Monthly Archives: August 2013

Durkheim, deviance, and “Why Baseball Still Needs Steroids”

Posted on by

A sociology PhD student argues that punishing the occasional steroid use in baseball might be more effective for fighting steroids than getting rid of PED use all together:

Societies need deviance to reinforce what behaviors are acceptable. Deviance affirms what behavior is right and wrong, reinforces social order, and deters future deviant behavior. I believe the steroid era combined with Major League Baseball’s weak attempts at curbing behavior blurred the lines of acceptable and prohibited conduct…

The public frowns upon steroids in professional sports, but we need to be constantly reminded that they are bad. Deviant behavior such as doping serves as a reminder of society’s norms regarding sport and fairness, more broadly. So every time the league suspends a player for drug use, it jogs our memory and prompts us to denunciate a rule-breaker.

I am not endorsing athletes to use PEDs. What I am advocating for is keeping the specter of steroids in the background. If we don’t, we may forget about a period in baseball history where we must second-guess whether a player’s impressive statistics were the result of hard work or pure athleticism. It took 20 years, government intervention, and public outcries to curb steroids in baseball, and I fear that not having a constant reminder will dismantle the work that has been done.

While I am happy to see that Major League Baseball is committed to cleaning up the sport, I hope they do a good but an imperfect job. It is the Ryan Braun’s and A-Rod’s of the world that we need to keep the integrity of the sport as we know it.

This sounds like a Durkheimian argument. Rather than seeing deviance and lawbreaking as fully negative, Durkheim argued punishing deviant acts helps remind society of the lines between deviant and non-deviant activity. To translate this into other terms Durkheim used, this helps remind people of the difference between the sacred and profane.

There may be some merit to this argument. Baseball went over a decade with widespread steroid use happening beneath the surface. I even heard someone argue recently (somewhat facetiously) that players who weren’t using steroids were the fools because their counterparts were reaping all the benefits. And there is a longer history of amphetamine use stretching back decades. So now you have a perfect opportunity to enforce the rules with some great players: a recent MVP, Ryan Braun, and one of the best players of all-time, Alex Rodriguez. Add these names to known PED users like record-setters Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire as well as MVP Ken Caminiti. While it is sad to see great players implicated, imagine that it was only minor league players who were caught. Imagine baseball could sweep all of this under the rug and claim that the problem didn’t extend to the major leagues or it was only limited to players with few skills. Wouldn’t that be a worse situation overall?

Discussing the dangers of retention ponds in Naperville

Posted on by

Retention ponds are plentiful in suburban developments as a means to handle excess water. But, officials in Naperville may soon look at regulations for retention ponds after a 6 year old recently drowned:

The pond, near the Glenmuir Luxury Rental Homes complex where Amer lived, reaches about 10 feet at its deepest point and is one of more than 200 bodies of water in Naperville — many of them man-made ponds created in recent decades to ease flooding when subdivisions were built, Naperville Fire Chief Mark Puknaitis said.

“Most of the ponds don’t have fencing or barriers,” Puknaitis said. “It’s highly impractical to do that with every pond. Even if you did, there’s nothing stopping somebody from scaling it.”

Several city council members agree that requiring fencing isn’t the best way to prevent future tragedies.

While fencing may seem an obvious way to prevent children from getting too close to retention ponds or falling in, Novack said there is a stormwater management reason not to install them: they block the flow of water during floods and slow the drainage process.

When single-family homes are constructed in the sprawling American manner, retention ponds are a necessity. Developing land and building homes often involves flattening land and disrupting the natural drainage. This is particularly an issue in swampier or low-lying areas where water already collected. They are so common that they are a ubiquitous “natural” presence that are often used as play areas or places to walk dogs. But while these ponds may seem natural, they are a carefully constructed part of the suburban infrastructure.

However, there are means by which to make retention ponds safer:

She said the recent trend toward letting natural vegetation grow along the shores of ponds helps to keep people — and Canada geese — away from the water and could contribute to increased safety.

So could using streams landscaped with native plants instead of large ponds to store water, Brodhead and Novack said.

In other words, it might take a little extra planning or effort but there are ways to “naturalize” the drainage. Communities could require developers to utilize these methods around retention ponds. And even if accidents in ponds are rare, it is hard to argue against safety in suburban settings.

“Real Housewives” character lives in McMansion only by fraud

Posted on by

A “Real Housewives of New Jersey” character lived in a McMansion and its accompanying lifestyle – but it was all a fraud:

On TV they live large — in a 10,000-square-foot McMansion full of garish baubles and expensive toys in an ode to the bad taste and excessive spending that has made “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” a Bravo hit.

It’s the lifestyle Joe and Teresa Giudice — who grew up together as working-class Italian-American kids — always hungered for but could never truly afford, sources said, even when they convinced themselves and everyone around them they could.

The Giudices’ shaky facade of massive personal wealth — increasingly fragile since a 2009 Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing — finally imploded in a spectacular way last week when they were hit with a 39-count criminal fraud indictment.

The federal charges range from allegations that the two conspired to forge W-2 forms, tax returns, pay stubs and other documents to trick banks into lending them money, to accusations of perjury and false statements in their bankruptcy proceedings.

This won’t do the reputation of McMansions any good. See the picture of the Giudice’s home about halfway through the news story: it looks like everything McMansion critics would hate including a large wrought-iron fence and gate, an elaborate front door, a roof that looks like a castle, and plenty of rooms. Yet, critics would like the symbolism: the home may have been impressive on the outside or looked good on TV but ultimately, it literally all a fraud.

So if and when they lose the home, who is going to buy it?

Misleading graph of Dyson vacuum suction power?

Posted on by

The latest edition of Time includes a back cover ad from Dyson with a graph of their vacuum’s suction:

DysonVacuumSuctionGraph

From the graph and the numbers below, it is pretty clear that Dyson has more suction power than the two other pictured vacuums: 160 air watts compared to 68 and 43 air watts. Fair enough, particularly for those who need the most air watts. But, I also wonder if this graph doesn’t represent a common problem with infographics: it is confusing a linear relationship, 160 air watts is more than twice as much as the competing vacuums, with volume. Not only does the Dyson have the most suction power, it is clearly the biggest vacuum in this graph. While I don’t think Dyson wants to sell their vacuum as the largest (in fact, they often pitch its manueverability), it isn’t necessarily bad to show that your product visually dominates the competition.

DuPage County looks to consolidate more than 400 taxing bodies

Posted on by

Illinois is known for its plethora of taxing bodies but a new state law gives DuPage County the power to consolidate some of these bodies:

Under the new law, the county will be able to dissolve non-elected government agencies deemed outdated or inefficient following a full analysis and public review process…

“Frequently we find there’s another unit of government that could do the same thing,” said DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin, who had pushed for the legislation. “Why don’t we just figure out who is going to be the odd man out?”

The narrowly written law currently applies only to DuPage County, which has more than 400 taxing bodies. State officials say they hope DuPage will serve as a model for other counties…

Cronin said his office will analyze each entity individually to determine whether there is the potential to save money and come up with a plan for how those services would still be provided. Residents would be able to weigh in during public hearings and could put together a referendum to fight a proposed dissolution.

The article mentions a few taxing bodies that are ripe for elimination but it will get more interesting when the County Board comes across ones that people want to defend and maintain. These local taxing bodies are all about local control and being able to spend tax dollars on one’s own interests or neighborhood. Pitting this suburban value, perhaps the guiding value for many suburbanites, versus wanting to have more efficient local government presents an interesting conflict.

Plus, how many taxing bodies will be eliminated under this new law? Is this law intended to get rid of just a few taxing bodies or does it involve a significant reduction from say over 400 to 300?

Don’t be worried about dating a leftist sociologist

Posted on by

A recent wedding story in the New York Times included this bit about getting to know a leftist sociologist:

Ms. Levine, 61, is keeping her name. She is a sociology professor at Colgate University who has written six books, including “Class, Networks and Identity: Replanting Jewish Lives From Nazi Germany to Rural New York.” She graduated from Michigan State and received a master’s in sociology from McGill. She also holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the State University at Binghamton. She is a daughter of Rae Levy Levine of Peabody, Mass., and the late Frank Levine…

At the time, he did not care to know her name. But in February 2011, after his relationship ended, he changed his opinion. Once he found out she was Ms. Levine, he looked her up on the Internet.

“I saw titles,” he said. “I saw she was a leftist sociologist. So what?”…

He soon called with an invitation for dinner at his house, where they became so caught up in conversation that “the tuna steaks were way overcooked on the grill,” he said. While there, she scanned his bookshelf, and drew comfort from the fact he had books by Barbara Ehrenreich and so many other left-leaning authors she uses in her classroom. “It turned out we were much more compatible than I thought,” she said.

If sociologists can teach courses on love, they can also get married, sociological commitments notwithstanding.

Two minutes to sum up Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, and Herman Miller

Posted on by

Refresh your architectural knowledge with these short videos on the influential works of Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, and Herman Miller.

I’ve asked this before: where in a K-college curriculum does a typical American student learn about modern architecture and design? I remember learning about Greek and Roman architecture in Western Civilization in high school. But, I don’t remember ever formally learning about more modern developments. I suppose some of this could be taught in art classes at older ages or in history courses. For example, it is hard to ignore the development of the skyscraper in American history in the late 1800s and early 1900s but this could easily be taught more from an angle about industry and progress rather than aesthetics and urban planning.

Because of this question, my urban sociology course this past spring semester spent several weeks discussing architecture and urban planning. All together, we read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, talked about New Urbanism, took a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour titled “Modern Skyscrapers (1950s-present),” and watched several episodes about sustainable design and development in the PBS e2 series. This led to some good discussions about the social life and role of buildings and urban design.

h/t Curbed National

More Chicago area houses purchased with cash

Posted on by

In perhaps another sign of the bifurcated housing market, more and more buyers are purchasing Chicago area homes with cash:

Some people actually pay cash to buy a house. In fact, it happens more than you’d probably expect—in the first half of 2013, cash paid for 34 percent of all homes bought in the Chicago area, according to data that RealtyTrac released exclusively to Chicago. For the month of June, cash bought 30 percent of local homes, which was even with the national average in data the company released last week.

Many of those cash buyers were investors, either the big corporate type or the smaller individual type. But real estate agents and others say the number of end-users buying homes for their own use and paying cash has risen steeply this year. (I could not find data that breaks down which cash buyers are end users and which are investors.)

And the reasons this is happening more?

-They want to be the sharpest competitor in a multiple-bid situation. A cash offer is “the cleanest offer,” Whelan says. It assures the seller that the deal won’t fall through for lack of financing, and it typically offers a faster closing because it eliminates the wait for the mortgage process.

-They know that sellers sometimes will accept a lower-priced cash offer over a higher-priced offer that will be financed, to avoid the hassle.

-They may believe that the value of the home they want is above what an appraiser would calculate based on comps from the recent past. Paying cash instead of getting a mortgage leaps over a mortgage lender’s requirement of an appraisal, Kawabata points out.

-Although it’s been easing recently, jumbo loans—mortgages for more than $417,000 in the Chicago area—were difficult to get for the past few years so buyers of higher-priced homes had been lining up cash for the home purchases they wanted to make this year.

In other words, if you have the cash on hand, it can give you a leg up on big real estate purchases. But, this option isn’t available to most people. So, it seems like this helps those with wealth to continue to rack up the wealth through larger and/or more valuable real estate portfolios.

A simple definition of McMansions: big and “decorated to the hilt”

Posted on by

Another look at the supposed McMansion comeback has a pretty simple definition of McMansions:

The go-go days of the late 90s and early 2000’s gave us the McMansion, those 5,000-square-foot homes decorated to the hilt.

This keeps McMansions at the simplest level. To start, they are big homes. With the average new home at 2,500 square feet, 5,000 square feet is double the size. Second, I think “decorated to the hilt” refers not to the interior decor but rather to the garish or impressive features of the home such as large entryways, roofs with many gables, and a whole range of stone/stucco/wrought iron/glitzy features on the front.

Observed in Manhattan: online shopping leads to more traffic

Posted on by

A graduate student in Manhattan argues that more online shopping leads to more traffic issues on the dense island:

Consider it this way: people around the world seem to have a travel time budget of a little over an hour each day. Before the rise of e-commerce, part of that time would have been spent in the service of purchasing goods. But if that budget remains fixed, then people today may simply buy something online, then hop in a car and go visit a friend across town. In that scenario, personal travel stays constant while commercial travel increases — a net gain of people and goods on the road…

Woodard’s case studies of the Gehry and three other residential apartments in Manhattan found the answer to those questions may very well be yes. Surveying the buildings for several hours at a time in the middle of the day, Woodard found that, on average, delivery trucks stayed parked for 21 minutes at a time, and two-thirds of them were double-parked. Extrapolating the data over a full day, in the case of the Gehry, that means delivery trucks alone occupy road space that’s not a true parking space for seven full hours…

Though Woodard’s case studies were never supposed to paint an exhaustive portrait of the urban e-commerce problem, they do underscore how little is known about it. One study from way back in 2004 estimated that delivery trucks cause nearly a million hours of vehicle delay each year, but the stunning grown in online shopping since then (and the fact that companies like Amazon are reluctant to release their data) makes any precise estimate difficult. Many experts consider this process of moving freight that final mile to be one of the biggest forgotten problems facing modern cities.

At the core of the problem is street parking. In a dense urban area like Manhattan, where few buildings have the luxury of freight docks or loading zones, delivery trucks have little choice but to park at the curb. That leaves passenger vehicles and delivery trucks to duke it out for precious street-parking space, which in turn leads to double-parking, which in turn leads to general congestion.

Interesting question and findings. How much do they apply beyond Manhattan, a dense place?

One issue not addressed here: how much do commerce companies bear responsibility for this congestion? Shopping online is often viewed as cheaper and more convenient but this analysis suggests there are some hidden costs that someone has to pay for. Roads are public goods paid for with tax dollars. If they are causing more congestion, could they bear some of this cost?