Monthly Archives: August 2012

Innovation: four McMansions built on top of a Chinese mall

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Here is one possible solution to running out of open land: build houses on top of other structures.

The Chinese city of Zhuzhou, the second largest in the province of Hunan, is being pressed under the tremendous pressure of growth. Home to many a manufactory and textile mill, residents are seeking new ways to live close to work while preserving the spaciousness of the countryside. Thus, these wonderful photos of McMansion-style housing atop a five-story shopping center in the central district of Zhuzhou.

The four houses are perched above the city, invisible to street-level action. They do not cast a shadow on the ground, and seem to exist solely in the rarefied world of smoggy skies, with scenic views into the apartments surrounding their airy enclave. Though the landscaping around the houses leaves something to be desired, the overall approach is one we’d like to see replicated on blank and bare urban roofscapes everywhere. Now that’s mixed-use development.

Think of the views!

Too bad we don’t have interviews with those who bought or live in these homes.

I know this looks unappealing and I’m sure there are some structural issues (like how do these homeowners get off the building) but on the other hand, why not? If space is at a premium, this is a solution…perhaps not the best but a solution for those who have to have such a home.

“First large scale [lost letter] study” results from London

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The results of a lost letter study in London provide some interesting results:

Neighbourhood income deprivation has a strong negative effect on altruistic behaviour when measured by a ‘lost letter’ experiment, according to new UCL research published August 15 in PLoS One. Researchers from UCL Anthropology used the lost letter technique to measure altruism across 20 London neighbourhoods by dropping 300 letters on the pavement and recording whether they arrived at their destination. The stamped letters were addressed by hand to a study author’s home address with a gender neutral name, and were dropped face-up and during rain free weekdays.

The results show a strong negative effect of neighbourhood income deprivation on altruistic behaviour, with an average of 87% of letters dropped in the wealthier neighbourhoods being returned compared to only an average 37% return rate in poorer neighbourhoods.

Co-author Jo Holland said: “This is the first large scale study investigating cooperation in an urban environment using the lost letter technique. This technique, first used in the 1960s by the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram, remains one of the best ways of measuring truly altruistic behaviour, as returning the letter doesn’t benefit that person and actually incurs the small hassle of taking the letter to a post box…

As well as measuring the number of letters returned, the researchers also looked at how other neighbourhood characteristics may help to explain the variation in altruistic behaviour — including ethnic composition and population density — but did not find them to be good predictors of lost letter return.

This is a good example of a natural experiment.

I wonder if there is any equivalent to this in the online realm. Perhaps an email that is mistakenly sent to the wrong address that would require a user to then take a small amount of time to forward the email to original recipient?

Sociological study: NYT obituaries have more celebrity deaths over the decades

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Here is a unique place to look for American’s obsession with celebrities: examine the “Notable Deaths” section of the New York Times since 1900.

Sociology researchers at the University of South Carolina analyzed obituaries in the New York Times from the same 20 randomly selected days in 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975 and 2000. From this sample, they ranked how much attention was given to the deaths of people in certain occupations in each year. They found that obituaries of entertainers and athletes marched steadily to the top in rank — from seventh in 1900, to fifth in 1925, to third in 1950 and first in 1975 and 2000; in 2000, celeb athletes and entertainers accounted for 28 percent of obituaries in the newspaper, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, the researchers said the number of obituaries for public figures in manufacturing and business halved over the century. Similarly, religious obituaries fell from fourth place in mid-century to last in rank, and the researchers said they did not find a single notable death article for a religious figure in their sample for the year 2000.

“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” lead researcher Patrick Nolan said in a statement from the University of South Carolina. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival,” added Nolan, who details the research in the journal Sociation Today.

So have celebrities replaced some of religion?

It would also be interesting to see whether the New York Times did this consciously and if so, how exactly this conversation went. Did readers actually suggest they wanted to see more celebrity news in the deaths section?

Some thoughts on Progressive and Matt Fisher

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By now, you’ve no doubt run across Matt Fisher’s blog post titled “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court”. (If you haven’t yet seen Matt’s post, take a moment to read the original and his follow up). There have been lots of reactions to Matt’s story (to put it mildly), including over at Above the Law, where blogger “Juggalo Law” makes the following two observations:

1. Matt Fisher’s “grief is impossible for most, if not all, of us to imagine.”

Katie Fisher died in a car crash and her brother lashed out at the insurance company that made life for her surviving family more difficult. Matt Fisher’s overwrought tumblr post can be excused by the fact that, you know, his sister died in a car crash. His grief is impossible for most, if not all, of us to imagine. And yet thousands of people put on their imagineering hats and did just that.

As an initial matter, this seems like a denial of even the possibility of empathy. Is ATL really arguing that it is “impossible” for people generally to even imagine another person’s grief in the wake of death? Except for the very young, virtually everyone has known someone who has died, and we each face the inevitable prospect of our own mortality. Of course no one besides Matt Fisher knows the precise contours his grief, but this is hardly a persuasive, blanket argument that humanity generally is incapable of even imagining what his grief is like.

Furthermore, the tragedy at issue here is a death caused by an automobile accident. While the number of motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. varies from year to year, during the years 1981-2010 it ranged from 49,301 (1981) to 32,885 (2010). In all, 1,268,122 people died over this 30 year span. Even in a nation of over 300 million, this is an enormous number. Matt Fisher’s loss of his sister is tragic, but, sadly, it is not unique.

2. Insurance companies are “inhuman” entities whose “existence…is predicated on their attempts to make money. ”

Sometimes, life deals you a sh**ty hand. Death, however, always does. And yet, those stuck behind will undoubtedly encounter a world that barely shrugs in acknowledgement. And that’s how it should be. You will still be asked if you want a coffin with gold plating and you may be asked if you want your loved one’s ashes compressed into a beautiful diamond that you can wear around your neck for a lifetime. And all the mundane features of our economy will seemingly laugh at your grief. But they’re not laughing and insurance companies and all of the other businesses that survivors must joust with aren’t “inhuman monsters.” They’re merely inhuman. And they will follow protocol and attempt to minimize their own exposure as much as is possible. The existence of insurance companies is predicated on their attempts to make money. And nothing in this case suggests that their actions were borne out of anything other than this absolute truth.

Here, the ATL blogger seems to argue that insurance companies automatically get a pass for distasteful behavior because they are “inhuman” (with a strongly implied “what else do you expect?”). I think this approach lazily obscures rather than thoughtfully resolves any of the issues Matt Fisher’s personal tragedy raises. Obviously, the facts in this case are disputed and not fully known (at least publicly), and I have no personal knowledge of this matter. However, taking Matt’s original post and follow up clarification at face value, it is clear that Matt is not blaming Progressive for his sister’s death. Matt’s argument (and the general outrage) against Progressive boils down to these alleged facts:

  • Katie was a Progressive insurance customer with underinsured motorist coverage.
  • Katie was killed in an automobile accident with an underinsured motorist.
  • Asserting that Katie herself might have been responsible for the accident (in which case Progressive would have no legal obligation to pay under Maryland law), Progressive refused to pay what it owed under Katie’s policy to her surviving family members.
  • When Katie’s family went to court and sued the other driver to establish that he was liable for the accident rather than Katie, Progressive sent in its own lawyer(s) to help the other driver prove he was NOT liable.

So far as I can tell, the general outrage being directed at Progressive arises from this last assertion. I think most people understand that “fault” in auto accidents can be murky, and I think that many people would have understood if Progressive had refused to pay Katie’s policy until this issue was conclusively resolved by a court.

But that’s not why Matt’s post went viral. It went viral because he alleges, as he puts it in the title, “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court.” The extreme outrage is not that an insurance company wanted to be 100% sure it owed money before paying out. The outrage is that (allegedly) an insurance company unleashed its lawyer(s) against its own customer. I agree with ATL that one generally expects auto insurance companies to “attempt[] to make money.” However, I submit that many do not expect auto insurance companies to proactively work against their own policyholders who are involved in accidents by making common cause with the other driver. It is one thing to dispute liability and force a court to sort the issue out. It is another thing to send lawyer(s) into the resulting lawsuit on behalf of the opposing side.

On the same day that Matt posted about Progressive, Bob Sutton blogged about how “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care” (it’s as bad as you think, assuming the facts Bob recounts are all true). Bob narrates one part of the story in which the father is on the phone with a United employee located at the same airport as the lost 10-year-old, who was flying as an unaccompanied minor. When he “asked if the employee could go see if [his daughter] was OK,” she replied that she “was going off her shift and could not help. [He] then asked her if she was a mother herself and she said ‘yes’—he then asked her if she was missing her child for 45 minutes what would she do? She kindly told him she understood and would do her best to help.”

Bob writes:

This is the key moment in the story, note that in her role as a United employee, this woman would not help [the parents]. It was only when [the father] asked her if she was a mother and how she would feel that she was able to shed her deeply ingrained United indifference — the lack of felt accountability that pervades the system. Yes, there are design problems, there are operations problems, but the to me the core lesson is this is a system packed with people who don’t feel responsible for doing the right thing.

“Juggalo Law” titled its ATL post “Progressive Insurance Is Inhuman,” as if this fact excuses inhuman behavior. But just because corporations themselves aren’t people doesn’t mean their shareholders, managers, and employees aren’t. As Bob Sutton notes in his article on United Airlines, “a key difference between good and bad organizations is that, in the good ones, most everyone feels obligated and presses everyone else to do what is in their customer’s and organization’s best interests. I feel it as a customer at my local Trader Joe’s, on JetBlue and Virgin America, and In-N-Out Burger, to give a few diverse examples.”

Assuming the facts Matt alleges are true, Progressive clearly didn’t act in their customer Katie Fisher’s best interest. That’s not simply a sign that it wants to make money–or is legally organized as a corporation. If true, it’s a sign that it will act against its own customers whenever it can. Ironically, in a competitive marketplace, that approach is not in Progressive’s best interest. Indeed, the near-universal condemnation levelled at Progressive over the past few days suggests that such a narrowly self-interested approach is suicidal once it comes to light.

Illinois State Toll Highway Authority thinking of changing how new interchanges are funded

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If you were ever curious how new interchanges on Illinois toll roads are funded (and I am), you can find out here as the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (ISTHA) thinks of changing its regulations:

The agency traditionally funds half the costs of interchanges, but it may provide more money if it appears revenues will exceed 50 percent of projections or if communities indicate that the location is near a major regional road or truck route.

Other considerations would be if towns can offer right-of-way land or agree to finance the project and be reimbursed by the tollway.

Another proposal would be a “corridor approach.” This could mean when a new interchange is built with tolls that are higher than other nearby ones, the agency may evaluate and increase those adjacent rates…

Some other revisions include stipulations that all future requests for interchanges must come from government agencies and requiring more financial information and payback schedules.

I had no idea this is how things work but I am not surprised. Having studied the early years of some of the Illinois toll roads, particularly I-294, I-88, and I-90, it is remarkable to me how few full interchanges were built originally. For example, I-88 only had a few full interchanges, meaning that motorists could get on or off the tollway going any direction, between the Cook County line and Aurora. Since then, things have changed as the population further west of Chicago has increased. These changes included a new full Winfield Road interchange in the 1990s (which helped spur the growth of the Cantera property which has become quite important to Warrenville), an added full interchange at Route 59 (originally it only had two ramps), and a new interchange at Eola Road to help handle the growth in the Aurora area. Of course, not all of the interchanges have been improved: exits like Route 53 are still limited. Additionally, if you drive on other toll roads like the Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania Toll Roads/Turnpikes, the exits are quite infrequent as it would cost a lot more money to build interchanges where the population may not support it.

Globalization relies on pallets

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Tom Vanderbilt exposes the hidden workhorse of globalization: the humble pallet.

And yet pallets are arguably as integral to globalization as containers. For an invisible object, they are everywhere: There are said to be billions circulating through global supply chain (2 billion in the United States alone). Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets. So widespread is their use that they account for, according to one estimate, more than 46 percent of total U.S. hardwood lumber production.

Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs. There is a whole science of “pallet cube optimization,” a kind of Tetris for packaging; and an associated engineering, filled with analyses of “pallet overhang” (stacking cartons so they hang over the edge of the pallet, resulting in losses of carton strength) and efforts to reduce “pallet gaps” (too much spacing between deckboards). The “pallet loading problem,”—or the question of how to fit the most boxes onto a single pallet—is a common operations research thought exercise…

As USDA Forest Service researchers Gilbert P. Dempsey and David G. Martens noted in a conference paper, two factors led to the real rise of the pallet. The first was the 1937 invention of gas-powered forklift trucks, which “allowed goods to be moved, stacked, and stored with extraordinary speed and versatility.”

The second factor in the rise of the pallet was World War II. Logistics—the “Big ‘L’,” as one history puts it—is the secret story behind any successful military campaign, and pallets played a large role in the extraordinary supply efforts in the world’s first truly global war. As one historian, quoted by Rick Le Blanc in Pallet Enterprise, notes, “the use of the forklift trucks and pallets was the most significant and revolutionary storage development of the war.” Tens of millions of pallets were employed—particularly in the Pacific campaigns, with their elongated supply lines. Looking to improve turnaround times for materials handling, a Navy Supply Corps officer named Norman Cahners—who would go on to found the publishing giant of the same name—invented the “four-way pallet.” This relatively minor refinement, which featured notches cut in the side so that forklifts could pick up pallets from any direction, doubled material-handling productivity per man. If there’s a Silver Star for optimization, it belongs to Cahners.

I will attest to the importance of pallets from my two summers spent working in a book publisher’s warehouse. The second summer, much of my work day consisted of loading boxes onto pallets, driving the forklift with the pallet to an unloading area, and then unloading the boxes so that workers along the line could start the books moving down the line to what would become packed boxes. Without pallets, I have trouble imagining how so many boxes of books could have been moved.

This did raise some other questions for me:

1. How much money can be made manufacturing pallets? Clearly the world needs a lot of pallets…

2. How many pallets become unusable each year and what happens to these pallets?

3. Do people like products that are specifically designed for better packing on a pallet, like Costco’s rectangular milk containers?

h/t Instapundit

More on Twitter co-founder and his teardown vs. neighbors in San Francisco

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I recently wrote about Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ fight with his San Francisco neighbors over his proposed teardown McMansion. Here is more information about the story:

“We don’t want nouveau riches McMansions sprouting up all over our ridges,” one resident wrote to San Francisco’s Planning Department.

And here, at least, is one local example of the side-effect of a tech boom that the city has fought hard to fuel. San Francisco worked hard in particular to convince Twitter to keep its headquarters in town in hopes that it would amp up the tech scene north of Silicon Valley. Williams, who is 40, was Twitter’s CEO before stepping down in 2010 to support more tech startups…

The strife started after Williams and Lundberg Design, the design firm hired by Williams, contacted neighbors about the couple’s plans. A couple of longtime residents quickly began circulating a handwritten flyer around the neighborhood, decrying the “APPALLING” plan to demolish a “widely coveted, unique and historic (to most) house.”

“TEAR DOWN is NEEDLESS, WASTEFUL, POLLUTION, DISRESPECTFUL,” the flyer said in all caps. It asked people to send in one letter per person if possible because “volume counts.”…

Williams isn’t alone in his neighborhood woes. Other high tech moguls have run into opposition from neighbors, including late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was trying to demolish a Woodside property and rebuild as well, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who sued his Pacific Heights neighbors last year for their overgrown trees. Ellison’s Pacific Heights residence was, coincidentally, designed by Lundberg Design.

Sounds quite contentious. The columnist suggests San Francisco might have to change a little if it wants to keep important firms; what if the Twitter co-founder threatened to move away, taking away tax revenue and jobs? Communities compete against each other by offering tax breaks or other incentives so couldn’t corporations and their leaders make stipulations about housing issues?

Rising income segregation in the United States

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Sociologist Stephen Klineberg discusses income segregation and a new Pew Report that suggests it is growing in the United States:

So what’s happening – as the gap between rich and poor increases, people increasingly live in very separate worlds and we’ve always sort of been more comfortable in communities made up of what the Wall Street Journal once called PLUs, people like us. Right? We never liked it too much. There were a lot of people much poorer than us or much richer than us. We’d like to be in those communities where we felt at home and with people like ourselves and you see it in Houston, I think, more than most other cities because Houston is still, today, the most spread out, least dense major city in the country…

The great danger for the future of America is not an ethnic divide. It’s a class divide…

Oh, tremendous consequences of the isolation of the poor in places where there are only other poor people with very few connections to the job opportunities that are out there, to the knowledge. We know that there are several forms of capital. Right? There’s human capital, which is education. There’s financial capital and there’s, above all, social capital. Who do you know? Who are you connected with? Who can you go to for advice? Who will know about jobs that are opening and help connect you to those jobs?

And so the isolation of the poor creates two things. Number one is it isolates the poor in ways that make it much more difficult for them to work their way out of poverty and it isolates the rich so that they live in worlds where they have no clue as to the kind of challenges that people are facing.

This is not a new issue. However, several decades ago, the focus was more on the extremely poor/the hypersegregated living in inner cities, and now the problem is perceived to be affecting more people.

The Pew report can be found here and here are some of the findings:

The analysis finds that 28% of lower-income households in 2010 were located in a majority lower-income census tract, up from 23% in 1980, and that 18% of upper- income households were located in a majority upper-income census tract, up from 9% in 1980.

These increases are related to the long-term rise in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income—to 76% in 2010, down from 85% in 1980—and a rise in the shares that are majority lower income (18% in 2010, up from 12% in 1980) and majority upper income (6% in 2010, up from 3% in 1980)…

By adding together the share of lower-income households living in a majority lower-income tract and the share of upper-income households living in a majority upper-income tract, this Pew Research analysis has developed a single Residential Income Segregation Index (RISI) score for each of the nation’s top 30 metropolitan areas…

Among the nation’s 10 largest metro areas, Houston (61) and Dallas (60) have the highest RISI scores, followed closely by New York (57). At the other end of the scale, Boston (36), Chicago (41) and Atlanta (41) have the lowest RISI scores among the nation’s 10 largest metro areas.

Worth paying attention in the years ahead. Even in the era of Facebook, Twitter, and more weak ties, neighbors and neighborhoods still matter for a number of important life outcomes.

Discovering America’s consumer habits at yard sales

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A photographer discusses what he has seen at American yard sales:

After traveling the country for four years shooting Yard Sales, Ruffing’s photos document consumer habits, low-budget marketing, the movement of military families and telling evidence of the economic recession…

Ruffing, 33, says he spent several days working on the assignment [at the “world’s longest yard sale” 700 miles long] and was quickly drawn in by the culture. One of the first things he noticed was the way yard sales have become their own little marketplaces with unique advertising strategies. Sellers aren’t creating high-end Nike or Budweiser commercials, but he says they will go to great lengths to create inventive ways to increase traffic…

Yard sales also have a unique way of demonstrating consumption habits, he says. While his work doesn’t compete with the famous photos of people squished against Best Buy doors on Black Friday in terms of pure shopper madness, they are still a window into our lust for stuff…

Fortunately, there is also a flipside to the doom and gloom, he says. To many people, both buyers and sellers, he says yard sales also represented a new and more calculated approach to living within our means.

I wonder if anyone has calculated the average lag time for how long certain products take to make it to yard sales.

It sounds like we could draw another interesting conclusion: Americans simply have a lot of stuff. This reminds me of the book Material World: A Global Family Portrait which includes photographs of families from around the world with all of their worldly possessions in their front yard. Even with an “average” American family, the Americans had far more stuff than everyone else. And I would suspect Americans have only collected more (on average) since that books publication in the 1990s.

This also reminded me of Dave Ramsey who often tells people to hold a yard or garage sale so they can make some quick money and popular shows like Pawn Stars where people are looking to turn their objects into cash. People may like their stuff but they also often like turning that stuff into cash (often overvaluing their own possessions – just look at Craigslist) so they can they buy more.

ProCure proton therapy: you are not “close to downtown Chicago”

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I’ve heard plenty of radio commercials for the ProCure proton therapy facility in Warrenville, Illinois and one thing gets me every time: the ad claims the center is “close to downtown Chicago.” A few thoughts about this:

1. The actual distance from Chicago to the facility is 30 miles. While the drive is relatively simple (Eisenhower to I-88 and then about 0.6 miles off the Winfield Road exit), this is not “close.” It probably wouldn’t even qualify as nearby. In no traffic, this drive would take at least 35-40 minutes and during the day would be longer. In my world, 10 miles or less would be close to downtown Chicago.

2. I’m not sure why the facility was built in Warrenville: the land is conveniently located near an interstate, close to Central DuPage Hospital (CDH), I assume the land was cheaper than in or near Chicago, and was able to be put up in “record time.” And there was competition: Northern Illinois University wanted to build a proton therapy facility in West Chicago and CDH filed a lawsuit against NIU that was withdrawn when a regulatory board gave the go ahead to the Warrenville facility.

3. One reason they might make this claim is because not too many people have heard of Warrenville. Going to Warrenville, a small community, doesn’t sound as good as going to somewhere “close to Chicago.”

4. Another reason they may have made this claim is that they want to win market share in the Chicago region. The ProCure facility has teamed with CDH which provides care to western DuPage County and has designs on a larger healthcare footprint (with a recent merger with Delnor Hospital) but may not be familiar to all of Chicagoland. Perhaps the claim of being close to Chicago is more about winning the PR battle against Chicago hospitals such as University of Chicago, Northwestern, Rush, and Loyola.