Monthly Archives: December 2012

Looking at Seneca Falls, New York, “the real Bedford Falls” in It’s a Wonderful Life

Posted on by

Social Explorer, a cool tool for looking at demographic data, takes a quick look at the New York community that was the inspiration for Bedford Falls in the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life:

Producer and director Frank Capra set the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life in the fictional small town of Bedford Falls, NY.  The actual town of Seneca Falls, NY, claims to be Capra’s inspiration.   The town hosts the annual It’s a Wonderful Life Festival and visitors can explore the history at the museum dedicated to the legend…

Back in 1940, Seneca County had 25,732 residents, of whom 99.5 percent were white and 0.5 percent were black.  Nearly a third of the county’s foreign born population (32.0 percent) hailed from Italy, more than both statewide (one fifth) and nationwide (one seventh).  Many foreign born residents also came from Germany (10.2 percent) and England and Wales (9.1 percent).

Today, Seneca County has grown 37.1 percent to 35,285 residents, while the state grew 43.2 percent and the nation grew 133.0 percent.  Seneca County remains predominately white (92.9 percent) with a small but growing black population (4.3 percent).  According to 2006-10 ACS data, today 4.6 percent of the foreign born population comes from Italy.  Larger shares of newcomers come from other countries including Canada (17.4 percent), India (11.2 percent), Laos (6.1 percent), Ukraine (5.1 percent), and Poland (3.6 percent).

The top occupations in 1940 were:

  • Proprietors/Managers/Official (20.9 percent)
  • Craftmen/Foremen/Kindred Workers (16.4 percent)
  • Operatives/Kindred Workers (15.0 percent)
  • Laborers (13.9 percent)

Of the adult residents, 18.2 percent had completed high school (or more) and 3.0 percent had graduated from college, which were both smaller percentages than in the state (22.9 percent and 5.5 percent) and nation (24.1 percent and 4.6 percent).

Sounds like small town life that may not be much different today. The movie seems to provide more information about the “feel” of the community rather than the demographics. George Bailey is trying to build suburban-type homes and is thwarted by the evil banker in the community. By the end of the film, Bailey and other average citizens in the community are shown to be decent people who rally together in times of need. Does this story necessarily line up with the ancestry of the community or the top occupations? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps demography is not narrative destiny in this case. Perhaps the best way to attack this issue would be to compare the demographics of Seneca County in 1940 to other typical small towns and counties and see how “representative” the movie demographics might have been.

Pope: modern society doesn’t leave much room for God

Posted on by

Pope Benedict’s Christmas Eve mass included this commentary about the role of religion in modern society:

“Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for him,” said the pope, wearing gold and white vestments.

“The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full,” he said.

The leader of the world’s some 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said societies had reached the point where many people’s thinking processes did not leave any room even for the existence of God.

“Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the ‘God hypothesis’ becomes superfluous,” he said.

“There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so ‘full’ of ourselves that there is no room left for God.”

This sounds like a secularization argument to me: the rational thinking that began off several centuries ago before and during the Enlightenment has squeezed out God. It also reminds me of the 2004 book Sacred and Secular by Norris and Inglehart that suggested the modern welfare state has met more people’s daily needs so there is less need for God.

Additionally, the Pope also suggests modern technologies that offered to help make our lives more efficient now just take up more of our time. Is the Pope simply a crank from an older generation or is this prescient commentary about the downsides of technology millions the world over have adopted?

Selling car insurance by the mile

Posted on by

The idea of replacing the gas tax with a tax by miles driven is being tested so what about car insurance by the mile? One company has introduced the concept in Portland:

You wouldn’t buy an unlimited fare card if you only took a few transit rides per month, but when it comes to car insurance that’s pretty much how things work. Drivers who are similar in age, gender, and residence pay about the same premium even if some drive 5,000 miles a year and others 50,000 miles. The problem is not only that low-mileage drivers end up subsidizing high-mileage ones — it’s that everyone has an incentive to drive as much as they can.

One idea to undercut this system is pay-per-mile car insurance. Earlier this month at The Atlantic, Matthew O’Brien explained (via this 2008 Brookings report; PDF) just how much America stands to save with such a service. Driving would fall 8 percent nationally; oil usage and carbon emissions would drop 2 and 4 percent, respectively; fewer traffic and accidents could be worth upwards of $60 billion a year.

Since city residents have transportation alternatives at their disposal, they’re likely to benefit from mileage-based systems more than most. That’s the basic idea behind MetroMile, a new per-mile car insurance company that launched earlier this month in Portland, Oregon. While conventional car insurance companies dabble in mileage programs, MetroMile was created explicitly with that low-car lifestyle urban driver in mind — even down to the name…

MetroMile users receive a device called a Metronome (sadly, the “N” isn’t capitalized) that plugs into the car and tracks mileage in real-time. Drivers pay a monthly base rate that’s around $20-30, says Pretre, then pay 2 to 6 additional cents per mile. He says anyone driving fewer than 10,000 miles a year should start to save, and once you get down to 8,000 miles, the savings approach 20 to 25 percent over major car insurers…

While it makes sense to introduce this in Portland or a number of other dense cities where mass transit usage or alternatives to driving are common, would this work as well in the suburbs? Would the costs of paying car insurance be enough to prompt people to change their living patterns? Maybe it depends on how much cheaper that car insurance could be or perhaps the quest for the cheaper house that provides more bang for the buck would still win out.

The 2008 Brookings report cited above titled “Pay-As-You-Drive Auto Insurance: A Simple Way to Reduce Driving-Related Harms and Increase Equity” makes an interesting point: increased driving is related to increased income (see page 10 and 40). In other words, Americans who have the money to do so drive more. This helps explain the reluctance of higher-income Americans to use buses.

Opposition to permanent supportive housing for the mentally ill in the Chicago suburbs

Posted on by

With the public discussion of mental illness in recent days, here is a look at trying to build housing for the mentally ill in the Chicago suburbs:

She would like to find a place close by, a place that’s affordable, a place that would provide independence and easy access to needed social services.

But local social service agencies and advocacy groups say that kind of housing — often referred to as permanent supportive housing — is rare in the suburbs…

Chicago-based Daveri Development Group, with help from agencies like the North/Northwest Suburban Task Force on Supportive Housing for Individuals with Mental Illness, has submitted three proposals during the past several years for supportive-housing developments in the suburbs — one in Arlington Heights, one in Mount Prospect and one in Wheeling.

Mount Prospect leaders approved Daveri’s plan in November 2011. That project, known as Myers Place, is expected to open at Dempster Street and Busse Road in the spring or summer of 2013.

The other two proposals, after encountering stiff resistance from neighbors, were rejected.

Many critics of those plans said the same basic thing: good concept, bad location.

The article goes on to talk about how several of these cases have gone to court. Despite the claims of opponents that their reactions are not based on fear, it is hard not to see this as a NIMBY situation: suburbanites living in typical subdivisions wouldn’t want such facilities near them. Saying it is a zoning issue sidesteps the problem; zoning is all about making sure different uses don’t mix and is often wielded in suburbs to protect more exclusive residential neighborhoods.

This leads to an interesting dilemma: what if the average suburbanite thinks such facilities would be good for helping deal with mental illness but no one wants to live near them?

Tradeoff between making a stricter energy code for new homes and higher costs for buyers

Posted on by

While there is growing interest in more energy efficient homes, this doesn’t come without an upfront cost. This is illustrated by the debate in Illinois about how much new energy standards might add to the costs of new homes:

A new statewide building energy code that takes effect Jan. 1 strives to make homes more comfortable and residential energy bills less costly by making the building’s “envelope” tighter. The adoption of a substantial amount of the International Energy Conservation Code for homes puts Illinois at the forefront of such efforts among states.

But the updates to the building energy code, required by state law every three years, have not been without controversy. While proponents say the changes will increase the cost of a new home from $958 to $1,775 in Illinois, or about $1,500 in the Chicago area, detractors of the new rules peg that Chicago-area cost increase at $4,600, a sum they say will price some first-time buyers out of the market…

The changes won’t be obvious, and even the code’s proponents agree the upgrades in energy efficiency won’t be as easy to market to consumers as, say, granite countertops and crown molding.

They include upgraded insulation in attics and basements, more energy-efficient windows, upgraded bathroom vent fans, the use of some high-efficiency lights, insulated hot water lines to kitchens and air sealing around furnaces…

Supporters of the changes say consumers living in a Chicago-area home of 2,400 square feet with a basement should save an estimated $350 a year on their energy costs, compared with the current building regulations.

If these estimates about savings each year are correct, these code changes would be worthwhile over the the full lifetime of a home. However, how many homebuyers take this long perspective? In a mobile country, how many would be willing to pay upfront for costs from which they may not personally benefit?

This seems like the classic dilemma about a number of green products in the United States: will people pay upfront for savings down the road? It will be interesting to see how builders try to sell these code upgrades , massage the price points of home to account for these new costs, and also try to appeal to greener buyers overall.

Patterns in “the most cited works in sociology, 2012 edition”

Posted on by

According to Neal at Scatterplot, here are the most cited sociological books and articles of 2012:

top25_2012

This is an interesting list. Three of the patterns in the data:

So, one in 33 articles cites Distinction. The majority at the top of the list are books along with a pair each from AJS, ASR and the Annual Review, along with one article from Social Forces. The authors and titles are truncated by Web of Science, so don’t blame me. Remember that the lists only counts citations in this group of sociology journals, so being famous in other worlds doesn’t get you on the list.

Fun fact: 2/3 of things that were cited last year were only cited once, and 95% of things cited were cited less than five times. And, unless one of your articles was cited nine or more times in one of these journals last year, you can consider yourself, like me, one of the 99%.

One thing that struck me was how old everything  on this top list was. The median publication year in the top 100 was 1992. Of the top 100, only one piece was published in the last five years.

A few other things stuck out to me from this list:

1. The list involves a number of big name sociologists. I assume they became big names because of the quality of their work, such as in the pieces cited here, but how much could it be that the works are cited more because they came from big names? There is some interesting work that could be done here with individual pieces to look at patterns of citations and how works become well-known.

2. There are several more methodological pieces on the list. The Raudenbush and Bryk 2002 book involves hierarchical linear modeling, a technique that uses multiple equations to nest individual cases within larger groups (like students within schools in the sociology of education). The Strauss and Glaser 1967 book is about the basics of grounded theory, a technique that has been adopted across a variety of qualitative studies. The Steensland et al. 2000 piece is about developing the measure RELTRAD which more effectively categorizes Americans into religious traditions. These methodological works have wide applications and were influential across a variety of subfields.

3. Could we interpret a list like this as one that tell us the “classic works” of sociology today? Could we hand a list like this to undergraduate majors or graduate students and tell them that this is what they need to know to understand the broader field? One way to check on this would be to compare the top cited works year to year to see how much the list changes and how consistently important these works are. Presumably, new works will be added to the list over time but this may not happen quickly.

Posting your favorite McMansion photos

Posted on by

A discussion board at DC Urban Moms and Dads starts with a simple order: “The last threads about McMansions have been very entertaining — as has been seeing people so worked up one way or the other. Let’s have a good laugh and post your favorite McMansion picture here!” And the results are fascinating. There are a variety of pictures here and the discussion ends up revolving around what exactly makes a McMansion. A number of the traits line up with the four I found in looking at how the term was used over a ten year period in the New York Times and Dallas Morning News.

Here is the photo that several discussants declared the winner among the postings:

New study says congestion could be lessened by reducing a small number of trips from certain neighborhoods

Posted on by

A new study suggests a targeted reduction of trips from certain locations could greatly reduce congestion:

To learn more about traffic congestion in the hope of finding ways of relieving it, an international team of scientists analyzed road use patterns in the San Francisco Bay area and the Boston area. They used mobile phone information from more than 1 million users over the course of three weeks to map out where drivers were concentrated on roads. (The data was rendered anonymous before the investigators looked at it, the study authors noted.)

Based on their analysis, the researchers suggest that certain neighborhoods in these urban areas were home to drivers that caused major congestion. The scientists found that canceling just 1 percent of trips from these neighborhoods could drastically reduce travel time that was otherwise added due to congestion.

“In the Boston area, we found that canceling 1 percent of trips by select drivers in the Massachusetts municipalities of Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell and Waltham would cut all drivers’ additional commuting time caused by traffic congestion by 18 percent,” said researcher Marta González, a complex-systems scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In the San Francisco area, canceling trips by drivers from Dublin, Hayward, San Jose, San Rafael and parts of San Ramon would cut 14 percent from the travel time of other drivers.”

The location of these neighborhoods apparently makes it easy for them to impact their cities. “Being able to detect and then release the congestion in the most affected arteries improves the functioning of the entire coronary system,” González  told TechNewsDaily.

There are many ways people might reduce the number of drivers hitting the road from these key neighborhoods, the scientists said. For instance, the authorities might encourage alternatives “such as public transportation, carpooling, flex time and working from home,” González said. Mobile phone apps that connect people using the same roads might help them coordinate carpooling, she added.

Two things stand out to me:

1. It seems like the advantage to this method is that it allows officials and drivers to target traffic flows from particular locations and then plan accordingly. More often, we settle for traffic solutions like adding more lanes over a stretch of highway or extending mass transit to a particular location. But this kind of analysis is able to help people target particular areas rather than having to apply catch-all solutions.

2. Collecting and using this data sounds very interesting. This is big data at work: taking information that is collected about over 1 million cell phone users and then using that information in a new way. It also allows researchers to see the system as a whole.

My next question would then be is it be easy politically to target particular areas for congestion reduction?

Website of the day: gradeinflation.com

Posted on by

Perhaps it is finals week that piqued my interest in this particular website: gradeinflation.com. There is a lot of fascinating information on this site about college grading trends in recent decades. Yes, my own institution is represented on the site.

If this puts you in the grading spirit, you can try out The Grading Game app which one Wired reviewer liked:

I’m frankly surprised by how much I like The Grading Game. It is ultimately about grading papers and looking for spelling errors, but somehow the intense time limit, scoring mechanics and various modes wrapped around that seemingly bland premise make the game super addictive. And, as someone who does a great degree of text-editing, I suspect that this simple iPhone app is making me better at my job.

Not quite the same experience but it is an attempt to put grading through the gamification process.