Monthly Archives: January 2012

College president teaches “sociology of work” course

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The president of University of Virginia is a sociologist who this semester is teaching a course titled “sociology of work”:

The syllabus calls the University of Virginia class the “Sociology of Work,” but it might as well have been called “Everything You Need to Know About the Real World That’s Not Usually Taught in College.”…

Many of them signed up for the class not knowing what to expect, and some admit that they were just looking to fulfill a class requirement before graduation. But they were all intrigued by the professor listed for the course: U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan…

Although the demands of leading a university continue to grow, several presidents in the region still carve out time to teach. It seems almost gimmicky: The university’s top executive standing before a class of students, leading by example and learning from doing. Sullivan’s syllabus says the course “reflects my conviction that teaching and research are closely related.” But it’s also an opportunity to indulge in what got school officials into higher education in the first place…

One morning last week, the class discussed juggling work and family. Sullivan, who has a PhD in sociology, told them that when she was pregnant with her first child, she took her department chair out for lunch: “I said, ‘Bill, I’m pregnant.’ And he choked on his hamburger. I thought we would have to do the Heimlich,” Sullivan said, with a laugh. At the time, she was one of two women in her department, and no one was sure how to handle maternity leave.

I wonder if students automatically give better course evaluations to a college president. It would be interesting to know how well college presidents can teach though I assume former academics might be just fine.

Additionally, the opening line of this article is interesting as it implies college doesn’t teach anything about the real world. This is a growing refrain and yet should college classes only be about how to navigate workplace situations as this article suggests?

Does anyone have a list of all the college presidents who are/were sociologists? I would think sociologists would be well-suited for dealing with all of the different aspects of the college…though studying society doesn’t necessarily mean one is well-suited for dealing with people.

New documentary: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

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A new documentary about urban life that was released yesterday may just be worth seeing: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. The film has been reviewed by a number of outlets (including a short review in the New York Times) but here is a longer description in Architectural Record:

Accepted wisdom will have us believe St. Louis’ infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing development was destined for failure. Designed by George Hellmuth and World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth), the 33-building complex opened in 1954, its Modernist towers touted as a remedy to overcrowding in the city’s tenements. Rising crime, neglected facilities, and fleeing tenants led to its demolition—in a spectacular series of implosions—less than two decades later. In the popular narrative, bad public policy, bad architecture, and bad people doomed Pruitt-Igoe, and it became an emblem of failed social welfare projects across the country. But director Chad Freidrichs challenges that convenient and oversimplified assessment in his documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, opening in limited release January 20.

He makes a compelling case. Drawing heavily on archival footage, raw data, and historical reanalysis, the film reorients Pruitt-Igoe as the victim of institutional racism and post-war population changes in industrial cities, among other issues far more complex than poor people not appreciating nice things. But while Freidrichs opens a new vein for discussing Pruitt-Igoe, he doesn’t totally dispel the titular myth about it. There’s a passing mention of the project’s failure being one of Modernist planning, that such developments “created a breeding ground for isolation, vandalism, and crime.” And of course there’s an invocation of Charles Jencks’ famous declaration that the death of Pruitt-Igoe was “the death of Modernism.” But Freidrichs never adequately addresses Pruitt-Igoe’s place in the history of urban design.

But even if The Pruitt-Igoe Myth falls short of its stated goal, it’s nevertheless exceptional. In an important act of preservation, Freidrichs captures the voices and memories of five former Pruitt-Igoe residents. They tell stories of jubilation when they’re assigned an 11th floor apartment (their “poorman’s penthouse”) and when they see rows upon rows of windows bejeweled with Christmas lights. They share horrific tales of siblings murdered and living in constant fear of who lurks in the shadows. They remember how the welfare office told them they couldn’t have a phone or a television, and how their husbands and fathers weren’t allowed to live with them.

Nearly 40 years after its destruction, the people interviewed for the film continue to wrestle with Pruitt-Igoe’s legacy and its place in their lives. They love it and hate it, but don’t resent it. Despite the piles of trash, mountains of drugs, and preponderance of crime, this was their home. For some, it was their first proper dwelling. They cared deeply about Pruitt-Igoe and still do, even in its current form—a largely overgrown lot roved by feral dogs. Pruitt-Igoe is fundamentally a part of them, and by sharing their memories they obliterate the part of the myth that says it was undone by its people.

Something that just came to mind while reading a few reviews: why was Pruitt-Igoe blwn up so quickly while other notorious housing projects, like several in Chicago, lasted three decades longer? There has to be some interesting local twists to this story.

In an era where high-rise public housing projects are rare if not all gone because of the Hope VI program, it will be interesting to see how these housing complexes are preserved in American history. Will they simply be seen as failures? What will the lessons be?

“The 2012 New American Home”

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Each year, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) puts together a “New American Home” featuring the latest and greatest for single-family homes. Here are the features of the 2012 New American Home:

Phil Kean of Winter Park, Fla., the architect and builder of the 2012 home, seeks to honor the architecture of the past while taking advantage of current technologies and design trends. Kean is focusing on functional and transitional spaces and attention to detail instead of square footage and the design uses space efficiently to create a calm and serene living environment.

The latest green building products and methods are factored into every aspect of the home’s design. Kean designed the home to achieve “emerald” status under the green building certification process administered by the NAHB Research Center and based on principles set forth in the ICC 700-2008 National Green Building Standard™ certified by ANSI – “Emerald” is the highest of the four levels of achievement a home can attain…

Kean has designed The New American Home 2012 to take maximum advantage of Florida’s friendly climate. Walls of movable glass panels and motorized screens provide a seamless flow from the indoor to the outdoor spaces.

At 4,181 square feet, the home will be the smallest in The New American Home series in many years. It will be displayed as a two-bedroom floor plan that will appeal to empty nesters, and will have four additional rooms that could be converted to bedrooms if needed.

Kean is building The New American Home 2012 on an infill site in an older neighborhood close to downtown Winter Park. Amenities within walking distance include shops, restaurants and a public library.

See videos of the home here. A quick discussion of some of these themes:

1. While the Wall Street Journal suggests this home provides evidence that “the love affair with supersized McMansions is waning,” the home is still 4,181 square feet, significantly larger than the average new house size of about 2,400 square feet.

2. There is a continued push to go green. I didn’t even know there was an emerald level…

3. This sounds like a New Urbanist type of setting: it is a new home but is in an old neighborhood so residents could walk to a historic downtown. I wonder what the neighbors think of the new home; while it isn’t a teardown, I imagine it might be different than some other nearby homes?

4. The design and furnishing of this home seems modern, following in the footsteps of “Le Corbusier and Richard Meier.” Perhaps this works better in Florida but I wonder if the average wealthy homebuyer would be interested.

5. And how much would this particular house cost in its current setting or transplanted or built elsewhere? There appear to be some cool features such as a suspended staircase, an art gallery, and a waterfall table on the back patio but I’m sure those things add up.

Ban on lead the cause of drop in crime?

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Here is a quick overview about how the reduction of lead exposure in society could have contributed to the recent decline in crime rates:

One of the most fascinating questions in American sociology, political science, and public policy is the substantial decline in violent crime in America has been falling for two decades after a near-peak in 1991; the homicide rate hit a 50-year low last year despite the recession. There are a lot of interesting theories, none that (as far as I’ve read) is considered dominant. In November, Llewellyn Hinks-Jones wrote a compelling piece for the Atlantic about crime rates and the declining price of cocaine; there’s the evergreen broken-windows theory; Steven Levitt’s abortion theory (PDF); increasing incarceration rates; the destruction of massive public-housing complexes; improved trauma care; and many more. I was reminded of another one when reading up on public housing yesterday, thanks to a brief aside in Beryl Satter’s masterful Family Properties (emphasis mine):

The “peril to life and safety of the inhabitants” of slum buildings was often of a gruesome sort. Residents were injured on poorly lit stairways or ones with broken banisters. They were knocked out by falling plaster. They were scalded by the escaping steam of malfunctioning radiators. They perished in fires in buildings where fire escapes had collapsed from neglect. Their infants’ limbs were gnawed by rats. Each year approximately twenty-five children died from eating lead-filled paint chips. Others survived lead poisoning but were left mentally disabled.

Satter’s numbers come from a Chicago Daily News report from 1963. To put that in context, between 16 and 46 young Chicagoans died from accidents each year between 2002 and 2006, the leading cause of death in the 1-14 age group. In a 1962 Trib report, a board of health poison control pilot study found 35 deaths from 1959 to 1961: “Most of the victims were from 1 to 5 years old and came from rundown slum area buildings….” 465 cases were treated at County Hospital in those two years, and another 65 suffered severe brain damage…

That’s correlation, but what about cause? The great young science writer Jonah Lehrer explains the believed chain of causation from lead poisoning to violence (emphasis mine):

Here, for instance, is a recent PLOS study from the Cincinnati Lead Study, in which the blood lead level of babies born in poor areas of Cincinnati were repeatedly measured between 1979 and 1984. Twenty years later, the researchers tracked down these subjects and put them in MRI machines, allowing them to measure the brain volume of participants. The researchers found that exposure to lead as a child was linked with a significant loss of brain volume in adulthood, particularly in men. Furthermore, there was a “dose-response” effect, in which the greatest brain volume loss was seen in participants with the greatest lead exposure. What’s especially tragic is that the loss of volume was concentrated in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain closely associated with executive function and impulse control.

Several things come to mind:

1. Perhaps we simply need more scientific studies in order to sort this out yet a one cause answer to the drop in crime may be really difficult to find. Human behavior within a social context is complex.

2. I wonder if this hints at an already existing and likely to grow set of studies that discuss how everyday substances negatively affect us.

3. The person who is able to conclusively/definitively find the causes in the drop in crime will be either heralded, attacked from all sides, and perhaps both.

The real question to ask about the iBooks 2, textbook killer: will it help students learn?

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There is a lot of buzz about the iBooks 2 but I have a simple question: will students learn more using it? In one description of the new program, this isn’t really covered:

Yet, the iPad offers a big opportunity for students to get excited about learning again. The iPad has already demonstrated it can help children with learning disabilities make leaps in bounds in their development, and schools have already invested heavily in Apple’s tablet. Roughly 1.5 million iPads are currently in use in educational institutions.

Schiller said that the problem with textbooks is not the content, which is “amazing,” but the weight of the physical book. They need to last five or six years when they’re written, and they’re not very durable or interactive. Searching is also difficult.

At that point, Schiller introduced iBooks 2, which has a new textbook experience for the iPad. The first demonstration showed what it’s like to open a biology textbook, and see an intro movie playing right before you even get to the book’s contents. When you get to the book itself, images are large and beautiful, and thumbnails accompany the text. To make searching easier, all users need to do is tap on a word and they go straight to the glossary and index section in the back of the book…

Jobs had long hoped to bring sweeping changes to higher education for much of his life. When he left Apple and launched NeXT in 1986, Jobs wanted the company’s first computer — a distinctive all-black magnesium cube — to be designed specifically for higher education establishments and what Jobs called “aggressive end users.”…

“‘The process by which states certify texbooks is corrupt,’ he said. ‘But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent the whole process and save money.'”

Based on this article, I see five things that are good about iBooks 2: it will excite students, it is lighter to use so don’t have to carry so much weight around, it will be cheaper for everyone in the long run, there are some cool features like searching and embedded videos, and it could make Apple a lot of money (and presumably traditional textbook publishers will lose money unless they adapt?).

But, we have been told for decades that better technology in the classroom, computers, laptops, the Internet, etc., will lead to improvements in learning and test scores. Isn’t this how iBooks 2 should be measured? It is good if kids are excited about learning again but will this tool actually help them learn more? The technology may be better and cheaper in the long run but this doesn’t necessarily mean it will lead to improvements in the education system.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that iPads or iBooks 2 can’t lead to better learning but I would want to know a lot more about its effect on educational outcomes before simply adopting the technology.

Newt Gingrich: visionary professor? Historian who would be a “superior president”?

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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting profile of Newt Gingrich’s days as a professor at West Georgia College. Two quick thoughts: he sounds quite ambitious as a young professor (applying to be college president during his first year) and it doesn’t sound like he followed social conventions (“brusque treatment” of his department chair, etc.).

I still find it interesting that Gingrich is using his academic credentials in his campaign:

Mr. Gingrich often says his experience as a historian would make him a superior president. During Monday’s GOP debate, he lectured “as a historian” on “a fact-based model” for revamping Social Security, citing the success of programs in Galveston, Texas, and Chile.

This could lead to some questions:

1. I thought Republicans/conservatives were more suspicious of academics who they often paint as elitist and liberal. So it isn’t actually the job or career itself that is the problem or the knowledge one has to acquire to become a professor – it is what political views the academic has?

2. What would be the best academic discipline from which to choose a President who was formerly an academic? Law seems to get a lot of attention but is this the best perspective or training to start with?

(This follow an earlier post in which I contrasted a potential presidential election between the two academics Obama and Gingrich.)

Take the sociological approach and see your in-laws as an alien culture

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Here is an interesting suggestion after the holidays: in order to improve a visit with your in-laws, approach them as an alien culture.

So, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, “What’s the deal with in-laws?” Why do they cause us so much stress? — I mean, not me of course, my in-laws, who happen to read all of my articles are awesome and exempt from all of the obnoxious statements that come next — perhaps I should re-phrase that — Why do your in-laws cause you so much stress?

The answer to this question is simple: Your in-laws are aliens…

Every family is a culture unto itself and all cultures develop rules of propriety, hierarchy and membership. For example, while some families insist on eating a formal breakfast that begins only when all members are awake, clean, and wearing monocles, others permit and perhaps even encourage thunderous belching of the national anthem while eating Cool Ranch Doritos in the family room — we don’t need to name names, you know who you are. There are families that are dominated by a single parent or grandparent and others that have a more egalitarian dynamic. Some parents might consider anyone who stops in on Christmas Eve to be a part of the family, and others require you to earn your place at the table by slaying a boar or porcupine, or performing some other feat of gallantry…

So, what do you do? Basically, I suggest an imaginary sociological approach to the problem. If you pretend that you are a sociologist trying to learn about an alien culture you will probably have less grief when you visit your in-laws and you actually might be able to enjoy yourself a bit.

This is a take on a classic sociological idea: if a Martian came to earth, what would they objectively observe?

If we want to go further with the idea of viewing your in-laws as an alien culture, we would also have to discuss the issues with being a participant observer. When visiting, it would be hard to simply sit and watch without being involved at all. (Of course, this could be easier in some family cultures than others.) At the same time, one could easily participate too much and not retain the objectivity necessary to understand what is truly going on. Finding this middle ground may be difficult but it would help in being able to hold both an insider and outsider perspective of your in-laws.

A new term: the “accordion family”

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Sociologist Katherine Newman explains a new term she has coined to describe the experience of many families in recent decades where young adults return to live at home: the accordion family.

NEWMAN: …[B]asically, an accordion family is a multigenerational household in which you have adult children over the age of 21 living with their parents. And, actually, that has not been the norm in the middle class for some time. It would have been the norm before the Second World War, but it really hasn’t been for some time now…

[I]t’s actually a trend that’s been in play for some time now, so it’s not unique to the recession we’ve been mired in. But, really, ever since about the early 1980s, we’ve seen a pretty steady increase in the proportion of young people of this age group that have been either moving back with their parents or who don’t leave in the first place.And that’s mainly because the economy has been changing in ways that make it difficult for young people to find entry level employment that really pays enough for them to be independent. As well in the middle class, where we see ambitions for professional futures, it takes longer and longer and more and more money to achieve the kind of educational credentials needed to launch a middle class professional life.

So we see young people who complete college and move back in with their parents in order to shelter those costs of the master’s degree or experience with an internship where they’re not earning any money at all in the hopes of launching at a higher level when they get a bit older.

I don’t think Newman says in this interview why she uses this term but I’ll hazard a guess: an accordion implies that American families stretch to accommodate younger adults at home when economic times are bad and then contract when these same adults move out when jobs are plentiful and the economy has picked up. This is different than a norm of multi or intergenerational living – the economic climate affects who can and will move back home.

Two different methodologies to measure the US Jewish population

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Measuring small populations within the United States can be difficult. Here is an example: even though two separate studies agree the US Jewish population is roughly 6.5 million, they used different methodologies to arrive at this number:

Many federations around the country commission scientific studies to better understand their local Jewish populations. These reports typically rely on random digit dialing, in which researchers come up with a percentage of Jews in the community based on the results of telephone surveys. In other instances, researchers will estimate the number of Jews based on the number of people with Jewish last names.

These reports provided the backbone for Sheskin and Dashefsky’s own annual estimate. But since not every federation studies its own population, the two conducted original research in some localities. In this, they were often aided by knowledgeable community members or by local estimates they found online. Lastly, they used data collected by the U.S. Census of three solidly Hasidic Jewish towns in New York state: Kiryas Joel, Kaser Village and New Square. (Aside from these exceptions, the U.S. Census does not count Jews.)

Adding these figures together, Sheskin and Dashefsky came up with a national estimate — albeit a patchwork one — that far exceeded previous figures. And in some ways exceeded their own expectations. Their national total of 6,588,000 is an overestimate, they contend, because some Jews — such as college students who live in one place and go to school elsewhere, or retirees who live part-time in one city and part-time in another — were likely counted twice…

Saxe came to his national estimate of 6.4 million through very different means.

Daunted by the steep expense and lengthy time required by random digit dialing, Saxe and his team ferreted out data that already existed to reach his conclusion. This included information from more than 150 government surveys on topics completely unrelated to Judaism, such as health care or education. Each study had a sample size of at least 1,000 people, and each study asked the question: What is your religion?

“From this, we are now absolutely confident — and it has been vetted by all sorts of groups and people — that about 1.8% of the adult American population says that their religion is Judaism,” he said.

Saxe adjusted his sample to account for children and came to a total of 6.4 million Jews in America.

In order to count and know more about relatively smaller populations in the United States, say Muslims in the United States when asking questions about religion, survey researchers often try to oversample these groups so that they can draw conclusions from a larger N. But as this article notes, finding people of smaller groups through random-digit dialing can take a long time.

Both of these researchers worked with existing data in order make generalizations: one worked with local figures and the other used a sample of large-scale surveys. In both cases, this is a clever use of existing data because doing a large-scale survey would have likely been a lot more costly in terms of time and money.

I would guess both sets of researchers are happy that their figures are close to those of the other study as this enhances the validity of their numbers.

Perceptions of crime even as the top 15 most common causes of death no longer includes homicide

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I’ve noted before (see here and here) that perceptions of crime do not match the actual falling numbers. Here is more good news on the crime front: homicide has dropped off the list of the United State’s top 15 causes of death.

For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation’s top 15 causes of death, bumped by a lung illness that often develops in elderly people who have choked on their food.

The 2010 list, released by the government Wednesday, reflects at least two major trends: Murders are down, and deaths from certain diseases are on the rise as the population ages, health authorities said…

This is the first time since 1965 that homicide failed to make the list, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

Murders have been declining nationally since 2006, according to FBI statistics. Falling homicide rates have been celebrated in several major cities, including New York City, Detroit and Washington.

To play a contrarian for a moment, perhaps things still aren’t great: there are still a lot of murders happening (there were still just over 16,000 in 2010 and homicide is still #16 on the list); perhaps the drop homicide from this list is more of a function of other diseases claiming more lives; and perhaps we wouldn’t usually think of murder as being a top killer (it is far away from the figures for heart disease and malignant neoplasms).

At the same time, this is good news as the number of murders dropped. Yet, Americans might perceive that they are more at risk from violent attacks than some of the leading causes of death. While the media might report on the drop in violent crime, the overall story still seems to be that crime happens frequently and could happen to you.

h/t Instapundit