Author Archives: legallysociable

Predicting more Thanksgiving traffic due to a closed car-to-plane gap?

Posted on by

One way to predict traffic on the roads at Thanksgiving is to look at the car-to-plane travel gap:

Drivers will make up about 89.5 percent of holiday travelers this year, a gain of 0.1 percentage point from 2013, while air passengers will drop by the same amount to 7.5, forecasts prepared by Englewood, Colorado-based IHS Inc. show. A 0.1 point increase may not seem like a lot, but based on last year’s estimate that 39.6 million people traveled by car for Thanksgiving, that would roughly equate to at least another 40,000 people piling onto America’s highways.

The car-over-plane travel choice is made easier by the fact that airfares aren’t coming down like gasoline pump prices are. While the plunge in oil has driven down wholesale jet fuel prices 17 percent since August, almost matching the 18 percent drop in retail gasoline, airfares have risen 3.4 percent over that time, data compiled by industry groups show…

“Right now the airlines aren’t in the sharing mood,” Rick Seaney, chief executive officer of the Dallas-based travel website FareCompare.com, said. “They just went through six years of multi-megamergers and dividing the country up by city with little or no competition, so they’ll pocket whatever difference they may get for a while.”

Gasoline’s drop will save the average U.S. driver about $500 annually, helping boost consumer spending, according to IHS. U.S. auto sales have risen 5.5 percent to 13.7 million in the first 10 months of 2014, on pace to be the strongest in eight years, Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey-based data provider Autodata Corp. said.

A few thoughts:

1. Having 40,000 more people on the roads at Thanksgiving is going to complicate traffic all across the United States? Spread these people cross hundreds of metropolitan areas and assume they aren’t all leaving at the same time (Wednesday after work) and adding that kind of volume may not matter much at all.

2. The prediction of future traffic is interesting to me. This reminds me of Carmageddon fears, first in Los Angeles (twice) and then in Chicago earlier this year. This seems like the creation of news: get prepared for more Thanksgiving traffic now! It is the kind of fear-based reporting done by many local news outlets about things like weather or traffic, fairly mundane events that occasionally turn out to be horrible.

3. The Carmageddon cases hint at another piece of this prediction: making such claims could change future behavior. If Americans hear that there will be more drivers at Thanksgiving, even just a few of them changing their plans (not driving or changing their departure times) might go a long ways toward relieving the predicted traffic. Perhaps this forecast is all part of some plan to actually reduce Thanksgiving traffic?

4. Just from personal observation: plane tickets appear to be really high during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s this year. As the article notes, airlines are looking to make money and haven’t budged much in their prices even with the recent gas price drops.

 

 

New “Dry City Brew Works” reminds Wheaton of its dry past

Posted on by

A new brewery in Wheaton has a name that highlights the community’s past stance toward alcohol:

Exposed brick walls, metal accents, a wooden ceiling and plans for local musicians to regularly perform give Dry City Brew Works the feel of an urban coffeehouse…

The name, of course, is a reference to Wheaton’s history of being a dry city until the mid-1980s.

“A lot of people, especially from the Wheaton area, are telling us, ‘Wow, finally, it’s so good to have something like this in Wheaton.’ They love the name and the play on Wheaton and the reaction to the actual product has been good,” Jessica said.

Friends, family and strangers helped the brewery raise $15,000 through a Kickstarter.com campaign to help with some of the startup costs. The owners are now in the process now of rewarding the backers with Dry City-stamped T-shirts, glasses and other items.

A bit of a change for a community which voted for its own prohibition after the Federal prohibition ended. Read an earlier post about Wheaton’s dry past and reactions to Ale Fest a few years ago. The ban on alcohol sales was revoked in part because of arguments that such sales would help the downtown: enhance the downtown experience, attract businesses and restaurants, and thus boost tax revenues. A brewery downtown would seem to contribute to all this though it remains to be seen how successful a brewery in Wheaton can be.

The reasons behind a collection of dead shopping malls in the Chicago suburbs

Posted on by

Another shopping mall in the Chicago suburbs closes, joining several other “dead” malls:

Last week, it was announced that Lincoln Mall in suburban Matteson would close after the holiday season, due to its operator’s inability to keep the mall properly maintained and staffed. However, the 700,000 square foot shopping center is not alone, as it joins a growing list of dead malls in the greater Chicagoland area. Chicago photographer Katherine Hodges has been documenting so-called dead malls and other abandoned sites for several years, and has visited numerous shopping centers throughout the Midwest that have either completely shuttered, or are on the verge of closing for good.

Hodges shoots many other sites beyond malls that are on death row, however the images of humungous vacant shopping centers speak for themselves. One mall that Hodges has highlighted — The Plaza in Evergreen Park — was the first modern shopping mall in the Chicago area, having originally opened in 1952. It closed last summer. The Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles, another mall featured in Hodges’ series, is currently the focus of a major redevelopment effort that could potentially revive the shopping center.

With big empty spaces comes big problems. Some shopping centers have been successful in turning things around, and others — not so much (Lincoln Mall for example). However, with these vacant spaces come new opportunities, and in the case of Lincoln Mall, there have already been some ideas floated for a possible redevelopment of the property. It’s still a bit early to speculate exactly what will happen to the site, but at least for now, it’s certain that the mall will join the area’s growing shopping center dead pool.

There are a variety of forces at work with these shopping malls – and I’ll throw out some speculative ideas as well:

1. The economic crisis of recent years did not help: consumer spending slowed and stores simply couldn’t have locations all over the place.

2. Population shifts can contribute. Malls are often built in thriving suburban areas but there are no guarantees that the communities around the malls will continue to thrive.

3. Big box stores can locate right next to malls but probably compete for customers. Outside of department stores, malls feature a variety of smaller, niche stores. But, a Walmart or a Target can sell a bunch of goods in one location.

4. How much has the Internet hurt malls? This would include actual sales but might also include less need for a physical social gathering spot (which can now happen online).

5. Malls themselves have changed design over the years. The old model was to construct a large facility of stores with lots of surrounding parking lots. More malls today have added other uses, particularly sit-down restaurants, in order to attract people to the mall and keep them there longer. Malls are not just for shopping; they are now often lifestyle centers.

It may be difficult to imagine but suburban shopping malls don’t have to exist in the future.

“Sociology’s most cited papers by decade”

Posted on by

Kieran Healy looks at the patterns among the most cited sociology papers:

Again, we’re looking at the Top 10 most-cited papers that were published in the 1950s, 1960s, and so on. This means that while the eleventh most-cited paper from the 1980s might outscore the fourth most-cited paper from the 1950s in terms of cumulative citations, the former does not appear here whereas the latter does. There are some striking patterns. One thing to notice is the rise of articles from the Annual Review of Sociology in the 2000s. Another is the increasing heterogeneity of outlets. Of the top ten papers written in the 1950s or before, seven appear in the American Sociological Review, two in the American Journal of Sociology, and one in Social Forces. (That is SF’s only entry in the list, as it happens.) ASR and AJS rule the 1960s, too. After that, though, there’s more variety. Strikingly, for the 2000s only one of the ten most-cited articles is from ASR and none is from AJS—a complete reversal of the pattern of the ‘50s and ‘60s. You can also see the long shadow of post-war university expansion and “Boomer Sociology”. The most-cited work from before 1970 is not nearly as widely cited as the most-cited work from the ‘70s and ‘80s, despite having been around longer. The drop-off in citation numbers in the Top 10s from the ‘90s and ‘00s is to be expected as those papers are younger. American dominance—or insularity—is also evident, as the only non-U.S. journal to make any of the lists is Sociology, and that was in the 1970s.

Turning to the subject matter of the papers, I think you can see the importance of articles whose main contribution is either a methodological technique or a big idea. There are fewer papers where a specific empirical finding is the main contribution. If you want to hang in there as one of the most-remembered papers from your decade, it seems, give people a good concept to work with or a powerful tool to use. Of course, it’s also true that people tend to have a lot of unread books lying around the house and unused drill attachments in the garage.

It is tempting to connect these two patterns in the data. To speculate: ASR and AJS remain amongst the journals with the very highest impact factors in the discipline. Publishing in them has become more important than ever to people’s careers. Yet the most-cited papers of the last two decades appeared elsewhere. These journals demand the papers they publish meet high standards in methods and ideally also innovate theoretically, along with making an empirical contribution to knowledge. That, together with a more competitive and professionalized labor market, produces very high-quality papers. But perhaps it also makes these journals less likely than in the past to publish purely technical or purely theoretical pieces, even though some papers of that sort will in the end have the most influence on the field.

Outlets like Sociological Methods and Research and Sociological Methodology now publish articles that might in the past have appeared in more general journals. Similarly, big-idea pieces that might once have gotten in at ASR or AJS may now be more likely to find a home at places like Theory and Society or Gender and Society. At the same time—perhaps because the state of theory in the field is more confused than that of methods—theoretical papers may also have been partially displaced by ARS articles that make an argument for some idea or approach, but under the shield of a topical empirical literature review. In a relatively fragmented field, it’s also easier for methodological papers to be more widely cited across a range of substantive areas than it is for a theory paper to do the same.

These seem like reasonable arguments to me. It is also interesting to see that a few subfields attract more attention, like theory and methodology but also social networks, social movements, gender, and cultural sociology, while other subfields are not among the most cited.

The historical (in)accuracy of Assassin’s Creed Unity

Posted on by

Video games can help shape our understandings of historical events. Thus, a debate over the portrayal of the French Revolution in the new Assassin’s Creed:

The former leftist French presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called it “propaganda against the people, the people who are [portrayed as] barbarians, bloodthirsty savages,” while the “cretin” that is Marie-Antoinette and the “treacherous” Louis XVI are portrayed as noble victims. “The denigration of the great Revolution is a dirty job to instill more self-loathing and déclinisme in the French,” he told Le Figaro. The secretary general of the Left Front, Alexis Corbière, said on his blog:

To all those who will buy Assassin’s Creed: Unity, I wish them a good time, but I also tell them that the pleasure of playing does not stop you from thinking. Play, yes, but do not let yourself be manipulated by those who make propaganda.

Ubisoft, the maker of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, which has been going since 2007 and has sold more than 70 million copies, is in fact French. One of the makers of the game replied that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a “consumer video game, not a history lesson” but did say that his team hired a historian and specialists on the Terror and other aspects of the Revolution. Le Monde lays out seven errors in the game here (in French).

In fact, the debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s. British counter-revolutionary thought often focused on the suffering of the monarchy in their stories, such as the King’s tearful goodbye to his family before his execution on Jan. 21st, 1793 or Marie-Antoinette’s perhaps apocryphal last words to her executioner after stepping on his foot just before her head was cut off: “Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it.”

So perhaps the game simply reflects the ongoing debates of which actors in the French Revolution should be cast as heroes or villains? This all intrigued me because one of my classes recently considered how historical narratives are constructed and then played several historical video games to see how each portrays history. Some games clearly try to impart more historical accuracy – and these seem to be ones more intent on educational purposes – while others suffer from the gamification of history. This can lead to two things:

1. The games differ in their levels of ambiguity; after all, there has to be a winner. But, even as this debate illustrates, it is not always easy to depict who benefited or should have benefited from particular events. On one hand, it is easy to fight Nazis – there are a video game go-to for a clear enemy – but other events or periods are much more unclear. One solution is to simply drop in an outside story – as the Assassin’s Creed line does – and make it up from there.

2. This often means there is the potential to change history. This may just be a modern fad – This American Life recently asked some Americans about time travel and there was a subset of people who wanted to change big events:

Jonathan Goldstein

And even though they’ve been mulling this over for so long, many still reach for the most well-trodden sci-fi comic book staple.

Man 4

My first impulse about time travel is the same one that I would guess that everybody has. You know, thinking that I’m going to go back and I’m going to kill Hitler.

Sean Cole

What’s funny is that they know it’s kind of lame. You can hear it in their voices.

Man 4

Or kill Hitler when he’s a baby, or kill his mother or something.

Jonathan Goldstein

They preface it with phrases like–

Woman 1

It’s the thing everyone always says is–

Sean Cole

And then they say it anyway.

Woman 1

If there hadn’t been a Hitler–

Man 5

Put a bullet in Adolf Hitler’s head when he was still a student, I guess…

And of course, no one imagines that they’ll end up with an iron collar around their neck, working in a quarry. Instead, they have a starring role in the historical docu-drama. Like this guy, who’d set the controls for the Revolutionary War.

Man On Street 2

I don’t think I’d be like, a general in the field or anything like that. But I’d probably be more of like an adviser to Washington. Like Alexander Hamilton was, right? And a few other folks. So yeah.

Jonathan Goldstein

I love how you’re already an officer in this.

Man On Street 2

Exactly. Yeah.

Historical games can pose an interesting “what if?” yet also lead to improbable events or outcomes.

I would guess most of these action-oriented games are not concerned much about historical accuracy outside of how it can enhance the backdrop or the gameplay. Yet, given the sales of these games, the amount of time spent playing them, and who purchases them (often younger people), such games could go a long way toward influencing perceptions of the past.

Watch for how Chicago’s new “Array of Things” signs communicate information

Posted on by

Big data about Chicago is to be communicated to the public in a few different ways, including from public signs:

But the information it gathers is only half of what the Array of Things does. It will communicate that data in a complete, machine-readable form online, for users to search, analyze, and adapt. The sensors, however, will also communicate the data to passers-by.And that presents an interesting design dilemma. Most public signage seems self-evident and intuitive, like stop signs and walk signals, but it tends not to change very much, and when it does, it’s iterative. What do you do when you’re designing a new form of public signage, on the cheap, and one that has the possibility to communicate a wide range of information? To find out, I spoke with the array’s designers, SAIC professor Douglas Pancoast and master’s student Satya Batsu.

The obvious approach would be to use a screen. But screens are fragile and expensive. “We knew we didn’t want to have screens,” says Pancoast. “We wanted it to be visible—it couldn’t be too small, it couldn’t be too big, and you couldn’t mistake it for traffic.”…

That also led the designers to the current design of the Array nodes. (Not final, necessarily—the 3D-printed screens are cheap, quickly produced, and replaceable in a few minutes with off-the-shelf hardware.) The hexagonal shape of the lights in a honeycomb pattern is meant to further distinguish the Array nodes from traffic signals—a simple, familiar shape that’s still different from the language of signage that will surround it on city streets…

From that, Pancoast and Batsu narrowed down the nodes to their current iteration, leaving open the question of what information they’ll communicate and how people will recognize it. And that’s where the community comes in. The Array of Things is “neighborhood asset mapping,” in Pancoast’s words; residents are likely to be interested in different data in different places. In one place, they might be interested in air quality, an “asymmetrical” issue across the city. In another, sound or temperature.

This could present some interesting opportunities for observation to see how residents will interact with these public signs. Will they stand around them? Glance at them quickly as they walk by? Ignore them? I’m curious to know what information these signs could provide on a regular basis that would be better than what residents could gather on their smartphones or that would add value to their daily routine.

Should environmentalism promote pristine wilderness or more urban parks?

Posted on by

Debates over the legacy of John Muir pose an interesting question for environmentalists: to support pristine wilderness or more urban parks?

Christensen and others see Muir’s beliefs as antiquated in the face of 21st century environmental challenges that the bushy-bearded Scot could not have imagined: population growth, urban sprawl, demographic shifts, climate change.

The debate boils down to Muir’s primary ethic: The wilderness is a temple to be left undisturbed, so man occasionally can experience nature in its purity. That precept helped shape a century of conservation, ensuring that there would be unspoiled wilderness for succeeding generations…

To Christensen and others, however, Muir’s notion that immersing people in “universities of the wilderness” — such as Yosemite — sends the message that only awe-inspiring parks are worth saving, at the expense of smaller urban spaces…

Critics also see a correlation between the emotional, biblical language of Muir’s writings and the demographic makeup of national park visitors and the ranks of the largest environmental organizations — mainly aging, white Americans.

The Sierra Club, which Muir founded, and the Audubon Society are struggling to connect with California’s diverse population, particularly Latinos, who polls show are among the most devoted environmentalists in the state. A strong and diverse membership in California, where Latinos are expected to become a majority by 2050, is important to influencing political decisions and raising funds to support missions of conservation and environmental education.

Interesting issue. A few thoughts:

1. One could argue that there really aren’t many natural places completely undisturbed by human activity. Even the supposed “pristine wilderness” of the New World discovered by Europeans was really land that had been cultivated and altered by people for a long time.

2. The majority of people in the United States and in many countries now live in urbanized areas where they may have little time or resources for “pristine nature.” But, urban nature is a very human-altered form: for example, the design of Central Park in New York City is very intentional with its rock formations, water features, and set of paths and pedestrian areas (let alone space for vehicles and large buildings).

Preserving the Beatles modest post-World War II childhood homes

Posted on by

The Beatles grew up in modest homes outside of Liverpool but because of the stature of their former residents, the U.K. National Trust has preserved the dwellings:

A recent feature in the Liverpool Echo details how the U.K.’s National Trust restored the dwellings where Beatles songs like “Please Please Me” and “I Saw Her Standing There” were written. The childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney have been warped back to the ’50s, using “photographs and eyewitness accounts” as a guide to restoring fixtures and sourcing identical furniture.

Both homes are located in Liverpool, and are currently owned by the National Trust, which operates public tours four times a day. Lennon’s house, called Mendips, was purchased by Yoko Ono in 2002, who donated it to the Trust, requesting they “restore the house to what it once was, and tell John’s story.” (Paul’s has been owned by the Trust for 16 years.) Today, Mendips still has the creaky floorboards that Lennon once had to tiptoe around when returning from late night gigs. There’s also a replica of his bike leaning by the side of the house.

Notable details in McCartney’s former home include a replica of his first guitar and a stack of eggs tray in the kitchen, which his father used for noise insulation when the boys rehearsed in the dining room.

From what I have gathered in reading over the years, these homes aren’t terribly different from many homes in Britain after World War II. The Beatles came from working-class to middle-class families who cast normal aspirations for their sons. Of course, the Beatles moved beyond those aspirations though there was an interesting period between the start of their musical careers and before they hit it big when it wasn’t clear whether they were going to be stuck in normal lives. While it is hard to imagine a Paul McCartney or John Lennon living mundane lives in office jobs or manual labor or hustling to get by, this could have happened.

I suspect one question that people would ask when walking through these homes is how such music could have been developed in such settings. Perhaps it even helps drive home the point about the unusual success of the Beatles compared to many others.

Naperville mayoral candidates concerned about teardowns, infill development?

Posted on by

A quick overview of the six candidates interested in running for mayor in Naperville suggests at least a few are concerned with teardowns and infill development:

Councilman Doug Krause, a 66-year-old real estate broker, has been serving on the City Council since 1989 and ran unsuccessfully for the city’s top spot in the past. He said the city needs to be careful with infill developments, “making sure (they’re) compatible with the surrounding neighbors.”…

Retired Carol Stream firefighter Marty Walker agreed, saying the city must support both large and small businesses. Walker, 62, has been volunteering with Naperville events like Ribfest and Last Fling and said taking on the job of mayor would be a way to “continue to help people.”

Jim Haselhorst, a 54-year-old dental office manager who volunteers through the Naperville Jaycees, said he is entering the race because he feared several of candidates may not be as committed to the job as Pradel has been. He too, listed development as a major issue, especially in light of teardowns and rezoning in recent years.

“It’s a challenge to maintain a family-friendly environment in a way that keeps the nature of the city, the character of the city, intact,” he said.

While it is still early in the process, I believe these comments are quite indicative of the state in which Naperville finds itself today. It is built-out, meaning that there is little to no open land available for development. The city is large but has a high quality of life, as indicated by its recent ranking as the 33rd best place to live in the United States. The downtown is quite attractive – with plans underway to expand across to the south bank of the DuPage River – and there is still a thriving high-tech corridor along I-88.

Given these conditions, the statements by the mayoral candidates make a lot of sense: how can a mature community encourage growth (enough to pay for the good quality of life without having to raise taxes too much, keep its reputation as a thriving place) in such a way that its good character (wealthy, lots of good-sized single-family homes, family-friendly) is preserved? This will be a delicate balance but one that will go a long way to determining the Naperville of the next 50 years.

“An urban slum in the countryside” marked by a lack of McMansions

Posted on by

McMansions may be everywhere (including Iraq) but one writer notes their conspicuous absence in the suburbs of Cardiff, Wales:

“Out on what were the squelchy red muds, bluebell woods, beech-clad hillocks and bosky blackberry hedgerows of the ancient parish of Llanederyn, prices have collapsed and nothing sells. Few want to live in a no man’s land 40 minutes by bus from the city centre, an unloved, invisible of executive Mcmansions, roundabouts and superstores, sagging lintels and dripping gutters.”

We also learn that Trowbridge is “shabby and lacklustre” and that Llanederyn’s Maelfa indoor precinct is “a post-apolcalyptic boarded-up no-go zone, spurned by market forces uninterested in poor people.

“Thus was created an urban slum in the countryside.”

Some vivid descriptions that evoke a bleak image. It is interesting to compare this description of bleakness with how such things are discussed in regard to American McMansions. Outside of depictions of “zombie subdivisions” due to unfinished developments or suburban neighborhoods ravaged by foreclosures, American critics of McMansions tend to emphasize their emotional bleakness. Having McMansions implies having plenty of money or resources (or at least the means of acquiring debt). Yet, critics suggest neighborhoods with McMansions lack community, are lonely, project images of power but are empty inside. In the future, all those McMansions may suffer the fate of many homes: people who have moved on to newer and better things, the need for many home repairs, and a lack of exterior sheen due to age. The bleakness is not class-based or like urban blight with empty and boarded-up buildings but rather is based on a lack of soul.