Author Archives: legallysociable

Whatever happened to Occupy Naperville?

Posted on by

After seeing a few stories about the renewed Occupy Wall Street effort yesterday in a number of global cities, I wondered: what happened to Occupy Naperville? A few updates:

1. From the Occupy Naperville website (occupynaperville.org): they will be meeting again this Saturday, September 22.

Occupy Naperville Every Saturday Until We End the Corporate Dominance of our Government and Achieve Economic, Social, Democratic, and Environmental Justice for All

  • We are a grassroots movement, non-partisan and non-violent  and enlightened, intent upon establishing genuine democracy and just systems with sharing and fairness toward all.
  • Overcoming domination by elites and involving representatives of all stakeholders can lead society to creative solutions in both public and private spheres that serve the common good.

2. The media has been quiet regarding the group. The last story I could find in the local media was from April 17, 2012 when both Occupy Naperville and a local Tea Party group went to Benedictine University:

Benedictine University in Lisle held Youth Government Day on Tuesday. Through the event, Benedictine hosted several hundred high school students and representatives of two political movements…

This year, the CCL invited representatives of two highly visible political movements — Occupy Naperville and the Illinois Tea Party — to campus to demonstrate to high school students what their rallies look like. The students — with public safety officials, CCL leaders and their teachers present — were able to choose which of the mock rallies they wanted to attend. The event was designed as a learning exercise for the students, not to elicit any tension or conflict between the two groups.

After the rallies, leaders from both movements took part in a panel discussion with the students. Each side discussed what motivates them, how they organize, what resources they have and how they use social media to communicate with their members.

I wonder if any local students were convinced either way.

3. I’d love to see an academic study about Occupy Wall Street in the suburbs. All of the news stories I have seen have focused on the big cities and the larger gatherings of protesters. What happens to a social movement group in a more decentralized landscape? Naperville may be a suburban corporate center but these big businesses are not downtown. The protesters could still take on Starbucks, Apple, and other chain restaurants and retail stores but that is not quite the same in going to headquarters of major banks in a big city.

How Americans use “tax talk” to assert their own status

Posted on by

In a timely follow-up to an earlier post, a sociologist further explains a study about “tax talk” in America:

Our findings highlight how people can use tax talk as a way of asserting what sociologist Herbert Blumer called “a sense of group position.” That is, tax talk can be a symbolic way for people to proclaim their righteousness in contrast to those they believe are less deserving. Thus, our interviews were filled with abstract descriptions of people our respondents felt unjustly benefited from federal tax policies…

The importance of our findings is in how people brought these economic issues to life in everyday discourse. In ordinary talk these matters are not really about balancing budgets and encouraging growth. They are about a moral sense of right and wrong. They are about asserting one’s belief about who should and should not be rewarded by the policies of the federal government, and it’s worth noting here that even though we attempted to engage people in talk about all forms of taxation, people generally only wanted to talk about federal income tax.

Ultimately, our respondents’ discursive use of the income tax – as a symbol of a morally illegitimate, exploitive relationship between hard-working middle-class people, and the rich and poor who exploit them – helps to illuminate why tax talk occupies such a central place in American political discourse. Among other things, it helps to illuminate what American conservatives talk about when they talk about taxes.

Fiscal debates are about more than money; they are also about the meanings people attribute to how that money is collected in the first place. The Tea Party is a vivid example. Although the rhetoric of the Tea Party concerns taxes, this is not the main policy concern of the movement. Instead, Tea Party activists use anti-tax rhetoric to position themselves symbolically as a righteous group burdened by policies they believe only benefit the rich and the poor.

This sounds like boundary making, to put it into terms used in the sociology of culture. One way groups can differentiate between themselves is to draw strong symbolic and moral boundaries. In this case, paying taxes is seen as this moral boundary. Hard-working Americans pay their “fair share” while those above and below them find ways to shirk their civic duty. This is a clear value judgment that is then used to back or undergird political action.

Given the current political situation, we need a follow-up study that then looks at how taxes are talked about in social groups beyond this limited sample. As I noted in the earlier post, this ethnographic study had a targeted sample: “24 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with white Southerners who owned or managed small businesses—a demographic group that is typically anti-taxation.” How do other Americans wield taxes as a symbolic and moral boundary in their own actions and politics? President Obama has clearly used another moral boundary, suggesting those with more income and wealth should be paying more in taxes. This is a different kind of “fair share” but it might also give these higher-income Americans their own moral boost.

Genius and creativity = “a probabilistic function of quantity”

Posted on by

I was recently reading a Malcolm Gladwell article about the invention of the computer mouse and came across this statistical definition of genius and creativity:

The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn’t necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. “Quality,” Simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.”

Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “The more successes there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well”—meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too.

To put this in graph terms: as time increases, a creative person has an increasing number of ideas, a line with positive slope. Underneath this overall line of ideas is another positive line tracking the unsuccessful ideas and below that, increasing steadily but perhaps at a slower rate, is the line of successful ideas. In other words, the more overall ideas someone has, the more failures but also the more quality ideas.

The rest of the article is about creating the right structural environment to take advantage of ideas. Most groups and organizations won’t recognize all the best ideas but innovative organizations find ways to encourage and push the good ideas to the top. Indeed, the clincher at the end of the article is that Steve Jobs, supposedly one of the best innovators America has had in recent decades, missed some opportunities as well.

A world where “the city talks back”

Posted on by

Taking part in a conference in Germany about megacities, sociologist Saskia Sassen makes an interesting comment linking technology and cities:

The effects of the digital revolution shape the urban space and the access of city dwellers to their environs. The focus here is on technologies that allow us, within and with the city, to communicate with buildings and objects. “The city talks back,” says the renowned sociologist Saskia Sassen, one of the most distinguished authors who has published on the sociology of urban development and shaped the term ‘global city’. Felix Petersen, who has recently triggered a trend with his opinion platform Amen, will get together with other innovators to discuss his visions of location-based services. A brief run-down of new technologies will be presented in the “Elevator Pitches” session. Raul Krauthausen provides a new kind of access to cities by way of his Wheelmap application.

I’m intrigued by the idea “the city talks back.” This could simply refer to material objects; city residents and visitors will be able to quickly see more about buildings and objects. For example, Google is working on developing maps of building interiors. Or perhaps all buildings will be equipped with Siri-like voices that can respond to basic questions. However, I wonder how much of this is really about creating another avenue for interacting with other humans in the city. Buildings don’t “talk” – even the artificial intelligence of today has to be programmed.

More broadly, this reminds me of Simmel’s early 1900s ideas about “the stranger” in the city and the general lack of intimate relationships. Through apps and new technologies, we may have more people to “talk to” or “interact with” but are these deep urban relationships or even helpful ones? Or is this just more clutter, another category of urban stimulation that leads to a more “blase” attitude (following up with Simmel)? I suspect Sassen is right that new technology will change how we see cities and the objects and people within them but I also suspect it will have a mix of positive and negative consequences.

Let’s just hope the city talks backs in forms other than advertisements…

Activist charged for downloading millions of JSTOR articles

Posted on by

Many academics use databases like JSTOR to find articles from academic journals. However, one user violated the terms of service by downloading millions of articles and is now being charged by the federal government:

Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public…

“JSTOR authorizes users to download a limited number of journal articles at a time,” according to the latest indictment. “Before being given access to JSTOR’s digital archive, each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export content from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated programs such as web robots, spiders, and scrapers. JSTOR also uses computerized measures to prevent users from downloading an unauthorized number of articles using automated techniques.”

MIT authorizes guests to use the service, which was the case with Swartz, who at the time was a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics.

It sounds like there is some disconnect here: services like JSTOR want to maintain some control over the academic content they provide even as they exist to help researchers find printed scholarly articles. Services like JSTOR can make big money by collating journal articles and requiring libraries to pay for access. Thus, someone like Swartz could download a lot of the articles and then avoid paying for or using JSTOR down the road (though academic users are primarily paying through institutions who pass the costs along to users). But what is “a limited number of journal articles at a time”? Using an automated program is clearly out according to the terms of service but what if a team of undergraduates banded together, downloaded a similar number of articles, and pooled their downloads?

If we are indeed headed toward a world of “big data,” which presumably would include the thousands of scholarly articles published each year, we are likely in for some interesting battles in a number of areas over who gets to control, download, and access this data.

Another thought: does going to open access academic journals eliminate this issue?

A conservative fighting sprawl argues it is a Ponzi scheme

Posted on by

Here is a summary of the arguments against sprawl made by conservative Chuck Marohn:

But, while my concern with sprawling growth patterns was rooted in their effect on the landscape, on the environment, and on severely compromised populations left behind, Chuck is all about the money. As Thoughts on Building Strong Towns makes quite clear, Chuck believes that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme and we the taxpayers are the ones left holding the empty bags.

In fact, the lead chapters of the book are devoted to the Ponzi thesis, whereby municipalities chase outward growth to find new tax revenue that proves insufficient when the infrastructure needs repair; so they chase even more new growth to pay for the previous round, over and over, until the pattern chokes the economic life out of the place. In Chuck’s words:

“The local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange – a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation – is one element of a Ponzi scheme.

The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure.  In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance . . .

We’ve done this because, as with any Ponzi scheme, new growth provides the illusion of prosperity. In the near term, revenue grows, while the corresponding maintenance obligations – which are not counted on the public balance sheet — are a generation away.”

A few thoughts about this:

1. I’ve seen this in action in suburbs and the problem becomes particularly acute when growth slows or stops or the economy runs into trouble. At these points, the revenue flow based on developer fees plus the new tax revenues from property and sales taxes slows and budgets have to be looked at more closely.

2. Infrastructure is a long-term investment, not a short-term building issue. Lots of communities face this issue: how to generate enough money to substantially fix or replace aging infrastructure? Money needs to be consistently budgeted for these issues because issuing bonds is not always a good answer.

3. I’ve wondered this before: how much of growth is driven by money versus the status that comes with being a growing community? The money from new development is clearly important but there is also prestige associated with moving forward, adding to the population, and continually adding to the tax base. Imagine this line: “a good community is a stagnant/plateaued community.” I don’t think so.

4. More broadly, this is a call for more comprehensive long-term planning in communities. This doesn’t just mean 5, 10, and 20 year projections – communities need to think how the world might change, whether they will have the resources to change course, and how open they will be to pursuing differences courses given the changing world.

A mass transit revolution in Los Angeles?

Posted on by

Matt Yglesias argues that Los Angeles has turned the corner in promoting mass transit and is poised to become “America’s next great mass-transit city”:

The process started in earnest with the construction of the often-scoffed-about Red and Purple subway lines in the 1990s. This began to create the bones of a major rapid transit system. But it’s kicked into overdrive in the 21st-century thanks to the confluence of three separate incidents. First, Rep. Henry Waxman, the powerful House Democrat who represents L.A.’s Westside, went from being a NIMBY opponent of transit construction to an environmentalist booster. Second, Antonio Villaraigosa  was elected mayor in 2004. Third, in 2008, L.A. County voters passed Measure R, a ballot proposition that raised sales taxes to create a dedicated funding stream for new transit. Thanks to Measure R and Waxman, a new Expo Line connecting downtown to some of the Westside is already open, and work will begin on a “subway to the sea” beneath Beverly Hills soon. The same pool of money also finances expansion of the light rail Gold Line and the rapid-bus Orange Line while helping hold bus fares down…

Perhaps most importantly of all, the city is acting to transform the built environment to match the new infrastructure. A controversial plan to rezone the Hollywood area for more density has passed. The city has also moved to reduce the number of parking spaces developers need to provide with new projects, following the lead of the smaller adjacent cities of Santa Monica and West Hollywood. A project to reconfigure Figueroa Boulevard running south from downtown toward Exposition Park as a bike-and-pedestrian friendly byway is in the works, and pending the outcome of a November ballot initiative, a streetcar may be added to the mix. At the northern end is the massive L.A. Live complex of movie theaters, restaurants, arenas, hotels, condos, and apartments—the biggest downtown investment the city had seen in decades, constructed between 2005 and 2010. At the southern end of the corridor is the University of Southern California, which is planning to redevelop its own backyard to look a bit more like a traditional urban university village.

Los Angeles continues, like almost all American cities, to be primarily automobile oriented. But the policy shift is having a real impact on the ground. The most recent American Community Survey showed a 10.7 percent increase in the share of the metro area’s population that relies on mass transit to get to work, matched with a 3.6 percent increase in driving. And that’s before several of the key Metro projects have been completed or the waning of the recession can drive new transit-oriented development.

As work continues, people will find that Los Angeles has some attributes that make it an ideal transit city. Consultant and planner Jarrett Walker notes that the city’s long straight boulevards make it perfect for high-quality express bus service. And then, of course, there’s the weather. Something like a nine-minute wait for a bus, a 15-minute walk to your destination, or an afternoon bike ride are all more pleasant in Southern California than in a Boston winter or a sweltering Washington August. As a quirk of fate, the East Coast of the United States was settled first, so cities with large pre-automobile urban cores are clustered there. But the fundamentals of climate and terrain are more favorable to walking and transit in Los Angeles than in New York. The city could have simply stuck with tradition and stayed as the first great metropolis of the automobile era. But it’s chosen instead to embrace the goal of growing even greater, which will necessarily mean denser and less auto-focused. While the Bay Area and many Northeastern cities stagnate under the weight of oppressive zoning codes, L.A. is changing—by design—into something even bigger and better than it already is.

Three other factors I think are in Los Angeles’ favor:

1. The metropolitan region is actually denser than all others in the United States:

The nation’s most densely populated urbanized area is Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, Calif., with nearly 7,000 people per square mile. The San Francisco-Oakland, Calif., area is the second most densely populated at 6,266 people per square mile, followed by San Jose, Calif. (5,820 people per square mile) and Delano, Calif. (5,483 people per square mile). The New York-Newark, N.J., area is fifth, with an overall density of 5,319 people per square mile

Mass transit works best in denser conditions when more people are within reach of mass transit stops/stations and it is more difficult to maintain and park a car. Los Angeles is rightfully known for sprawl but it is denser sprawl.

2. Los Angeles does have an earlier history of mass transit: streetcars were widely used in the early 1900s.

During the early and mid-1900?s the historic streetcar served as a popular mode of transportation along Broadway.  The Los Angeles Streetcar system was primarily operated by Pacific Electric (1901-1961) and developed into the largest trolley system in the world by the 1920?s. This breath of scale enabled residents and visitors alike to routinely traverse the Los Angeles region, and connected many of Southern California’s communities. The system operated for over half a century, and at its peak traversed over 1,100 miles of track with  900 electric trolley cars; this dense network produced a rate of public transit usage higher than San Francisco does today on a per capita basis.

For years the system was considered by many to be “the vital cog in the city’s transportation system,” and according to author Steven Ealson, provided transportation for millions who enjoyed the streetcar so much they would “ride for miles simply for fun or for transportation to places of amusement.” The demise of the streetcar began with the unprecedented development of single-family tract housing designed and built to accommodate automobiles. This pattern of development quickened during post-war housing construction, and accelerated the demise of the streetcar system as the region became dependent on private transportation.

Read more about how General Motors was involved in dismantling the streetcar system in many large cities, including LA.

3. I wonder if a larger proportions of Los Angeles residents and leaders are simply fed up with highway traffic and want to now look at different options. Remember “Carmageddon“?

h/t Instapundit

Interior designer chooses 1963 modernist home over (all?) McMansions

Posted on by

I’ve written about this theme recently but here is another version: an interior designer in Houston chooses to buy and redecorate a 1963 modernist home.

Architect Preston Bolton designed this stunning Tanglewood residence in 1963, a look that appears fresh and modern today. In the spring of this year, Kristen and Lee Nix moved in, but not before she transformed the sleek abode into a comfortable home for the couple and their 2-year-old son.

“I knew right when I walked in what I wanted to do,” Kristen said. “Grass rugs, grass cloth on the walls, not a lot of color but lots of texture.”…

“I felt like the house had such good bones in it . . .  it was different with its high ceilings and clean lines.”

The mid-century modern structure provided an ideal palette for Kristen’s interior design skills, honed at the knee of her mother, designer Sheridan Williams, and via a degree in interior design from Houston Community College.

1. The dichotomy presented in the headline is strange as it sounds like this interior designer and others only really have two choices: either a McMansion or a modernist home. Both of these types of homes are a small subset of all homes constructed. I think this is probably an example of McMansion being used as shorthand for all sorts of suburban homes and a modernist home clearly stands out from this crowd.

2. I’ve argued before I don’t think most Americans would choose a modernist home over a McMansion. Does this article prove my point by suggesting it takes an interior designer, someone trained in decor, style, and design, to choose the modernist home over the average and/or bland McMansions?

3. Why no exterior shot of the entire home??

Improving the word cloud: NYT adds rates of word usage and comparisons between groups

Posted on by

I’m generally not a big fan of word clouds but one of students recently pointed out to me an example from the New York Times that makes some improvements: looking at the rates of word usage at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. (Click through to see the interactive graphic.) Here is how I think this improves on a typical word cloud:

1. It doesn’t display word frequency but rather the rate of the word usage. Thus, we get an idea of how often the words were used in comparison to all the words that were said. Frequencies by themselves don’t tell you much but this helps put them into a context. (A note: I would like the graphic to include the total word usage for each convention so we have a quick idea of how many words were spoken).

2. The display also makes a comparison between the two political parties so we can see the relative word usage across two groups. This could run into the same problem as frequencies – just because one group uses the term more doesn’t necessarily mean they think it is more important – but we can start getting some clues into the differences in how Republicans and Democrats made a case for their party.

Overall, this is an improvement over the typical word cloud (make your own at wordle.net) and helps us start analyzing the tens of thousands of words spoken at the conventions. Of course, we would need a more complete analysis, probably including multiple coders, to really get at what was conveyed through the words (and that doesn’t even get at the visuals, body language, presentation).

The “most beautiful” McDonald’s in the US isn’t really in a McMansion

Posted on by

I’ve seen several references to this story about the Long Island McDonald’s that is in a 1795 house. A few details about the location:

Known as the Denton House, its bones date back to 1795, when it was constructed as a farm house by one Joseph Denton, a descendent of the founder of the village of Hempstead. In 1860, it was given a Georgian makeover, complete with gingerbread ornamentation, and throughout the 1900?s, found commercial use as a funeral home and a series of restaurants.

By 1986, it was abandoned and on the verge of falling down.

McDonalds purchased the property with the intention of tearing it down and replacing it with a standard McDonald’s restaurant. Thank God for the citizens of the New Hyde Park, who worked to secure landmark status for the building in 1987.

McDonald’s had no choice but to restore the property and work within the parameters of the landmarks commission, which ultimately resulted in their most beautiful restaurant in America (if you know of a better example, please let me know).

This is interesting in itself. However, I was also intrigued by another link to the original story that dubbed this Long Island McDonald’s the “McMansion of the Day.” Perhaps this is simply a play on words: it is a McDonald’s in a mansion so it cleverly could be called a McMansion. It wouldn’t be the first McDonald’s to earn the term; an Arkansas McDonald’s was also dubbed a McMansion.

But, perhaps this is an intentional use of the word McMansion with the typical meaning of a new, large, ugly house in the midst of suburban sprawl. If so, this is the wrong use. Yes, this particular McDonald’s is in the middle of suburban strip malls. However, this is truly a historic house, one that acquired landmark status. McDonald’s renovated the interior for their purposes but it still retains the appearance of an older mansion. People may not like that McDonald’s was able to do this to an older home but it is not really a McMansion in the typical understanding: it is not a new building, it was not originally mass produced (and McDonald’s changes probably weren’t mass reproduced in their other restaurants), and it doesn’t look ugly as the McDonald’s sign above the front door is pretty understated.