Monthly Archives: March 2015

Sociologist on the three social pillars of science

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Science has its own social context and goals:

Fuller has also written a lot about science and technology studies, or STS. Flipping through his 2006 book The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, I came upon a passage–adapted from a 1998 essay—that defends the critical stance that STS scholars often take toward science. The passage reads like a comment on my recent column:

“There appears to be nothing uniquely ‘rational,’ objective,’ or ‘truth-oriented’ about the activities that our society calls ‘scientific.’ Make no mistake: it is not that scientists are less rational than the rest of humanity; rather, they are not more rational. STS researchers generally credit ordinary people with a good deal of intelligence.

“The power of science seems to rest on three pillars. One is science’s distinctive social organization, which enables concentrated periods of both teamwork and criticism, nowadays done on a global scale with considerable material resources. Another is concerted political effort to apply the results of scientific research to all aspects of society. Finally is the control that scientists continue to exert over how their history is told. Past diversions and failures remain largely hidden, resulting in an airbrushed picture of ‘progress’ otherwise absent from human affairs.

Especially in today’s world, we could use more sociology of science. Without some questioning, science tends to get a free ride in American society as one of the key promoters or carriers of progress. Yet, science is still a social enterprise and works with its own set of assumptions.

One question: where can you have reasonable discussions about science (natural and social) and its assumptions and findings?

Convenient to see the end of Pradel’s career as a new era for Naperville

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The Naperville Sun/Chicago Tribune ran a long story about Naperville mayor George Pradel stepping down and what this means for Naperville:

Longtime residents and colleagues say Pradel’s style — which he, himself describes as Naperville’s No. 1 cheerleader — suited the suburb well as about 42,000 new residents brought the need for new schools, fire stations and grocery stores during historic growth.

Naperville faces a new era now, as Pradel, 77, prepares to step down after five terms in office in May. His departure leaves one of four mayoral candidates with a new task of leading the nearly built-out city through its next set of challenges, from filling empty storefronts to countering an unwanted reputation as a party town after several high-profile, alcohol-fueled incidents downtown…

Since 1969, Naperville has operated with a council-manager form of government, which uses a full-time city manager to run the community’s day-to-day operations, while the mayor serves as the city’s public face, available to grand marshal parades and have dinner with girl scouts.

It’s an arrangement that Pradel said he’s been grateful for since he won his first election in 1995, a victory that caught him by such surprise that he didn’t even have an acceptance speech ready.

This is the sort of story that can feed the “big leader” narratives of history. But does it really fit here? Pradel was an outgoing character and a cheerleader. He was very visible. He had a long history in Naperville as a police officer. Yet, the story even reminds us that the mayor was a figurehead with the day-to-day work falling to the city manager. Naperville, like many cities its size, has a large professional staff. The city has a number of business and civic leaders who contribute.

This is not intended to downplay the role that figurehead leaders can play. Perceptions matter a lot within and among communities. At the same time, larger-than-life or long-serving leaders can often get the blame or credit for things that they didn’t do. Pradel was mayor over a particular period of time that saw Naperville peak in population (at least at this point without serious efforts to grow up), continue to grow a vibrant downtown, and encounter a few issues including traffic, some crime, and thinking about how to connect disparate parts of the city. Was he responsible for all of this?

This is where a more complex picture of Naperville or other communities can help. Some people indeed have more power and influence. But, communities have more going on than just one person.

Using Chicago as a new big data laboratory

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University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park once said that the city was a laboratory. A new venture seeks to use Chicago as just that:

On the heels of the University of Chicago’s $1 million Innovation Challenge for urban policy solutions, today’s announcement that UI Labs (“universities and industries”) will open CityWorks, a private R&D partnership that will be based on Goose Island, sets up the city to be a center for urban studies, technology and innovations. Founding partners Microsoft, Accenture, ComEd and Siemens will operate a bit like angel investors, according to Jason Harris, a spokesman for UI Labs. This project will seek to “level up Chicago as a center for the built environment.” The city’s mix of university and industry partners, government leadership and legacy of architecture and design innovation place it in a perfect position for this kind of incubator, according to Harris.

CityWorks wants to seed 6-8 ideas this year, focused on energy, physical infrastructure, transportation and water and sanitation, Harris says (funding amounts aren’t being released). “Our vision is that we have projects that can use the city as a testbed and try out ideas not being tested in other cities,” he says.

CityWorks will award grants to university and private researchers, with a focus on digital planning and the Internet of Things. Chicago is vying to be an important center for this potentially lucrative field. With the recent introduction of the Array of Things, a cutting-edge system of sensors that researchers and computer scientists are hoping will prove the value of real-time, open-source city data, and the recent opening of Uptake, a Brad Keywell-backed startup looking to bring custom data analytics solutions to businesses, the city is well-positioned to become a leader in the field.

I’ll be interested to see what comes out of this. It sounds like the goal the goal is to use big data collected at the city scale to find solutions to urban business issues. I do wonder if this is primarily about making profits or more about addressing urban social problems.

Some might be surprised to see such a project going forward in Chicago. After all, isn’t it a Rust Belt city struggling with big financial problems and violence? At the same time, this project highlights Chicago as a center of innovation (which requires a particular social context), a place where businesses want to locate, and home to a good amount of human capital (in both research interests and educated workers).

Innovative design in response to social needs and social conditions

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The creativity in innovative design doesn’t come emerge from a vacuum: one academic explains how it is related to social forces.

“The ADA totally changed transport, architecture and every area where accessibility is important,” he says. “Design also develops out of a sense of social needs.”…

At a time when Jony Ive’s creations for Apple are as much status symbol as a technological advance, Margolin believes that the discipline’s potential lies in solving big problems and the creation of culture, not just the newest products…

He sees system design and a systemic perspective as key to innovation. Numerous modern inventions, such as Peapod and mobile banking, are built upon pre-existing infrastructure and only work well when they encompass different behaviors and user cases. Failures that ignore these perspectives are apparent every day…

Margolin also believes that innovation on a disruptive scale often requires a concept that creates a community of people around a common cause, such as the American mobilization of industry during WWII, the growth of research laboratories of mid-century American industry or the Silicon Valley of Steve Jobs’ era, inspired in part by the innovations of Xerox’s PARC research division.

This is related to one thing I try to impart in my Culture, Media, and Society course: despite our images of lone geniuses developing great novels, music, art, technology, etc., objects come out of a social process. This is the argument of a number of sociological works on cultural production and includes famous ideas like Becker’s idea of “art worlds.” You can also this in case studies of certain objects that once were not very popular but became popular through a series of events, such as the Mona Lisa whose stature was heightened by theft. Of course, social forces can also limit creativity whether we are talking about Babylonian culture in the first century BC where they were more interested in preservation of their past or in current copyright law that places restrictions on using created works.

Creating a quirky and warm Twitter personality for your on-the-market housing unit

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Here may be a new housing trend: personifying your for-sale home in a Twitter account.

Bob the House — a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath ranch in the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect — has been tweeting about his journey on the market since October. You’ll find Bob to be a rather inspirational house, tweeting messages of positivity and hope on a regular basis, along with fanfare for the Chicago Cubs and humorous updates about his search for the right family. (“Six showings today! You like me, you really like me!”)

Here’s the open secret: It’s not really Bob who’s doing the tweeting. It’s his “handler,” Rich Burghgraef, an account executive with sales consulting firm Randolph Sterling, Inc. Burghgraef writes in a blog post that he created Bob, whose name comes from the street the house lives on, Robert Drive, as a way to get away from typical advertising tactics. It seems Bob was a hit, with showings of the home going from one or two a weekend to six and eight after the Twitter account debuted. It may have even been responsible (or at least contributory) to the ultimate happy ending, as Bob tweeted on March 1: “My new family moved in on Friday. Thank you all for taking an interest.”…

Burghgraef says that he used Bob to make a personal connection with buyers, not just to throw marketing messages of “buy me!” at them. Bob would tweet about the school that taught him to tweet (so there’s a good school in the neighborhood!); his friend, the stop sign (safety first!); and his stepson, the swing set (don’t you see your family here?). The home’s Twitter account gave buyers a new way to “fall in love with him even before stepping in for a showing,” Burghgraef says.

A clever way to use social media. The several accounts I read of this phenomena did not provide much evidence regarding the effectiveness of this tactic. Of course, social media attention is one of the currencies of today’s social realm so why not leverage it to help sell your home?We can’t be too far away from someone automating this process so that every new housing unit on the market could take advantage of Internet available information about the neighborhood and surrounding area to develop a winning personality.

I think Burghgraef is right in suggesting that this could be particularly effective with real estate since there is a high level of emotional investment. While we could imagine all sorts of consumer goods having their own online personalities, not all of those goods might have the same emotional connections to their owners.

Our lack of knowledge about the indoor biome

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Science may be going to the natural frontiers on Earth but what about the indoor biome?

If you add up the area of the indoor biome in Manhattan — including its walk-ups and high-rise apartments — it’s three times bigger than the area of the island of Manhattan itself…

And yet the indoor biome remains at science’s frontier. “We know virtually nothing about it,” said Laura J. Martin, an ecologist at Cornell University.

In the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Ms. Martin and 24 fellow scientists have issued a manifesto urging serious scientific investigation of the indoor biome. We need to find out not only what is living in our homes and workplaces, the scientists say, but how they got there…

Dr. Dunn and his colleagues argue that, ecologically speaking, our houses have a lot in common with caves. In both habitats, temperature and humidity are much steadier than outside, making for stable environments. But both lack the dense vegetation that most other biomes have, so there’s less food to be had…

But our houses also have otherworldly ecological niches, like shower heads and freezers, that can support more biological diversity than you’d find in a cave.

This may be a bigger issue than ever for three reasons:

1. People have become more sedentary than in the past for a variety of reasons, which often means they are inside more.

2. The indoors has made it possible to adapt to more inhospitable habitats. (Think heating and air conditioning.) Yet, this also provides more potential for mixing organisms.

3. And the reason that might funnel the necessary money to study the great indoors: health. When is the indoor biome healthy for humans and when is it not? We know about some features of this – think exhaust and particulates in garages or from fireplaces or bacteria in the kitchen or bathroom – but do we know the whole complex story? What if the indoors was making us less healthy?

How trust builds and then declines through online reviews

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Two sociologists explain how trust develops and then changes over time in the online sharing economy:

For their research, Parigi and Cook examined Couchsurfing, a website that supports international travel and cultural exchange. Its members both host visitors and surf the site to find sympathetic lodging as they travel the world, all without exchanging money. Profile pages of members list Couchsurfing friends and other personal information.

The findings revealed, the researchers wrote, an interesting mechanism at the root of interpersonal trust: “The accumulation of ratings about users (whether guests or hosts) had a double-edged effect on trust and relationships: it made relationships easier to establish initially but it also weakened them after a certain threshold.”

In other words, technology boosted interpersonal trust among users at first, but it also made it more difficult to build stronger ties as users acquired more and more reviews…

Parigi and Cook explain that in an online community, interactions between people are more normalized, less open to chance. “This is because trustworthiness is promoted not by interpersonal ties, but by the monitoring of one another in a network in which reputations are posted,” they wrote…
As a result, he said, an interesting conundrum seems to be emerging: technology makes it possible for people to trust complete strangers, while at the same time it may be weakening the bonds that unite individuals.

Trust is a necessary component of human relationships; people need to have some confidence that the other person is not going to take advantage of them or let them down and deeper connections can form when mutual trust develops. Yet, trust can develop in different ways. In this particular case, it sounds like the trust is built on crowd-sourced data – posted online reviews – that contribute to confidence but don’t necessarily lead to deeper relationships.

Maybe this is all okay. We don’t expect to form deep relationships with everyone we interact with, particularly when it comes to economic transactions. (Think of interactions with cashiers or waiters or others at the lower status jobs in the service economy.) The larger issue may be when most or all of online interactions develop these qualities. This is the same sort of question that worried Georg Simmel in his piece “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Simmel made a similar argument: when humans enter a new social space (the big city) that is built around interdependence and specialization, humans can’t hope to get to know everyone. Similar situation today: humans enter a new social space (the Internet, social media) that prioritizes individual action and choosing what connections to make.

Suburbanites who don’t like proposals for affordable housing in the Twin Cities region

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The Metropolitan Council for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is working on plans for affordable housing but a number of suburbanites are not pleased with where the affordable housing might go:

The Met Council sees a growing problem. Its own newly available data suggest that annual production of affordable housing has dropped by hundreds of units since 2010, even as market-rate housing has rebounded.

An advance peek at the Met Council’s proposed goals, to be released late Monday, shows that communities considered to be prime locations for adding affordable units include upper income suburbs, such as North Oaks and Eden Prairie, and cornfield’s-edge fringe communities such as Minnetrista and Lake Elmo…

The target numbers — released this week for public comment, with adjustments possible from now to July — are part of a once-per-decade planning process that will begin in every city this fall. Each must start to figure out how to accommodate the additional units.

The Met Council is under heavy fire for allegedly pushing too much affordable housing into areas with plenty of it already, intensifying concentrations of poverty and perpetuating racial segregation in the Twin Cities.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The region has a history of metropolitanization, a rare occurrence in American cities, as well as an openness to immigrants, yet advancing affordable housing units in middle- to upper-end suburbs may be going too far. As some of the suburbanites in the article note, they moved to these communities to escape issues like this. But, the quality of life concerns they tend to express (good school, low crime, sense of community) seem to be inextricably linked with race/ethnicity and social class. Just a reminder that part of the benefits of having money in the United States is that one can move to such a place that insulates you against interacting with others.

In economic terms, 1 baseball team = 1 midsized department store

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Following up on the academic consensus that sports do not economically benefit communities, one economist notes the economic impact of sports teams:

“If every sports team in Chicago were to suddenly disappear, the impact on the Chicago economy would be a fraction of 1 percent,” Leeds says. “A baseball team has about the same impact on a community as a midsize department store.”

The reason?

Economists say the biggest reason sports teams don’t have much impact is that they don’t tend to spur new spending.  Most people have a limited entertainment budget, so the dollars they are spending when they go to a game is money they would have spent elsewhere, maybe even at a restaurant or small businesses where more money would have stayed in the community. Plus, Matheson says, rather than draw people to a neighborhood, games can actually repel them.

Don’t underestimate the money generated by large retail stores. When I worked a short stint at a local Target at the end of high school, I remember seeing the board in our office that listed daily sales. The figure was typically around $100,000. That generates a lot of tax revenue through sales taxes and property taxes.

This is more evidence that the more important feature of sports teams in major cities is their social and cultural value. Teams provide something for a city to rally around and contribute to the city’s collective identify. In major cities with millions of people, it is difficult to find features or events that can bring large numbers of people together. Sports teams also provide opportunities for leisure, whether through enjoying the stadium experience or experiencing the game from afar. Now, if only we could find politicians that would admit the taxpayer money going to stadiums or teams was due to the interest in having a common sports identity and leisure experience rather than some grand economic impact…

Obama administration proposal to limit tax-free government bonds for stadiums

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Federal policy might change how sports teams and municipalities negotiate stadium deals:

That’s what the Obama administration proposed in its budget last month: to end the issuance of tax-free government bonds for professional sports facilities, a practice that has, according to research by Bloomberg, siphoned $17 billion of public money into arenas for NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL franchises over the last 30 years and cost Americans $4 billion in forgone federal taxes on top of that. It’s too late for residents of Cobb County, but Congress might yet save the rest of us some dough…

So how did we wind up in this situation? Local authorities have long used tax-exempt bonds to raise money for certain private uses—whether factories, train stations, or home mortgage loans—in addition to schools, sewers, and other infrastructure projects. In most cases, the ensuing economic growth was at least intended to pay back the municipal investment. Sports stadiums were no different: Governments could raise money in exchange for a share of future revenue…

Much of the rest of the article summarizes the research that shows cities and taxpayers tend not to come out ahead in these deals. So, this new policy might solve the problem?

Still, it wouldn’t stop cities from paying for stadiums. The last time Congress made public financing more onerous, in 1986, the result was a disaster: Cities jumped to meet the new, harsher terms, opening a three-decade stadium construction spree.

In other words, the policy might close the loophole for this particular financial instrument but there are other ways to make such deals. As I’ve said repeatedly, few politicians are willing to let the big team get away. Of course, the historical record suggests that everything does not necessarily fall apart when teams move. Many of the cities since the 1950s that saw teams move away later saw new teams take their place. Sports teams only have limited numbers of places they can move to make the kind of money they want; this is the reason Los Angeles looms so large right now in the NFL’s urban landscape because the next options are not very good.

The bigger question may be whether cities and suburbs can stop themselves from making bad deals, even with federal policies that take away some of their options.