Monthly Archives: July 2013

Home swapping about community life, sustainability

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A new study about people who swap homes are motivated by several factors:

‘My House is Yours’ is the first in-depth study of people using home exchange to travel the world. It was carried out by the University of Bergamo and based on a survey of 7,000 members of the HomeExchange.com website…

Researchers Francesca Forno, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Sociology of Consumption, and Roberta Garibaldi, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Tourism Marketing concluded that “people are turning more and more to models of consumption that emphasise community over selfishness”, and that home exchange “may help to make our societies work better towards a sustainable future”.

“Swapping houses is one of the most significant boundaries of modern tourism, because it incorporates some of the dynamics that characterise the tourist of the new millennium: the increasingly felt desire to travel several times a year, even with limited budgets, the need to organise tailor-made trips as personalised as possible and the desire to make the trip an authentic experience … not only to know a new country with all its attractions, but also to immerse yourself in a new culture,” they said.

The tourist of the new millennium also has a home to swap in the first place.

Additionally, it sounds a like more “ethical tourism” where the tourist seeks to not contribute to the inauthenticity of a place (tourist traps/hotels/resorts, menial jobs, etc.) and would rather move in and out unobtrusively. The 21st century tourist wants to soak up an authentic location and leave it the same or better than when they came. This could have quite an impact on places with lots of tourists, possibly aiding a resistance to a globalized/Westernized set of tourist experiences.

It’s too bad we don’t have a reaction from the tourism industry in this article. Are hotel chains worried or is this something that be marketed and commoditized?

The BBC on why many think the suburbs are boring

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A sociologist suggests British suburbs are not quite as boring as some might think:

Unlike the usual presumption of suburbs as quiet, featureless places “where nothing ever happens”, recent years have seen dramatic happenings in suburbs, not least the riots of 2011 in places like Ealing and Croydon in London.

In many ways the 21st Century suburb faces some thoroughly modern problems. There is crumbling infrastructure, with hollowed out High Streets. There is pressure on public services prompted by population increases, as witnessed in the annual scramble for school places…

But far from being cultural deserts, suburbs have been a fertile breeding ground for artistic movements. It is from the nation’s Acacia Avenues that almost all post-war pop has emerged, even if its artists would rather make out that they hailed from high-rise hell and so be more “edgy”…

Suburbia has shifted to become a place of dynamism housing ethnically mixed populations, as illustrated by the 2011 Census figures, in contrast to the assumptions of uniformity.

This description could also fit some of the changes in American suburbs in recent decades. Inner-ring suburbs, adjacent to big cities, face big city problems. A number of suburbs are looking for revenue due to cuts in federal and state aid. Suburbs are often marked by single-family homes. More suburbs are seeking out cultural and entertainment opportunities, at least to provide increased tax revenues. Increasing numbers of non-whites and poorer residents now live in suburbs. In fact, the final paragraph of the op-ed seems to suggest American and British suburbs are not so different:

We should smash the stereotypes of nondescript suburbia and rather than being embarrassed by them, celebrate those places on the edges of our cities that give our nation its essential character.

The essential character of Britain is in its suburbs?

With these changes afoot, it then is interesting to consider why suburbs consider to have this image as boring. As the op-ed says, some of this is due to media portrayals of banal suburban life, whether through television sitcoms or songs by musicians railing against their suburban upbringings. It is also due to academics and other socially influential people arguing against suburbs. When I think about it, I don’t know if I would say these portrayals suggest suburbs are boring; these critiques are often more negative. Boring implies there isn’t much going on but the criticisms of suburbs range from invoking individualism, racism, materialism, classism, and other social ills.

Wired’s five tips for “p-hacking” your way to a positive study result

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As part of its “Cheat Code to Life,” Wired includes four tips for researchers to obtain positive results in their studies:

Many a budding scientist has found themself one awesome result from tenure and unable to achieve that all-important statistical significance. Don’t let such setbacks deter you from a life of discovery. In a recent paper, Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn describe “p-hacking”—common tricks that researchers use to fish for positive results. Just promise us you’ll be more responsible when you’re a full professor. —MATTHEW HUTSON

Create Options. Let’s say you want to prove that listening to dubstep boosts IQ (aka the Skrillex effect). The key is to avoid predefining what exactly the study measures—then bury the failed attempts. So use two different IQ tests; if only one shows a pattern, toss the other.

Expand the Pool. Test 20 dubstep subjects and 20 control subjects. If the findings reach significance, publish. If not, run 10 more subjects in each group and give the stats another whirl. Those extra data points might randomly support the hypothesis.

Get Inessential. Measure an extraneous variable like gender. If there’s no pattern in the group at large, look for one in just men or women.

Run Three Groups. Have some people listen for zero hours, some for one, and some for 10. Now test for differences between groups A and B, B and C, and A and C. If all compar­isons show significance, great. If only one does, then forget about the existence of the p-value poopers.

Wait for the NSF Grant. Use all four of these fudges and, even if your theory is flat wrong, you’re more likely than not to confirm it—with the necessary 95 percent confidence.

This might be summed up as “things that are done but would never be explicitly taught in a research methods course.” Several quick thoughts:

1. This is a reminder of how important 95% significant is in the world of science. My students often ask why the cut-point is 95% – why do we accept 5% error and not 10% (which people sometimes “get away with” in some studies) or 1% (wouldn’t we be more sure of our results?).

2. Even if significance is important and scientists hack their way to more positive results, they can still have a humility about their findings. Reaching 95% significance still means there is a 5% chance of error. Problems arise when findings are countered or disproven but we should expect this to happen occasionally. Additionally, results can be statistically significant but have little substantive significance. All together, having a significant finding is not the end of the process for the scientist: it still needs to be interpreted and then tested again.

3. This is also tied to the pressure of needing to find positive results. In other words, publishing an academic study is more likely if you disprove the null hypothesis. At the same time, not disproving the hypothesis is still useful knowledge and such studies should also be published. Think of the example of Edison’s quest to find the proper material for a lightbulb filament. The story is often told in such a way to suggest that he went through a lot of work to finally find the right answer. But, this is often how science works: you go through a lot of ideas and data before the right answer emerges.

The cold infrastructure behind America’s food supply

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Alexis Madrigal provides an overview of the cold storage that makes modern America’s food supply possible:

At least 70 percent of the food we eat each year passes through or is entirely dependent on the cold chain for its journey from farm to fork, including foods that, on the surface, seem unlikely candidates for refrigeration,” Twilley writes in introducing her show…

These systems, by design and necessity, exist away from the cities, and even when they’re within cities, away from where the people are. You don’t see them unless you work there, and if you work there, you generally don’t get to tell the stories of the landscape in the popular press.

To venture into infrastructural space is not just to leave the Beltway or the New York media world behind, but to come to know entirely different networks. The nodes on the map are different: Oakland and Richmond, not San Francisco; Long Beach and Hueneme, not LA; Newark and Wilmington, not New York.

In these geographies, the physical reasons people have long chosen certain locations retain their purchase: proximity to resources and markets, water access, transportation access, grid access. Take Allentown, Pennsylvania. It features a logistics hub “where U.S. Foods, Americold, Millard Refrigerated Services, Kraft, Ocean Spray, and others all maintain facilities,” thanks to its “location at the intersection of I-78, I-476, and several East Coast railway lines. It is also close to major urban markets in the north-east corridor–but not so close that the land is expensive.”…

My point here is that this is another America. And it’s neither the pastoral, wholesome family farm of Iowa political campaigns and Wendell Berry poems nor the dense Creative Class preserves where the nation’s bloggers and TV producers live. Almost no one tells the stories of these places.

It sounds like our current food supply is very dependent on several factors that get little attention. A distribution network that efficiently gets food from source to shelves. A transportation system, primarily trucks and railroad, that links this all together. An army of workers in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs that make this all possible. A geographic system/map that doesn’t line up with the global cities of the United States.

Another question to ask is whether it matters much if Americans know this tale of where their food travels. Some have powerfully argued yes in recent years, suggesting knowing this information and being able to make choices based on it is linked to sustainability and enjoyment. On the other hand, many Americans seem happily ignorant of the infrastructure that makes much of their food possible and only care if something goes wrong.

Using suburban homes for film shoots

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The Daily Herald describes what happens when suburban homes are chosen for film shoots:

Directors of Hollywood movies, TV shows, commercials and national print ads regularly use suburban homes as locations for filming and photo shoots. Just a few weeks ago, scenes from the movie “Precious Mettle,” starring Paul Sorvino and Fiona Dourif, were shot at homes in Naperville and Aurora…They will add the photos to their online database and show them to prospective directors. Because they have thousands of homes in their database, the odds of being chosen are slim. But you never know what a director is looking for, and there’s growing demand for suburban-styled homes, said longtime location scout Oryna Schiffman, based in Elmhurst.

“Since the recession started, I’ve been getting less and less requests for your typical North Shore mansions. They say, ‘I want real people who live in real houses,'” said Schiffman, who accepts photos at oryna@me.com. “You never know what they’re going to ask for next.”…

However, there is a downside to offering up your home. Filming and photo shoots can disrupt your routine, your sleep, and possibly your neighborhood. Movie crews, especially, tend to completely take over an area with trailers and equipment. Homeowners usually get short notice about the shoots and need to hastily sign off on the legal paperwork.

While most film crews are respectful of people’s property (and often contractually obligated to return it to its original condition), paint sometimes gets chipped and things get broken or banged up. That’s why it’s important to get things in writing before the filming begins.

Of course, the article starts with a story of a family who was paid $12,000 for giving up their home for six days for a print advertisement shoot. There may be quite a few suburbanites who would relish such an opportunity.

The quote that directors are looking for “real homes” is interesting. The suggestion here is that with tighter economic times, people want to see more normal homes while during more economic prosperous times people like seeing bigger homes. When they arrive at a home, how much do they take the home as is or they change it up to suit their filming needs? Plus, how often is the tone of the commercial, TV show, film, or advertisement that the suburban home needs improving or there is something to critique? On one hand, there are a lot of critics of suburban tract homes but they are apparently useful for marketing and some artistic purposes.

Keeping chickens at McMansions

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Here is an explanation of recent efforts to allow raising chickens in Stonington, Connecticut, an area known for things like McMansions:

Having chickens in the back yard was fairly common when I was growing up in the ‘50s in Westport, Conn.

We kept a flock and so did our neighbors, who eventually had nine children. At the time, chicken feed came in cloth sacks with calico print patterns and we girls often wore summery skirts my mother made us all from the repurposed material.

Westport has changed a lot. Most people equate it now with movie stars, Martha Stewart and McMansions. What hasn’t altered is its acceptance of backyard chickens…

In Stonington, it takes three acres – to have two chickens. Legally.

Certainly, there are many chickens living under the radar here. But why not make them legal? And why not let more people “share the joys of chicken keeping?”…

Like Westporters – and in a growing number of communities around the country — those who wished could gather the freshest possible eggs from a backyard coop, use the poop for fertilizer, reduce the number of ticks and other insects in their yards, feed their flocks kitchen scraps and add another piece of self-sufficiency to their lives.

This discussion about raising chickens has occurred in numerous American communities in recent years, particularly with more people interested in knowing where their food came from as well as cutting costs in light of the recession. But, can chickens and McMansions go together?

1. McMansions are generally associated with wealth and higher property values. Chickens might eat into the image.

2. McMansions are sometimes associated with big houses on smaller lots. This doesn’t necessarily leave much room for keeping animals or having large gardens or doing much at all with the yard.

3. Allowing chickens might help improve the image of McMansions with critics. One big criticism of the homes is that they are not environmentally friendly. Imagine big homes making space for free range chickens, having green roofs, being powered by solar panels or geothermal sources, or being very energy efficient (passive homes or net zero energy homes). Perhaps chickens (and other livestock?) could help McMansions be more green.

In the end, fighting over allowing homeowners to keep chickens mirrors the debate over McMansions themselves: how much latitude should individual homeowners have with their own property?

Social inertia in time use between the 1960s and today

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A sociologist who has examined recent time use surveys suggests not much has changed since the 1960s:

John Robinson, a sociology professor from the University of Maryland whose research has focused heavily on Americans’ time use, said the most striking aspect of the latest American Time Use Survey is how closely it resembles similar information from before the 2008 recession — and from as early as the 1960s when time-use surveys first came into being.

The annual Bureau of Labor Statistics publication documents how Americans spend their time. In 2012, employed people worked for about 7.7 hours each day, spent two hours on household chores and took between five and six hours on leisure activities, with close to three of those hours spent plopped in front of the television…

Although today’s Americans spend their time similarly to their counterparts in the decade of discontent, Mr. Robinson noted some important changes in the by-the-minute breakdown. Men and women spend much more equal amounts of time at work, on housework and on leisure activities than they did in the 1960s.

Time spent watching TV has inched upward with every passing year, and although Mr. Robinson expected Internet use to slowly eat into TV time, the Web has yet to take up a large chunk of Americans’ time. The latest survey found men and women both spend less than 30 minutes of leisure time per workday on the computer.

Regardless, both Internet and TV use fall into the same category of activity: sedentary behavior.

This sounds like a good example of persistent social patterns. Without any official guidelines or norms about how people should spend their time, people are living fairly similarly to how they did in the 1960s. If daily life hasn’t changed much, perhaps it is more important to ask people’s perceptions about their time use. Do they feel better today about how they spend their days compared to fifty years ago? These perceptions are shaped by a number of factors, including generational changes where the younger adults of the 1960s are now the older adults of today.

The easier target for analysis: did people in the past expect that the people of the future would spend their time watching TV? I doubt it. At the same time, it suggests television has some staying power as a form of entertainment and information.

Houston a relatively unknown city despite being the 4th biggest in the US

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An interesting profile of Houston as the “next great American city” includes this bit about how the city is viewed:

If nothing else, the Kinder Institute’s reports underscore how little the country really knows about Houston. Is it, as most New Yorkers and Californians assume, a cultural wasteland? “The only time this city hits the news is when we get a hurricane!” complains James Harithas, director of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. “People have no idea.” Its image in the outside world is stuck in the 1970s, of a Darwinian frontier city where business interests rule, taxation and regulation are minimal, public services are thin and the automobile is worshiped. “This was boomtown America,” says Klineberg of the giddy oil years. “While the rest of the country was in recession, we were seen as wealthy, arrogant rednecks, with bumper stickers that read, ‘Drive 70 and freeze a Yankee.’” Today, he adds, “Houston has become integrated into the U.S. and global economies, but we still like to think we’re an independent country. We contribute to the image!”

Several thoughts about Houston’s profile:

1. Part of the issue may be that Houston is trying to join the group of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that has been set for decades. Houston is the newcomer and perhaps besides oil, doesn’t yet have the broad appeal these other three have. Plus, these top three are world-class cities, top ten global cities, and that comparison can be harsh.

2. It sounds like Houston could benefit from a strengthened booster campaign. Cities often have to sell themselves and their assets. This requires business, civic, and political leaders (the growth machine) to band together behind some common appeals. What might draw people to Houston? What would attract businesses and tourists?

3. I wonder if there is some conflict between being part of Texas and being from Houston. From the outside, perhaps particularly from the coasts, it is easier to lump all of Texas together, even though it has a variety of communities (some big differences between Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio). Additionally, Texans tend to like to play up the uniqueness of their state. Compare this to cities like Chicago where there is a very sharp divide between the metropolitan region and “downstate.” Perhaps Houston needs more of a city-state mentality to separate it from Texas.

Just how much should McMansions cost?

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Curbed San Francisco asks whether a McMansion in the city should sell for $2.16 million. The pictures are interesting and here are a few more details on the home:

The big abode was built in 2011 and features things like “5 luxurious baths” (one of which is photographed with an awkward looking dog in it) and too much recessed lighting. In fact, there’s too much of everything. Too much moulding, too much granite, too large rooms. The 5-bed, 5-bath home clocks in at 4,487 square feet and is asking $2,160,000, which is way more than half of the neighborhood average list price of $869,500.

The main argument here, both in the post and in the comments, appears to be that the home is priced too high compared to the neighborhood in which it is located. Prices for real estate, of course, are relative. But, this could lead to a larger question: how much do McMansions cost? It is assumed that McMansions are big so they will cost a lot. But, just as I have argued that at some point the square footage of a home makes it a mansion rather than a McMansion (perhaps around 7-8,000 square feet?), is there a price point where the mass produced McMansion becomes something only for the wealthy? In addition to being big, another trait of McMansion is that they are more mass produced in terms of architecture and design. Yet, how many Bay Area residents could afford a $2.16 million home? I’m not sure exactly where this price point for a McMansion versus a mansion is, particularly in expensive markets like San Francisco, but there is a line somewhere.

NIMBY reactions in Chicago suburbs to possible marijuana dispensaries

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With a medical marijuana bill in the works in Illinois, some Chicago suburbs are trying to prepare for marijuana dispensaries:

In anticipation of the law, the Lake County Municipal League plans a seminar July 18 addressing how to handle the issue. Several suburbs, including Barrington, Buffalo Grove, Carpentersville, Deerfield, Highland Park and Libertyville, have taken preliminary steps to determine where marijuana facilities could locate…

Fox Lake took steps to limit marijuana facilities to its manufacturing areas, away from the downtown and residential areas.

“No one on the board is opposed to medical marijuana,” Mayor Donny Schmit said. “Everybody knows someone who’s had cancer or suffered eye disease. We just wanted an area where (suspicious) traffic would be noticed.”…

The proposed Illinois law would limit access to medical marijuana to patients 18 and older. Marijuana facilities would have to be at least 1,000 feet from schools, and smoking marijuana would be forbidden in public places and motor vehicles…

“Do you want your home next to a marijuana dispensary?” he said. “I wouldn’t. At least our communities would be protected to the fullest extent we can.”

It will be fascinating to see how more suburbs respond to this. Even if the facilities are legal, many residents, particularly in places with higher property values, will not want to live near such facilities and communities will not to have them prominently featured in their business and civic areas. At the same time, this is a different issue than many NIMBY concerns like landfills or prisons or manufacturing facilities – the medical marijuana law is intended to help sick people. Does having a medical marijuana dispensary nearby lower property values? Is it an eyesore on the level with tattoo parlors?

Might the tide turn if there was some local sales tax money that could be collected from each facility?