Author Archives: legallysociable

Lost Star Terk episode was to feature Milton Berle as a “messianic sociologist”

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I’ve noted before that sociologists are rarely featured in television shows or in movies. Alas, it looks like CBS won’t allow the creation of a new online Star Trek episode based on a long-lost script featuring Milton Berle as a “messianic sociologist.”

Last fall an unused script for the cult 1960s television show turned up after being forgotten for years. Its author, the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, announced that it would become an episode of a popular Web series, “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II,” which features amateur actors in the classic roles of Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and other crew members of the starship Enterprise.

But then another player stepped in: CBS, which said it owned the script and blocked a planned Web production of it. Trekkies were appalled. “These executives should be phasered on heavy stun,” said Harmon Fields of Manhattan, who called himself “a ‘Star Trek’ fan of galactic proportions.”…

The story begins in 1967, after Mr. Spinrad wrote an acclaimed episode of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” “I did ‘The Doomsday Machine’ fast,” Mr. Spinrad, 71, said by phone from his home in Greenwich Village, “and then they said: ‘We’re in a hole. Can you write something in four days?’ ”

The result was “He Walked Among Us,” which the producers envisioned as a dramatic vehicle for the comedian Milton Berle. His character is a well-meaning but messianic sociologist whose conduct threatens to destroy the planet Jugal. The crew of the Enterprise must remove him without disrupting the normal development of the culture.

Spinrad’s script was set aside and he recently made it available online.

Milton Berle as a “well-meaning but messianic sociologist” sounds very intriguing. How much did Spinrad intend this as commentary about sociologists and social policy in the late 1960s? Perhaps sociologists should be glad this show was not made as it probably doesn’t put sociologists in the best light. In fact, it sounds like it could feed into some common stereotypes of sociologists: they may care about some important issues but in the end they are academics who don’t know how things work in the real world. At the same time, how many sociologists are Star Trek fans and would love to see their discipline discussed in an episode?

Smaller luxury homes: “I’d rather have a 3,500-square-foot house and have it make sense.”

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Two home builders in Tennessee explain that they are building smaller luxury homes:

The luxury homes being built by Castle Homes are smaller than just a few years ago, Looney said.

“Not 8,000 square feet. Now the average is 4,500 square feet,” he said.

The custom home Colclasure is completing in Green Hills has about 3,700 square feet, and the open design almost eliminates hallways.

“The days of the McMansion with 6,000 square feet and you live in 2,000, the days of people wanting those houses, are long gone,” Colclasure said. “I’d rather have a 3,500-square-foot house and have it make sense.”

This is a decent reduction in size: moving from 8,000 to 4,500 square feet is a 44% drop while going from 6,000 to 3,500 square feet is a 42% drop. At the same time, these are still large homes. Most new houses do not have 4,500 square feet and even 3,500 square foot homes are 1,100 square feet above the 2010 average. Is this enough of a size reduction to not have these homes labeled as environmentally unfriendly or McMansions?

I really want Colclasure to explain what he means by this final statement: what does it mean for a large house to “make sense”? Does that mean that the large houses of ten years ago don’t “make sense” even if today’s builders built those same homes? Does this mean that luxury homes now come with more features rather than just size? Does it mean that builders have grabbed onto the idea that they can’t just sell impressive size?

Sociology professor developed and used computer program for grading papers

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Sociologist Ed Brant has developed and used a grading program for student papers:

Brent designed software called a SAGrader to grade student papers in a matter of seconds. The program works by analyzing sentences and paragraphs for keywords and relationships between terms. Brent believes the program can be used as a tool to save time for teachers by zeroing in on the main points of an essay and allowing teachers to rate papers for the use of language and style.

“I don’t think we want to replace humans,” Brent says in an article in Wired. “But we want to do the fun stuff, the challenging stuff. And the computer can do the tedious but necessary stuff.”

Using the software still requires work on the teacher’s part, though. To prepare the program to grade papers, a teacher must enter all of the components they expect a paper to include. Teachers also have to consider the hundreds of ways a student might address the pieces of an essay.

Interestingly, one person in the testing business argues that the biggest issue is not how well the software does at grading but whether people believe the program can do a good job:

But it’s tough to tout a product that tinkers with something many educators believe only a human can do.

“That’s the biggest obstacle for this technology,” said Frank Catalano, a senior vice president for Pearson Assessments and Testing, whose Intelligent Essay Assessor is used in middle schools and the military alike. “It’s not its accuracy. It’s not its suitability. It’s the believability that it can do the things it already can do.”

If this were used widely and becomes normal practice, it could redefine what it means to be a professor or teacher. This is not a small issue in an era where many argue that learning online or from a book could be as effective (or at least as cost-effective) compared to sending students to pricey colleges.

I wonder what percentage of sociologists would support using such grading programs in their own classrooms and throughout academic institutions.

Elderly co-housing in France an alternative to Going Solo in the United States?

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While Americans may be increasingly living alone, Le Monde reports on another trend: co-housing among the elderly.

This unconventional but pragmatic solution is happening all over France – dozens of house-shares have already been created, and they are giving food for thought to many in their 60s, 70s and 80s…

According to Yankel Fijalkow, urban sociologist and author of “Sociologie du Logement” [Sociology of Housing], “House-sharing for the elderly is a sort of group response to the ambient individualism.” Fijalkow says. “It is part of the same phenomenon as co-housing – houses with shared facilities – in Northern Europe and the United States or housing cooperatives. Faced by the fragility of the family unit, a desire emerges to recreate a quasi-family.”

But Fijalkow adds: “Let’s not be idealistic. Accommodation is expensive, and this is mostly a commercial transaction. With the current changes in family models, we go from being part of a couple to living on our own or in a house-share. People are flexible and adapt when the housing market is prohibitively expensive.”…

This system is being adopted all over Europe. Colocation Seniors, an organization in the western French city of Nantes was inspired by a similar project in Belgium, and has already helped dozens of seniors set up house-shares in the last three years, offering continuing support even after the house-share has been organized.

It is hard to know from this article how big of a trend this really is.

It is interesting to hear Fijalkow talk about these two motivating factors: a desire to have a “quasi-family” and economic realities. Which of these are more important? Does this suggest that people with more economic resources would not choose co-housing? It is already a foregone conclusion in many places that most families are fragile and/or past the breaking point?

This also reminds of the end of Kate Bolick’s article “All the Single Ladies” from November 2011. Here is where Bolick ends her thoughts on current relationships between women and men – a tour of a sort of dormitory for single women in Amsterdam:

The Begijnhof is big—106 apartments in all—but even so, I nearly pedaled right past it on my rented bicycle, hidden as it is in plain sight: a walled enclosure in the middle of the city, set a meter lower than its surroundings. Throngs of tourists sped past toward the adjacent shopping district. In the wall is a heavy, rounded wood door. I pulled it open and walked through.

Inside was an enchanted garden: a modest courtyard surrounded by classic Dutch houses of all different widths and heights. Roses and hydrangea lined walkways and peeked through gates. The sounds of the city were indiscernible. As I climbed the narrow, twisting stairs to Ellen’s sun-filled garret, she leaned over the railing in welcome—white hair cut in a bob, smiling red-painted lips. A writer and producer of avant-garde radio programs, Ellen, 60, has a chic, minimal style that carries over into her little two-floor apartment, which can’t be more than 300 square feet. Neat and efficient in the way of a ship, the place has large windows overlooking the courtyard and rooftops below. To be there is like being held in a nest.

We drank tea and talked, and Ellen rolled her own cigarettes and smoked thoughtfully. She talked about how the Dutch don’t regard being single as peculiar in any way—people are as they are. She feels blessed to live at the Begijnhof and doesn’t ever want to leave. Save for one or two friends on the premises, socially she holds herself aloof; she has no interest in being ensnared by the gossip on which a few of the residents thrive—but she loves knowing that they’re there. Ellen has a partner, but since he’s not allowed to spend the night, they split time between her place and his nearby home. “If you want to live here, you have to adjust, and you have to be creative,” Ellen said. (When I asked her if starting a relationship was a difficult decision after so many years of pleasurable solitude, she looked at me meaningfully and said, “It wasn’t a choice—it was a certainty.”)

When an American woman gives you a tour of her house, she leads you through all the rooms. Instead, this expat showed me her favorite window views: from her desk, from her (single) bed, from her reading chair. As I perched for a moment in each spot, trying her life on for size, I thought about the years I’d spent struggling against the four walls of my apartment, and I wondered what my mother’s life would have been like had she lived and divorced my father. A room of one’s own, for each of us. A place where single women can live and thrive as themselves.

How modern societies reconcile aging and individualism will be very interesting to watch.

Man sentenced for harassing female employees must take sociology class on gender

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I’ve never read of someone being sentenced to take a sociology course in response to admitting to harassing female employees:

Haralambos Katsikis, 53, owner of Stelio’s, admitted to sufficient facts Thursday in Lowell Superior Court to five counts of annoying and accosting a person of the opposite sex.

Middlesex Superior Court Judge Paul Chernoff sentenced Katsikis to two years probation with the conditions he stay away and have no contact with the five female former employees. The judge also ordered him to audit an appropriate sociology course on women in the workplace or gender issues at Middlesex Community College and to complete community service that involves delivering food to the women’s shelter…

In November 2008, Katsikis was the subject of complaints that he had harassed and accosted women who worked in his restaurant. Investigators later determined the women were subjected to a barrage of sexualized comments and unwanted physical contact by Katsikis. In an attempt to avoid Katsikis’ behavior, some of the women developed a buddy system where they would stay in pairs when they needed to go upstairs near his office to get supplies.

I wonder what Katsikis will think after following through on auditing an appropriate sociology class.

Ads to forestall foreclosure?

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From the how-can-I-best-annoy-my-neighbors department, WebUrbanist explains how you can trade your home’s exterior for mortgage payments:

Looking to make a little extra money, and instigate an all-out war with your neighbors? A company called ‘Brainiacs from Mars‘ has the perfect solution. They’ll paint your house in the brightest, most annoying colors imaginable and plaster it with logos in the ‘Billboard Home Initiative’, which is aimed at homeowners dealing with the threat of foreclosure.

I guess homeowners facing eviction now have a new way to not go quietly.  Though I wonder if pulling a stunt like this would actually accelerate the foreclosure process.  With so many homeowners behind on their mortgage payments and the huge backlog of foreclosure cases in some areas, it strikes me that purposely turning one’s home into a garish billboard might move actually one to the very top of a bank’s priority list for eviction.

McMansion = a “home [that] had a heart and it was ripped out”?

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The award-winning play “Rabbit Hole” includes an interesting view of the McMansion:

A child dies, a mother grieves, a father agonizes and a family is changed forever…

For “Rabbit Hole,” set designer Susan Crabtree has created a house that outwardly reflects an upper-middle-class lifestyle, yet frames a troubled family within.

In notes for the press, Crabtree says of her inspiration, “We wanted to create an impression of a ‘McMansion’ — a well-appointed home. But, as the story evolves, we discover the home had a heart and it was ripped out. In the end, the house is just a house — people are the real home. They have to find their family again as they turn to each other.”

The play earned the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The playwright was sure to include doses of comic relief along with thought-provoking lines to further draw in the audience. Its 2006 debut on Broadway earned “Sex and the City” actress Cynthia Nixon a 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a play, among three other Tony nominations. Her cast included fellow actors John Slattery of “Mad Men” fame and Tyne Daly from “Cagney and Lacy.”

Maybe this play isn’t really about the suburbs or certain kinds of homes but the description sounds like it builds upon some common ideas. I wonder if McMansion critics would like this depiction of such a house: it is place that may look nice but it has no heart. In other words, a McMansion doesn’t create or help develop a family – rather, it may even hinder them from forming deeper relationships. Put another way, you can buy the impressive looking house but that is not what really matters in the long run. This play also seems to draw upon common critiques of suburbia, the land where everyone acts like they have it together but the nice homes and communities hide desperate tales.

 

Translating the dystopian world of The Hunger Games…into 1930s scenery?

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In my review of The Hunger Games movie, I noted that I was not terribly impressed by the futuristic designs in the movie. At The Atlantic, three design critics make similar arguments and note that much of the scenery and design is not from the future but rather from the 1930s. Here are a few of their thoughts:

The props, sets, and costumes are a giant mash-up of visual cues taken from eras when the socioeconomic disparity between classes was so extreme as to be dangerous. The look is sort of cherry picked from influences ranging from the French Revolution to the Third Reich to Alexander McQueen. A more unified or coherent vision, one that took the influences and used them to create something unique, might have served the story better…

The opening scenes in District 12 are atmospheric and period precise. The bleached-out blue palette, the wooden shacks, the muddy roads—you know you are in the 1930s of the Farm Services Administration photographers. There were a couple of moments, like the line of cabins going down into the hollow, or the two scrawny kids looking out of a hole in the wall, that I could almost swear were direct imitations of a photograph. I found out after I saw the movie that those scenes were filmed in Henry River, North Carolina, an abandoned mill town from the 1920s. In District 12, it is coal. In North Carolina, it was yarn…

The overall look of the Capitol was 1930s neoclassicism, an architectural style used by the Nazis and based on Roman precedents. Fascist architecture seems too easy and obvious an equivalence for Panem’s totalitarian regime. I thought Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins was trying to make a trenchant point about what we all like to watch now. Making the Capitol a contemporary skyscraper city, like a forest of Far East towers, would have made a much more pointed contrast with the Appalachian opening. What about the top of Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, with its mile-high infinity pool, as the setting for Katniss and Peeta’s pre-Games talk? How could you get more decadent than that?…

Maybe oppressive architecture in movies has to be Fascist, in the same way that aliens need to be either robotic, humanoid, or insect-like—otherwise we don’t immediately recognize and fear what we’re seeing. The tributes’ apartment was like an outdated hotel room that was trying too hard to be hip but not quite succeeding; the green chairs were ridiculous in the same way as Effie’s shoes, hats, and makeup…

On the whole, these critics argue that the movie seems to lean on the past a lot rather than casting a new vision for the future. I understand the difficulties of doing this; futuristic settings can be too jarring or cheesy (see the city scenes in Star Wars Episodes I-III). Maybe moviegoers are more invested in the movie if there are scenes they can recognize. For example, the Nazi narrative is clear to many so invoking these ideas in the Capitol is an easy way to make a link between Nazism and the totalitarianism that made the Hunger Games possible in the first place. The movie taps into familiar cultural narratives such as the Depression or Nazism, pointing to the future while also drawing on the past.

Perhaps this comes down to an argument about whether movie makers should always try to hit a home run with design and setting or play it safe. I think The Hunger Games played it safe on this end. Rather than risk ridicule or have to develop a whole new world, they borrowed heavily from known images. Perhaps this could even drive home the possibly commentary even further that we aren’t as far away from this sort of world as we might think. In other words, the future (or the present) might look a lot similar to the pas.t But I think this was a missed opportunity: considering the budget and popularity of the books, the movie could have presented a grand vision of the future that truly captured the attention of viewers and also pushed design and popular imagery of the future further.

Trading in a McMansion for a McCottage doesn’t stop criticism

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One firm argues that the trend toward tiny houses may simply be a shift from McMansions to “McCottages”:

Not to rain on the parade, but let’s have a reality check. Small, very small and microhomes – ranging from 800 or 900 square feet down to 100 or 150 – may be a new trend, a fad, or just the subject of some clever marketing by their builders.

“The McCottage is replacing the McMansion as a home status symbol as more homeowners look to save money and reduce their impact on the environment,” says HSH Associates, the mortgage data firm. While national figures are hard to come by, or don’t exist, HSH quotes builders who suggest microhomes will be the next big thing…

If you’re building a weekend or vacation place, smaller is cheaper and better for the environment. But the HSH story says many people are building microhomes alongside their main homes as an alternative to a more traditional addition…

Finally, consider that the microhome fascination may be a passing fad that will leave owners with white elephants when fashions change in a few years. While many people scoff at the McMansion today, pressure to display wealth and keep up with the Joneses often returns when economic conditions improve. Just think about how people go back to SUVs and trucks when gas prices fall.

This argument suggests there are several ways tiny houses and McMansions are alike. With the prefix “Mc” before mansions and cottages, there is a suggestion that these are simply mass produced. Whether the home is big or small, mass produced is bad. There could be two issues behind this. First, there could be issues with the architectural quality and integrity. In other words, you could order one of these tiny houses out of a catalog, order it, and tow it into your backyard as could thousands of other people. Your tiny house is not unique.

There is a second issue with the mass produced nature of these houses: there is the possibility they are simply a fad and not a lasting trend. A savvy consumer doesn’t want to fall prey to these trends and simply follow along because it is a “status symbol,” even if it is a greener or cooler status symbol than a McMansion. This suggests that a buyer/owner needs to have more legitimate reasons for acquiring a tiny house.

Overall, it appears people unhappy with McMansions and who could get behind tiny houses may just have to fight similar negative generalizations.

 

Fighting the “artificial positivity” on Facebook with EnemyGraph

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A new Facebook app called EnemyGraph allows users to openly mark their “enemies” on Facebook:

EnemyGraph, a new app for Facebook, allows users to do just that: Declare their enemies on the world’s most popular social network.

It may sound sinister, but the motivation is more sociological, say the developers, a group from the Emerging Media + Communications program at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Facebook has this artificial positivity kind of forced upon it,” said Harrison Massey, a student at UT Dallas who, along with Dean Terry, the director of the program, and Bradley Griffith, a graduate student, collaborated to develop the app. “We believe that there is a certain amount of health in saying that you don’t like something, that something is your enemy, because you can create conversations about that. You can bond with people over that.”

Massey said, for example, that users could bond over the common dislike of a company or a political party…

“We are misusing the word ‘enemy’ the same way that Facebook misuses the word ‘friend,”‘ Terry, the UT professor behind the project, told HuffPost. “It’s totally inaccurate. It’s not about individuals. It’s really about things in popular culture.”

Several thoughts about this:

1. I think Facebook is pretty smart by limiting the negativity within the software itself. Of course, users can make negative statements on walls but even these can be deleted. Since Facebook is about connecting people, formal negativity could detract from this. Let’s say that you don’t like someone’s posts: Facebook’s easiest answer these days is to simply block them from showing up on your news feed. The genius is that the other person doesn’t know this so the negative interaction between the two people is limited and life goes on.

2. EnemyGraph seems to be channeling the sort of sentiment sometimes expressed by users asking for a “dislike” button to balance the “like” button. Isn’t it more “balanced” to have both options?

3. Perhaps in EnemyGraph’s favor, social interactions, particularly group interactions, are often reliant on clearly labeling who is “in” and who is “out.” Without the easy ability to mark who is “out” in Facebook, marking symbolic and moral boundaries becomes more difficult. Developing deeper relationships through having common enemies could be more difficult. Of course, drawing strong subgroup boundaries can lead to other issues such as antagonism between groups.

4. I bet Facebook would argue (and perhaps could even prove) that their current system actually increases social interaction and introducing more negative capabilities would limit social interaction. Think about other areas of web interaction (comment sections or pages like Digg) and see how the ability to formally report negative feelings leads to a different kind of environment.

5. I’m amused about broadly defining “enemy” just as Facebook broadly defines “friend.”