Monthly Archives: May 2012

Builders constructing denser, more urban developments in the suburbs

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USA Today reports that more builders are constructing denser suburban subdivisions:

The nation’s development patterns may be at a historic juncture as builders begin to reverse 60-year-old trends. They’re shifting from giant communities on wide-open “greenfields” to compact “infill” housing in already-developed urban settings…

“It’s the kids (ages 18 to 32), the empty nesters (Baby Boomers with no kids at home),” says Chris Leinberger, president of Smart Growth America’s LOCUS (Latin for “place”), a national coalition of real estate developers and investors who support urban developments that encourage walking over driving. “These two generations combined are more than half of the American population.”…

Most major builders have created “urban” divisions in the past five years to scout for available land in already-developed parts of cities and closer suburbs — even if it means former industrial and commercial sites or land that may require environmental cleanup…

Even traditional communities built on greenfields are transforming. In Southern California’s Inland Empire, an area where housing prices are lower and appeal to first-time buyers, Brookfield is building Edenglen in Ontario. The homes are built on smaller lots — 4,500 square feet instead of the more conventional 7,200 square feet — and priced from $200,000 to $300,000.

This phenomenon has been noted by a number of commentators in recent years though I wonder if it will last.

A few other consequences of this for suburbs:

1. How will existing suburban residents respond to dense, infill projects? I would guess that a good number of suburbanites would object to these dense projects being built near them, spoiling their neighborhoods.

2. Related to the first question about NIMBYism, how will these new developments change the character of existing suburbs? If a community is used to wide suburban streets and big lots, narrow lots and denser housing could change things.

3. This article hints at this but this could also be a product of the age of many American suburbs. Outside of the suburban fringe or exurbs, many suburbs not have at least a few decades of history and perhaps little to no open land (reaching build-out). If these suburbs want to continue to grow (boosting revenues and fees as well as prestige), infill development might be the only choice.

4. This article makes a common claim: certain generations (emerging adults and baby boomers) desire more urban kinds of housing. However, I wonder if it less about generational differences and more about the changing structure of American households. Is the increasing number of single households (which might be located more in these generations) really driving this? If so, this would be have bigger effects as the American suburbs have traditionally been communities build around family life and child-rearing.

Why promote education and reading with stars who make lots of money?

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As a kid, I remember seeing posters of Michael Jordan (see here) and other star athletes promoting reading. While watching NBA playoff games currently, you can see plenty of NBA Cares advertisements with NBA stars talking about the importance of school. But, amidst seeing several stories that 13-year NBA player Shareef Abdur-Rahim went back to UC-Berkeley to finish his undergraduate degree in sociology, why do these campaigns feature athletic stars and not feature athletes who thought they had a chance to be a star but then realized they needed their academic degree for the rest of their lives? For example, such campaigns could feature a college star who tried to make it in the pros but had a short career, didn’t make much money or got injured early on, and then realized that he needed his academic degree to work the rest of his adult life. Or going further, perhaps non-athletes with decent adult lives could promote the value of a degree. Or athletes could talk about or promote the valuable contributions to society made by people with high school and college degrees. Either way, the star who makes a lot of money, a dream a lot of kids hold but few can attain, doesn’t end up as the primary spokesperson for education.

(I assume that these reading and education campaigns have some data or studies that show using celebrities is the best way to reach children. However, perhaps this strategy of using celebrities doesn’t work, just as using celebrities to promote organ donations isn’t the only factor that increases donation rates. See the book Last Book Gifts.)

 

Today’s average individual can rely on experts to complete normal tasks

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In today’s world, more and more individuals are willing to offload certain tasks to “experts”:

In other words, there is no job too trivial to warrant not enlisting a professional to do it. The hired help has moved out of the mansion and into more modest homes, too. Across the country, an army of entrepreneurial “experts” have emerged, charging as much or as little as their local market will allow, and promoting their services with old-school flyers, slick websites and persuasive online ads. They are ready and willing to do those tasks we used to do ourselves or with the assistance of a neighbour—be it scooping up dog poop in the backyard or assembling Ikea furniture or changing light bulbs or programming the remote control.

If nothing is too minute to contract out, then no job is too important or personal either. In her new book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, famed American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the implications of hiring strangers to carry out what has historically been considered sacred labour done solo or with the support of loved ones: finding a mate, planning a wedding, scattering ashes, assembling a photo album, having a baby, naming a baby, raising children, visiting elderly parents…

Adding to the allure of outsourcing is our growing fixation with specialization. While we pursue our career paths with zeal, other people are refining the art and science of baby-proofing a home or choosing the right clothes or teaching dogs not to bark. The thinking goes that it’s wisest to let the pros do what they do best—lest we mess up. “If you’re buying a car you want to do it efficiently, you want a pleasant experience, and you want the best price. That logic is creeping into our personal life,” says Hochschild. In her book, she tells the story of a father who insists on planning his child’s birthday party. “It backfired,” recalls Hochschild. “He tried to be a clown and nobody laughed. And a neighbour says, ‘Leave it to the experts. They know what five-year-olds think is funny.’ ”…

Outsourcing might not be an ideal answer, but many people would say it’s better than the alternative, which is to do nothing except continue to run ourselves ragged. So while we hire retirement home consultants and dog walkers, we might contemplate the future and how it could be better. Duxbury has given it some thought, and she suspects that her own daughter will have learned more than a thing or two about the pursuit of balance from watching her mother all these years. Chances are, Duxbury predicts, the next generation will actually pay for help more often than their parents—but not because of gruelling jobs and domestic duties. Rather, they will work less inside and outside the home in lieu of other, more fulfilling, ways to live life.

This sounds like a combination of two famous ideas from early sociologists. Emile Durkheim argued that modern society was marked by an increased division of labor and specialization. In this setting, individualism would grow even as individuals were more dependent on other specialists to do things like produce food, clothing, and other necessities. He contrasted this to village or small-town society where individuals could perform multiple tasks and there was less specialization. Also analyzing modern society, Max Weber argued that history would eventually lead to an iron cage of bureaucracy where it would be difficult for individuals and social organizations to change course.

If you put these two ideas together, the division of labor and the iron cage, you have what Hochschild is describing: a system where people with means feel like they have to outsource certain tasks so they can be true individuals and do what they want to do but this locks them into certain actions and an increased reliance on other people. In a quest to get more choices, adults have to constrain themselves by outsourcing some of their tasks.

How much of this outsourcing is done by free choice or is there a lot of pressure to outsource? Perhaps there is peer pressure from friends or people at work subtly or explicitly suggest that people need to focus there more.

It would also be interesting to trace the rising status of “experts,” not just traditional experts like scientists or clergy or technocrats, but service industry experts. For example, just how much status does an organizing expert have today?

Argument: “Academia is more of a shame culture than a guilt culture”

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In a discussion of reforming PhD. programs, one academic suggests that frequent meetings between students and faculty are needed to speed up the process because shame motivates more than guilt:

David Damrosch, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, said that Ph.D. students and professors in his department have been thinking more carefully about coursework. “Very often, students drift for extended periods,” he said. Frequent meetings with dissertation committee members are helpful, he said. “All this result in fewer incompletes in coursework … and more consistent progress in the dissertations,” said Damrosch.

“In anthropological terms, academia is more of a shame culture than a guilt culture: you may feel some private guilt at letting a chapter go unread for two or three months, but a much stronger force would be the public shame you’d feel at coming unprepared to a meeting with two of your colleagues,” he said. “It’s also ultimately a labor-saving device for the faculty as well as the student, as the dissertation can proceed sooner to completion and with less wasted effort for all concerned….” With frequent meetings, the students doesn’t lose time on “unproductive lines of inquiry” or “tangential suggestions tossed out by a single adviser,” Damrosch said.

Neither shame or guilt seem like the best motivation…

I wonder how many Ph.D. students say they feel positively supported by their institution and faculty. This doesn’t necessarily mean that students are the only ones who have a voice in this but I wonder if a lot of these issues are due to a poor match of (unclear?) expectations.

Social profiling of McMansion owners?

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The mayor of an Australian town suggests that some residents are profiled because they live in McMansions:

HILLS Mayor Greg Burnett challenged Prime Minister Julia Gillard last week to meet struggling families and businesses from the Hills.

The mayor set the challenge on the Ben Fordham show on 2GB last Wednesday in response to the Prime Minister’s suggestion that Sydney’s north shore was out of touch.

“It’s social profiling and it’s similar to comments made regarding our area when they talk about McMansions and our levels of income,” he said.

“We have the highest proportion of families with mortgages than anywhere in the country and parents working 70 to 80 hours per week.

As I’ve suggested before, there isn’t really an acceptable quick comeback if someone accuses you of living in a McMansion. Such claims tend to put the owner in a defensive position. It is common to hear people make comments about McMansion owners, not only because of their perceived wealth but because of their bad architectural taste, their disinterest in community life (particularly in teardown situations), and how their purchases help feed into large social problems like sprawl and consuming too much.

The most support McMansion owners get tends to come in more wealthy communities with a critical mass of larger and more expensive houses. It is in these places where teardowns are not always seen negatively and property rights are more important in public discourse and regulations. These communities often have zoning that at least allows, if not encourages, the construction of McMansions. But from the outside, these communities can be viewed as exclusive as it requires a decent amount of money to live there and some communities actively work to keep certain housing and people (anything that might harm property values) out.

However, it might be going too far to suggest that McMansion owners are deserving of pity. After all, these tough economic times mean that there are plenty of people experiencing financial difficulties. These days, McMansions (and there owners) are a favorite whipping boy. See this example from a comment about a Atlanta Journal Constitution story about debt:

It’s because everyone wanted the McMansion ($300K). Then you had to have the Cadallic Escalade (40K)…to impress the neighbors.

And there were numerous housewifes who LOVE to shop and don’t work…

There is not much support for McMansion owners today…

History class “Lying About the Past” fools Wikipedia and the Internet…for a short time

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Here is a fascinating story of a history class at George Mason University that asked students to fabricate information on Wikipedia and it worked…for a short time.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly’s course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.

The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens’ memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today’s pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.

Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. “Things like that really, really, really annoy me,” fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful…

Sometimes even an apparent failure can mask an underlying success. The students may have failed to pull off a spectacular hoax, but they surely learned a tremendous amount in the process. “Why would I design a course,” Kelly asks on his syllabus, “that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past?” Kelly explains that he hopes to mold his students into “much better consumers of historical information,” and at the same time, “to lighten up a little” in contrast to “overly stuffy” approaches to the subject. He defends his creative approach to teaching the mechanics of the historian’s craft, and plans to convert the class from an experimental course into a regular offering.

Should this professor be applauded for his innovative use of technology or questioned about the possible unethical nature of asking students to create stories online?

I’d love to see the student evaluations for this course. This course could be practical on a variety of levels: it reveals some insights into how history is “made” (it requires a certain number of sources, credible sources, and a narrator or place where the facts can be put together), it involves current technology (a plus for today’s college student who spend a lot of time online and rely on Wikipedia a lot), and it shows students how to evaluate information (whether online or otherwise). These sound like laudable goals. Here is the syllabus for the second iteration of the course (Spring 2012) and some of the material from the first page:

Why would I design a course that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past? I have two answers to this question, both of which I hope will convince you that I’m onto something. The first answer is that by learning about historical fakery, lying, and hoaxes, we all become much better consumers of historical information. In short, we are much less likely to be tricked by what we find in our own personal research about the past. That alone ought to be enough of a reason to teach this course. But my second reason is that I believe that the study of history ought to be fun and that too often historians (I include myself in this category) take an overly stuffy approach to the past. Maybe it’s our conditioning in graduate school, or maybe we’re afraid that if we get too playful with our
field we won’t be taken seriously as scholars. Whatever the reason, I think history has just gotten a bit too boring for its own good. This course is my attempt to lighten up a little and see where it gets us.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have only taught this class once before and to my knowledge,
no other history professor in the world is willing to teach something similar (or works in a
department where they could get away with it). Various courses taught around the world spend
some time on hoaxes and hoaxing, but I haven’t found one that is all about the hoax. So the only
model to work from is the one I used last time (Fall 2008). The last time around, the final class
project generated a great deal of discussion (much, but not all of it negative) in the academic
blogosphere. As you’ll see when we discuss the previous iteration of this course, I’m not
particularly sympathetic to those who took a dim view of what my students did.

Learning Goals

I do have some specific learning goals for this course. I hope that you’ll improve your research
and analytical skills and that you’ll become a much better consumer of historical information. I
hope you’ll become more skeptical without becoming too skeptical for your own good. I hope
you’ll learn some new skills in the digital realm that can translate to other courses you take or to
your eventual career. And, I hope you’ll be at least a little sneakier than you were before you
started the course.

Interesting.

Illinois has the third highest rate of foreclosures in the US

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New data shows that Illinois has the third highest rate of foreclosures in the country

Almost 7.5 percent of all one-to-four-unit mortgage loans in Illinois were in foreclosure in the first quarter, compared with a national average of 4.39 percent, according to data released Wednesday by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“Illinois and New Jersey trail only Florida as being the worst in the country, and they’re getting worse,” said Jay Brinkmann, the association’s chief economist “The rate in Illinois more than twice that of California. In the judicial states the problem continues to get worse in terms of the backlog of loans in the foreclosure process.”

Added Michael Fratantoni, the association’s vice president of research and economics, “This is not a case that loans are entering foreclosure at a greater extent than in nonjudicial (states.) It’s that they’re staying in foreclosure longer.”

Illinois is not alone, according to the trade group’s quarterly national delinquency survey. In judicial states, the percent of loans in the foreclosure process reached an all-time high of 6.9 percent during the first quarter. That compares with a rate of 2.8 percent in non-judicial states, the lowest since early 2009.

The larger story about foreclosures in recent years has tended to focus on certain Sunbelt places like Florida, Las Vegas, and California so it is interesting to hear that Illinois has one of the highest rates – even if this is due to the particulars about how foreclosures are dealt with in the courts.

Based on this, could one argue that places like Las Vegas, said to be hard-hit by foreclosures, actually will be able to move past foreclosures more easily because of quicker court procedures? Speaking broadly, is it better for a state’s economic health and for its citizens for foreclosures to move more quickly in the courts even if this has some negative shorter-term effects? What is the proper trade-off between helping current residents and clearing bad mortgages off the books?

A follow up to a Charles Darwin experiment shows how emotions change over time

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Wired explains how several researchers followed up on an experiment Charles Darwin conducted:

Charles Darwin liked to freak out his friends—for science. Guests visiting the famed naturalist in 1868 were shown a set of “ghoulish” photos of a guy being prodded in the face with an electrical current. Darwin then asked his guests-cum-guinea pigs to describe the emotion displayed in each photo. Was the subject happy? Sorrowful? Cheeky? Darwin hoped to determine what universal core emotions exist (if any) and what culturally modified variations branch from them. The result was Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Interesting, sure, but not the best science: The Victorian-era crowdsourcing experiment lacked consistent materials, a control group, and enough test subjects—he had only 24.

Fortunately, the University of Cambridge’s Darwin Correspondence Project picks up where Darwin left off. It has re-created his study online using the same images, taken by French physiologist Benjamin Duchenne. Yes, they look like yearbook portraits from a sanitorium. But more than 18,000 participants’ evaluations have now been tallied, and the project may actually yield defendable results. And they include a dimension Darwin didn’t intend. “There are different emotional vocabularies and repertoires in different periods,” says Cambridge research associate Paul White. For example, whereas Darwin’s posse perceived the conveyed emotion in one image as “hardness,” today’s majority describes it as “bored”—a word that in the 1800s only described what you might have done to a piece of wood. Emotions, it turns out, vary not only cross-culturally but also cross-historically. You might say they’ve evolved.

This makes me wonder about the research of Paul Ekman, the inspiration behind the TV show Lie To Me and the author of the interesting book Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. Ekman can identify micro-expressions, the almost instantaneous emotional reactions we have and display on our face before we try to cover them up (within a few tenths of a second). Are Ekman’s understandings of these expressions cultural and historically informed, meaning that his reading of micro-expressions 100 years ago or 100 years into the future would be less accurate?

This article hints at a fascinating topic: how are our own reading and naming of our emotions and those of others influenced by different social, cultural, and historical factors? Take the example above of boredom: did the concept simply not exist several centuries ago before individualism? This is related to but different from current debates about questions like what counts as addiction or what should be included in the new DSV-V manual.

What is the future of Facebook if half of Americans think it is a fad?

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A new survey reveals some controversy in how long Americans think Facebook will last:

Half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll. And, in the run-up to the social network’s initial public offering of stock, half of Americans also say the social network’s expected asking price is too high…

The public overall is similarly divided on the company’s future. Just under half of adults (46 percent) predict a short timeline for Facebook, while 43 percent say it has staying power.

I’m not sure why we should think that average Americans should be experts on the value of Facebook’s IPO but the questions about the staying power of Facebook are pretty fascinating. I wonder what exactly it means that people call Facebook a fad: does that mean it is too popular (this could go along with the idea that Facebook is overvalued) or that it will someday disappear (maybe replaced, maybe simply fades away)? These are two very different options: Facebook’s membership numbers will probably level off at some point but that is very different than suggesting Facebook may not be around in ten years.

To me, these figures suggest several things:

1. The IPO could be a very important turning point for Facebook, perhaps akin of a transition from young adulthood to becoming a mature company. Will the company continue to grow or is this the beginning of the end (particularly in public perceptions)?

2. There is still room for Facebook to become more integrated into the daily life of people, particularly older Americans. Perhaps the number of users can’t increase all that much but the time one spends on Facebook can.

3. Facebook still needs to show a certain segment of the population that it is “worthwhile” and not just a “fad. “I’m not sure exactly what this would look like. It could include giving Facebook more functions so that more online activity, like shopping (though respondents to this survey are not very favorable about the idea of giving Facebook this data), takes place through Facebook. Or perhaps it includes convincing people that the social interaction on Facebook is now how normal social interaction takes place.

On the whole, this means that there is a lot for Facebook still to do.

Subways are all alike

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If you’ve ever traveled to a new city and felt deja vu while riding the subway, a recent academic paper summarized by Wired explains why:

With equations used to study two-dimensional spatial networks, the class of network to which subways belong, the researchers turned stations and lines to a mathematics of nodes and branches. They repeated their analyses with data from each decade of a subway system’s history, and looked for underlying trends.

Patterns emerged: The core-and-branch topology, of course, and patterns more fine-grained. Roughly half the stations in any subway will be found on its outer branches rather than the core. The distance from a city’s center to its farthest terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core. This happens again and again….Subway systems seem to gravitate towards these ratios organically, through a combination of planning, expedience, circumstance and socioeconomic fluctuation, say the researchers.

What particularly fascinates me is the prevalence of particular ratios within transit systems, suggesting that subways scale in consistent ways as their host cities grow.