Monthly Archives: January 2014

Questioning the open kitchen

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Lots of newer homes have kitchens open to great rooms or other gathering spaces. However, there are a few people questioning the trend:

J. Bryan Lowder, an assistant editor at Slate, recently slammed the open concept in a widely read article called “Close Your Open-Concept Kitchen.” He called the trend a “baneful scourge” that has spread through American homes like “black mold through a flooded basement.”

Lowder’s point, and one echoed through the anti-open-kitchen movement, is that we have walls and doors for a reason. While open-kitchen lovers champion the ease of multitasking cooking and entertainment and appreciate how the cook can keep an eye on the kids (or an eye on a favorite TV show), the haters reply that open kitchens do neither effectively. Instead, the detractors say, open kitchens leave guests with an eyeful of kitchen mess, distract cooks, and leave Mom and Dad with no place to hide from their noisy brood.

And apparently defenders of the open kitchen are quite vocal:

Roxanne, who blogs at Just Me With … under her first name only (and chose not to reveal her last name in this article for fear of backlash from open-kitchen devotees), ranted against the concept on her blog. For Roxanne, the open kitchen destroys coveted privacy.

Who knew this topic was so controversial. And how did we move from older homes with kitchens at the back of the house to the open kitchen of today?

Design psychologist Toby Israel, author of “Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places,” said open kitchens have gained such momentum because the kitchen is often the heart of family existence and a central gathering point.

All interesting. But, another issue with this article: the headline suggests there is a backlash against this design but presents limited evidence of this. Sure, it quotes a few people who don’t like the open kitchen. And there is a citation of an odd statistic that just over 75% of home remodelers are knocking down walls. All of this indicates more of a discussion about open kitchens, rather than a big trend.

This is a common tactic today from journalists and others online: suggest there may be a trend, present limited evidence, and then leave it to readers to sort out at the end whether a big trend really exists. There are several ways around this. First, present more data. A few articles that start heated online discussions do not tell us much. In this case, tell us what builders are actually doing or what homes people are buying. Second, wait it out a bit. Having more time tends to reveal whether there is really a trend or just a minor blip. While this doesn’t help meet regular deadlines, it does mean that we can be more certain that there is a discernible pattern.

Cross-section of Hong Kong’s 50,000 residents in 290,000 square feet

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Here is a detailed cross-section of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City which had some unbelievable population densities:

Though it was demolished over two decades ago, Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City is still emblematic of the kind of intense overcrowding usually seen in dystopian science fiction, so much so that to this day it inspires post-mortem maps, renderings in Lego, even Japanese arcades. At the height of its growth, the largely unsupervised encampment that the South China Morning Post once called “a lawless vacuum” where brothels and gambling hubs “operated with impunity” once crammed some 50,000 residents—all of them essentially squatters—into an area of about 290,000 square feet. Just before the complex was razed, a Japanese team created an amazingly detailed cross-section, recently turned up by Architizer and pictured in full below…

The complex comprised some 500 buildings, affording an average of about 40 square feet per person. In the center bloc pictured above, a resident tears down an interior wall with a pickaxe, while some kind of industrial kitchen operates in a room below…

Trash collects in-between buildings and electrical wiring snakes down the sides. In an alleyway, a man uses an umbrella to shield himself from a dripping water pipe…

The government managed to evict the residents of the Walled City in 1992, and it was leveled in 1993. The spot where it used to stand, not too far from Zaha Hadid’s Innovation Tower, has been turned into a park. Above, construction begins on the rooftop, in the middle of a panoply of T.V. antennae.

A reminder of some of the conditions people in expanding big cities face around the world due to a lack of resources and space. And still these cities continue to grow as there is a lack of opportunities elsewhere…

Cell phones are not an impediment to public social interaction

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Recent research from a sociologist analyzing video footage of public spaces shows cell phones don’t limit public interaction:

Between 2008 and 2010, his team accrued enough footage to begin a comparison with the P.P.S. films — together the two collections totaled more than 38 hours. “Films were sampled at 15-second intervals for a total of 9,173 observation periods,” he writes in his article, which reads like a study in scholarly masochism. Hampton and a team of 11 graduate and undergraduate students from Penn spent a total of 2,000 hours looking at the films, coding the individuals they observed for four characteristics: sex, group size, “loitering” and phone use…

First off, mobile-phone use, which Hampton defined to include texting and using apps, was much lower than he expected. On the steps of the Met, only 3 percent of adults captured in all the samples were on their phones. It was highest at the northwest corner of Bryant Park, where the figure was 10 percent. More important, according to Hampton, was the fact that mobile-phone users tended to be alone, not in groups. People on the phone were not ignoring lunch partners or interrupting strolls with their lovers; rather, phone use seemed to be a way to pass the time while waiting to meet up with someone, or unwinding during a solo lunch break. Of course, there’s still the psychic toll, which we all know, of feeling tethered to your phone — even while relaxing at the park. But that’s a personal cost. From what Hampton could tell, the phones weren’t nearly as hard on our relationships as many suspect…

According to Hampton, our tendency to interact with others in public has, if anything, improved since the ‘70s. The P.P.S. films showed that in 1979 about 32 percent of those visited the steps of the Met were alone; in 2010, only 24 percent were alone in the same spot. When I mentioned these results to Sherry Turkle, she said that Hampton could be right about these specific public spaces, but that technology may still have corrosive effects in the home: what it does to families at the dinner table, or in the den. Rich Ling, a mobile-phone researcher in Denmark, also noted the limitations of Hampton’s sample. “He was capturing the middle of the business day,” said Ling, who generally admires Hampton’s work. For businesspeople, “there might be a quick check, do I have an email or a text message, then get on with life.” Fourteen-year-olds might be an entirely different story…

In fact, this was Hampton’s most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It’s not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston’s Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. “The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles,” Hampton writes. Men seem to be “taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine.”

Perhaps there is such a reaction to people using phones in public because (1) they are a new technology and people still aren’t used to them – smartphones are only less than a decade old and/or (2) phones are less noticeable or personally intrusive in wide open settings like the steps of the Met but very noticeable in more confined settings where conversations can be heard.

I think there is also a lot sociologists could build on here with Hampton’s methodology. Video may seem archaic when you can utilize big data but it can still provide unique insights into social behavior. While the coding of the video was rather simple (they looked at four categories: “sex, group size, “loitering” and phone use”), it took a lot of time to go through the video and compare it to Whyte’s earlier film. This comparative element is also quite useful: we can then compare patterns over time. All together, think how much video footage is collected in public these days and how it might lend itself to research…

Driverless cars might lead to the safest roads ever seen and highways that actually work

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Google’s Sebastian Thrun discusses the safety advantages of driverless cars as well as effective highways in this video. Two quick thoughts:

1. Autonomous vehicles can help stop the wave or accordion pattern of driving where someone slowing down at the front of a line of cars backs everyone up. Thrun talks about a a much more closely coordinated zipper kind of merging where cars going basically bumper to bumper can accept new vehicles with little change.

2. Even with a dip in recent years, more than 30,000 Americans die each year in vehicles. Strun says most of this is due to driver error, which can basically be eliminated when humans no longer control the car.

All of this sounds good…

Argument: you can’t hide the size of McMansions, regardless of the design

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A local debate over McMansions draws this claim about whether the size of the homes can be overlooked:

However, I do feel that we need to bring the elephant in the room out into the open so everyone can appreciate it properly. If you strip away all of the polite planning jargon about massing, square footage, curb cuts, along with most everything else gets said in those circles, and then boil it all down to its core essence, the view becomes much clearer. What we are talking about here are some very large and quite ostentatiously designed houses.

I call it Adele Chang’s Dilemma. How do you build McMansions that don’t look like McMansions? You can’t. No matter what the design style, or where you place the garage, or how you reconfigure the roof, or bedeck the place with curlicues and cornices, or shuffle the massing, or even bring in a small gaggle of winged gargoyles and lawn gnomes, the result is still going to be one heck of a big barn.

In other words, some will argue that McMansions are just too big, even if are designed well or maybe even fit local architectural traditions. Underneath those design elements will always be too many square feet. And why is this square footage so important?

We are talking about a clash between two differing cultures here. On the one hand you have the traditional version of Sierra Madre. A place where people are comfortable with what they have today and don’t view house size as a measure of their personal or spiritual worth.

The culture Adele Chang and her CETT bosses cater to, on the other hand, is a nouveau riche arriviste’ sort crowd who somehow believe that building a vanity castle on the side of an open hillside will be recognized by all of those living below as a sign of an innate personal superiority. It is a form of unchecked clodhopper consumerism that most people living here today do not respect or care to live beside.

The size matters because it (1) suggests something vain about the owner and (2) is resented by others because it is a blatant status symbol. A big new home in a community that does not want it is tied to an owner who is seen as a jerk.

More movies have Oscar appeal than can be nominated so many don’t get the Oscar money boost

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A forthcoming study in a premier sociology journal looks at the formula for Oscar nominees and how it affects the money they make:

So is it a good idea for movie makers to pursue Oscar nominations? Rossman and Schilke’s research suggests that it probably is not. Rossman and Schilke use data from the Internet Movie Database to identify the themes of a very large set of movies. They then look to see how well each movie’s themes match the themes of Oscar nominees in the five years before the movie was released, to figure out how well the movie matches the “Oscar formula,” while also accounting for other factors (e.g. the studio that released the movie) which could affect the movie’s Oscar chances. This allows them to figure out the ‘Oscar appeal’ of each movie in their dataset. On Rossman and Schilke’s measure, movies like The Hottie and the Nottie have very low Oscar appeal, while movies like Out of Africa have high appeal.

The problem is that there are lots of movies with Oscar appeal, but far fewer movies that get nominated. Because the Oscar nominee list imposes a sharp cutoff (movies either get nominated or they don’t), movies that just failed to make the Oscar nomination cut are likely to do far worse than movies that just about got on the list, even if the two are of more or less equal quality. The financial losses of the failures counterbalance the success of the nominees.

As Rossman and Schilke conclude:

..net of achieving Oscar nominations, Oscar appeal has a negative effect on financial returns. In essence, there are two types of high Oscar appeal movies—those that do not receive nominations (and tend to lose money) and those that do receive nominations (and tend to make money)—but taken together these two types of movies are no more nor less profitable than movies with low Oscar appeal.

This seems to fit other evidence that it is very difficult to predict which mass culture products will be successful – whether movies, music, or books – and the more successful ones can make enough to offset the losses from producing all the rest.

American economic recovery varys widely by county

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A recent analysis of county-level data regarding recovering from the economic crisis shows winners and losers:

About half of the nation’s 3,069 county economies are still short of their prerecession economic output, reflecting the uneven economic recovery, according to a new report from the National Association of Counties…

The report, released Monday, examined four economic indicators: GDP, total number of jobs, unemployment rates and home prices. It found wide variations.

Almost 400 counties saw no decline in GDP from their prerecession levels. Large counties were hit hard by the recession, but have recovered relatively strongly.

The roughly 800 counties boasting prerecession employment levels by 2013 are mostly in the Midwest and South. And just 54 had achieved their prerecession level of unemployment last year, the report said.

In other words, the overall figures suggest some counties have done well while others continue to struggle. Just curious: what can be done at the county level in many of these places? Counties are one level of local government but they are more influential in some places that others.

 

Male British hedge fund employees worried about their appearance, link it to wealth

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Even as women are presented with pressure in regard to their appearance, some men face similar pressure. Take this case of male employees at a British hedge fund:

We got our hands on an academic paper published last week by the British Sociological Association, which muscles into the attitudes of male traders towards their bodies, ageing and fitness, as observed at one (thus far unidentified) City-based hedge fund…

According to the study, titled, “Built to last: ageing, class and the masculine body in a UK hedge fund,” people at the mystery fund admit they get teased for not keeping fit, think affluence is linked to physical activity and exercise to offset the negative perceptions of ageing … oh and er, lie about getting work done.

“Conversations on the floor suggested that traders explicitly rejected or mocked the idea of Botox or other forms of cosmetic treatment,” goes the report.

“Yet, during interviews some mentioned dyeing their hair, having regular massages or going on an intense boot camp holiday in order to ‘fix’ parts of their body.”

The acceptable masculine appearance in this setting is interesting. But, it would then be worthwhile to hear more about how appearance gets linked to success and status within the firm. Do fellow employees perceive fit workers to be more successful? Do they get earlier promotions? Did male traders always have to be fit or get benefits from being fit or is this a relatively new phenomenon? This may be another piece of evidence that economic trading is not just about the numbers. As a number of sociological studies have found, other factors other than individual talent or intuition affect abilities in the finance industry including emotion and social networks.

Two “cousin” states follow different paths: Minnesota goes Democrat, Wisconsin goes Republican

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A look at the twin ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin highlights the political differences between the two states:

In 2013, Wisconsin’s lawmakers cut income taxes. They approved an expansion of school vouchers. They passed a requirement, portions of which are now being contested in court, that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that women seeking abortions get ultrasounds. They rewrote iron mining rules to ease construction of an open pit in Northern Wisconsin.

In Minnesota, lawmakers sent more money to public schools, raised income taxes on the highest earners, increased the tax on cigarettes and voted to add new business taxes. They allowed some undocumented immigrants to get in-state tuition for public universities. They legalized same-sex marriage.

“It’s staggering, really, like night and day,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got two states with the same history, the same culture, the same people — it’s kind of like they’re cousins. And now they’re looking across the border and seeing one world, then seeing something else entirely on the other side.”

This sounds like a good natural experiment for social scientists to look at. If the states share similar backgrounds and geography, perhaps the differences in outcomes over the next few years can be attributed to the different political parties in control. Unfortunately, the article is pretty impressionistic thus far and doesn’t offer too many concrete differences in life. Perhaps not enough time has passed – or perhaps the differences in daily life still might not change that much for most residents.

Confessions of a Community College College Dean: “Foucault, plus lawn care”

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The “Confessions of a Community College Dean” blog at Inside Higher Ed has this intro tagline for the author:

In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990s moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care.

Is it fair to say the implied contrast here is that this cultural studies scholar wouldn’t have imagined being part of suburban life? Knowledge of lofty French thinkers and maintaining a yard. I suspect there are many in academia who would have similar thoughts: I’m an expert in such and such field, study important things all day, and for sure won’t end up in the populist and anti-intellectual suburbs. Yet, some certainly do become suburbanites. How do they reconcile these two areas of life?