skill ratings of the ten players on the court. The results of the simulations measure the effectiveness of individual players as well as the 5-player lineup, so we can then calculate the synergies of each NBA team by comparing their 5-player lineup’s effectiveness to the “sum-of-the-parts.” We find that these synergies can be large and meaningful. Because skills have different synergies with other skills, our framework predicts that a player’s value is dependent on the other nine players on the court. Therefore, the desirability of a free agent depends on the players currently on the roster. Indeed, our framework is able to generate mutually beneficial trades between teams…

The research team pored over a ton of data, ran countless simulations and looked at how many points certain combinations of skills created…

One pattern that emerged was that “rare events” (like steals/defensive ball-handling) tended to produce positive synergies, while “common events” (like defensive rebounds) produce negative synergies. How come? Because increasing a team’s rebounding rate from 70 percent of defensive rebounds (which would be lousy) to, say, 75 percent (very good) represents only a 7 percent increase. But upping offensive rebounds, which aren’t nearly as common as defensive rebounds, from a rate of 30 percent to 35 percent represents a robust 17 percent gain…

Figuring out the component parts of what we know as chemistry or synergy is one of the next great frontiers of this movement. It’s not enough to put an exceptional distributor on the floor. To maximize that point guard’s gifts, a team must surround him with the right combination of players — and that combination might not always be the sexiest free agents on the market.

Sports has so much data to pore over that researchers could be occupied with for a long time.

This particular question is fascinating because one could get a lot of answers to why certain five player units are successful from different actors such as coaches, players, commentators, and fans. Players might be easier to assess (ha – look at all the issues with drafting) but looking at units requires sharp analytical skills and an overall view of a team.

Which team(s) will be the first to utilize this statistic and really build team units rather than cobble together a number of good players and then try to squeeze the best out of them? Certain players who might be considered “busts” may simply be in the wrong systems and be the “missing piece” for another team.

Evaluating self-immolation as a protest strategy

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As the Arab Spring movements of this year began with an act of self-immolation in Tunisia, we might ask this question: is this an effective strategy for protest?

Self-immolation as a form of political protest is far more common than you might think. It’s particularly prevalent in countries that are home to many Buddhists and Hindus, who have long ascetic traditions that sometimes involve radical acts of physical self-abnegation. In 1990, for example, more than 200 upper-caste Indians set themselves on fire to protest government plans to reserve spots at university for people from the lower castes. Sharon Erickson Nepstad, an American sociologist who studies nonviolent resistance movements, says that Mahatma Gandhi based his theory of civil disobedience on the Hindu concept of tapasya, the embrace of suffering in the service of a higher cause. (The word literally means “heat.”) People sometimes forget, Nepstad says, that Gandhi regarded his activist followers as “nonviolent warriors,” ready to die for their cause even as they rejected attacks against others. (Intriguingly, as Nepstad points out, those three Americans who killed themselves to protest the Vietnam War were two Quakers and a left-wing Catholic, all of them members of avowedly pacifist groups.)…

The history of self-immolation as a political tool suggests that it is a highly volatile one. Setting oneself on fire can sometimes ignite a huge political protest, but there’s no guarantee that it will. Thich Quang Duc’s suicide resonated precisely because he and his supporters carefully calibrated their efforts to attract as much publicity as possible, even handing out prepared leaflets outlining their demands to bystanders. But they may have been the exception to the rule. Most self-immolators don’t seem to think that far ahead. Mohammed Bouazizi, whose suicide had a far greater political impact than that of any of his Arab Spring emulators, clearly had no inkling of the enormous changes his act would unleash.

Whether a political suicide succeeds in igniting mass activism seems to depend largely on the circumstances of the moment. Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion of his homeland the previous year, first came up with a harebrained scheme to occupy a government radio station before deciding at the last minute to burn himself in Wenceslas Square. Had he gone ahead with his initial (even more quixotic) plan, he might be remembered rather differently today…

Self-immolators make a tricky fit with established political organizations: Few leaders are likely to court popularity by inviting their followers to resort to public suicide. The Tibetan monks offer a case in point. Bhuchung Tsering, vice president of the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, D.C., says that the suicides pose a “moral dilemma” for the Tibetan opposition in exile, which is doing its best to dissuade would-be self-immolations even as it acknowledges the intense sense of desperation that appears to be driving them.

The answer appears to be not typically but perhaps it is helpful in generating a larger movement under the right conditions. This could be a catalyst for larger action but not necessarily. Is there ever a backlash against such an action?

The article doesn’t say about how often this has been tried in the Western world in order to call attention to a particular issue or in order to galvanize a movement. Is this generally a theologically-motivated act?

Rahm Emanuel says Chicago is “the most American city”

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In announcing that a prestigious conference will be held next year in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel made an interesting statement about the city:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced today that Chicago will host the 12th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates this spring…

The event is expected to attract high profile leaders from around the globe. All former Nobel Peace Laureates will be invited to attend. It will be co-chaired by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome. Emanuel will serve as an honorary co-chair.

This event “has been held in Paris, it’s been held in Berlin, it’s been held in Rome,” Emanuel said. “And they picked, in my view the most American city in America, Chicago.”

Chicago was chosen “due to its rich heritage and international profile,” organizers said Thursday.

What exactly makes Chicago “the most American city”? Several reasons come to mind:

1. Chicago came to prominence during the late 1800s as Americans were expanding to the West Coast, the railroad became really important, and America became a larger player on the world stage. In these changes, Chicago helped lead the way as a major port connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi and becoming the railroad hub of the nation. Chicago was the boomtown of this era, growing from just over 112,000 people in 1860 to nearly 1.7 million in 1900.

1a. In comparison, the older cities of the Northeast, Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia are too dependent on the colonial era.

1b. However, one could make the case that Los Angeles (or maybe even Houston) is the quintessential American city of the 20th century with a rise of the suburbs, highways, culture industries, and a population shift to Sunbelt and West Coast. At the same time these things were happening, Chicago was also changing: its suburbs have continued to grow (and also experienced growth in high-tech/white collar jobs) even as the city has experienced the Rust Belt problems of white flight and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

2. Chicago embodies some of the best and worse of America. It’s skyline is beautiful and it features miles of parks along Lake Michigan. The downtown and Michigan Avenue area is relatively clean and full of tourists. Chicago is a prominent world city because of its finance industry. On the flipside, Chicago is well known for its segregation (bringing MLK to the city in 1966), corrupt politics, and crime/gangsters.

3. Chicago is middle America, not the more educated or stylish East or West Coast. It embodies American values of hard work and grittiness alongside success and entrepreneurship.

A side note: it will be a busy spring in Chicago with the G-8 and NATO meeting in Chicago not too long after this Nobel gathering.

The Big Sort continues? Fewer Americans live in middle-income neighborhoods

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Here is another way to look at the gap between the rich and poor in the United States: the percentage of Americans living in middle-income neighborhoods has shrunk in recent decades.

In 2007, nearly a third of American families — 31 percent — lived in either an affluent neighborhood or a mainly low-income one, up from just 15 percent in 1970, according to the study conducted by Stanford University, and released in partnership with the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of American families lived in middle-class neighborhoods in 2007, down from 65 percent in 1970…

For the study, researchers used data from 117 metropolitan areas, each with more than 500,000 residents. In 2007, those areas were home to 197 million people — or two-thirds of the US population.

This study covers about two-thirds of the American population. I assume the study is restricted to larger metropolitan areas because of how the researchers defined a neighborhood but couldn’t they adapt to smaller cities in order to represent more of the US population? Also thinking about the research methods, I hope the researchers used analogous cutoff points for these different classes in 1970 and 2007.

Moving past methodological issues, this does bring to light an interesting issue: how many Americans experience residential segregation based on social class? Of course, race and social class is linked. Do Americans care that people of different income strata live in completely different areas? Based on American history, I would say no: Americans don’t seem terribly concerned about concentrated poverty or pockets of affluence. If you have money, it is generally expected that you go live with people who also have money. You might provide incentives for the classes to mix (example: mixed-income neighborhoods on the site of former housing projects) but this is rare.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown here between cities and suburban areas. Some of the earliest American sociological research focused on these disparities in the city, such as Zorbaugh’s work The Gold Coast and the Slum where the rich and poor lived in incredible proximity but rarely mixed. Is class-based residential segregation higher in the suburbs?

After case of fraud, researchers discuss others means of “misusing research data”

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The news that a prominent Dutch social psychologist published fraudulent work has pushed other researchers to talk about other forms of “misusing research data”:

Even before the Stapel case broke, a flurry of articles had begun appearing this fall that pointed to supposed systemic flaws in the way psychologists handle data. But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye, and that trend is warping the field…

In September, in comments quoted by the statistician Andrew Gelman on his blog, Mr. Wagenmakers wrote: “The field of social psychology has become very competitive, and high-impact publications are only possible for results that are really surprising. Unfortunately, most surprising hypotheses are wrong. That is, unless you test them against data you’ve created yourself.”…

To show just how easy it is to get a nonsensical but “statistically significant” result, three scholars, in an article in November’s Psychological Science titled “False-Positive Psychology,” first showed that listening to a children’s song made test subjects feel older. Nothing too controversial there.

Then they “demonstrated” that listening to the Beatles’ “When I’m 64” made the test subjects literally younger, relative to when they listened to a control song. Crucially, the study followed all the rules for reporting on an experimental study. What the researchers omitted, as they went on to explain in the rest of the paper, was just how many variables they poked and prodded before sheer chance threw up a headline-making result—a clearly false headline-making result.

If the pressure is great to publish (and it certainly is), then there have to be some countermeasures to limit unethical research practices. Here are a few ideas:

1. Giving more people access to the data. In this way, people could check up on other people’s published findings. But if the fraudulent studies are already published, perhaps this is too late.

2. Having more people have oversight over the project along the way. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a bureaucratic board but only having one researcher looking at the data and doing the analysis (such as in the Stapel case) means that there is more opportunity for an individual to twist the data. This could be an argument for collaborative data.

3. Could there be more space within disciplines and journals to discuss the research project? While papers tend to have very formal hypotheses, there is a lot of messy work that goes into these but very little room to discuss how the researchers arrived at them.

4. Decrease the value of media attention. I don’t know how to deal with this one. What researcher doesn’t want to have more people read their research?

5. Have a better educated media so that they don’t report so many inconsequential and shocking studies. We need more people like Malcolm Gladwell who look at a broad swath of research and summarize it rather than dozens of reports grabbing onto small studies. This is the classic issue with nutrition reporting: eggs are great! A new study says they are terrible! A third says they are great for pregnant women and no one else! We rarely get overviews of this research or real questions about the value of all this research. We just get: “a study proved this oddity today…”

6. Resist data mining. Atheoretical correlations don’t help much. Let theories guide statistical models.

7. Have more space to publish negative findings. This would help researchers feel less pressure to come up with positive results.

Residents in Chicago suburb of Palatine oppose proposed Starbucks

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For suburban communities, the arrival of a Starbucks can be seen as a sign that the suburb has the ability to attract national stores. But some residents in suburban Palatine are opposed to a proposed Starbucks:

The Palatine village council Monday referred the proposal back to the Zoning Board of Appeals on the village attorney’s advice so that it can review the results of a traffic study despite its earlier unanimous vote to recommend the project. The postponement also grants a request by McDonald’s Corp., which operates an adjacent restaurant, the opportunity to look the study over.

The Starbucks would make up one of three tenant spaces to be built on a vacant lot between the fast-food restaurant and Harris Bank on Northwest Highway near Smith Road. Charley’s Grilled Subs would fill the second space with the third still undetermined.

A couple dozen residents attended the council meeting to oppose the national coffee chain, which they believe will ultimately force nearby Norma’s Coffee Corner to close.

“We as a town should embrace diversity, and I would hate to see Palatine become a national franchise town if there are no mom-and-pops around,” Roman Golash of Palatine said.

Four things strike me about this story:

1. Traffic is a common complaint in NIMBY cases. However, this Starbucks would be located near several other chain/strip mall type businesses on an already busy road. Is Starbucks the problem or the type of development that is already there?

2. The residents seem interested in buying local and Starbucks is one of those companies, perhaps along with Walmart, Walgreens, and others, that represent sprawl and big box stores. At the same time, as far as I can tell from Google Maps, Norma’s is also in a strip mall. So are these residents opposed to all national stores in town? Why is Starbucks singled out in particular? This isn’t quite the battle of a long-time downtown business versus the big national chain. While national stores may not be local businesses (unless they are franchises), they can still bring in tax revenue.

3. Diversity equals having a mix of national and local businesses? This doesn’t sound like the traditional definition of diversity which is typically associated with race and perhaps social class. I wonder if suburbanites use these altered definitions of diversity because they really think that racial or class diversity is not really desirable but they think people like to hear about diversity. (To be fair: Palatine is 76.9% white, 10.3% Asian, and 18% Latino.)

4. Some Chicago suburbs are interested in attracting Starbucks and similar businesses to their downtowns in order to bring in more people. For example, the Starbucks that opened in downtown Wheaton in the late 1990s was seen as a sign that Wheaton’s downtown was an important shopping area (and had a wealthy enough demographic to support such a business).