Author Archives: legallysociable

Americans are coolest nationality according to Badoo.com poll

Posted on by

A new poll from Badoo.com finds that Americans are the coolest nationality:

Social networking site Badoo.com asked 30,000 people across 15 countries to name the coolest nationality and also found that the Spanish were considered the coolest Europeans, Brazilians the coolest Latin Americans and Belgians the globe’s least cool nationality.

“We hear a lot in the media about anti-Americanism,” says Lloyd Price, Badoo’s Director of Marketing. “But we sometimes forget how many people across the world consider Americans seriously cool.”…

“America,” says Price, “boasts the world’s coolest leader, Obama; the coolest rappers, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg; and the coolest man in technology, Steve Jobs of Apple, the man who even made geeks cool.”

Brazilians are ranked the second coolest nationality in the Badoo poll and the coolest Latin Americans, ahead of Mexicans and Argentinians. The Spanish, in third place, are the coolest Europeans.

At least one marketer is happy.

Two thoughts:

1. I would be very hesitant about accepting the results of this poll. If this is a web survey of social network site users, it is probably not very representative of people within these countries. Serious news organizations should report on the methodology and discuss the downsides (and advantages) of this approach when reporting this information. But, if it is an accurate take on social network site users, generally younger, plugged-in populations, perhaps this is exactly what American companies would want to hear.

2. America has military, political, and economic power but this hints at another, less-recognized dimension: cultural power and influence. For better or worse, American values, celebrities, products, and ideas have spread throughout the world. Even if our economic and political power goes into a relative decline, this cultural influence will live on for some time. (A bonus: a Badoo poll from earlier this summer also said Americans are the funniest nationality!)

3. Is being “cool” really something to aspire to as a nation? In an America dominated by celebrity, media, and consumption, it may be hard to know that this is not the primary objective.

(Some background on Badoo.com.)

[CollegeNameHere].com coming to a browser near you

Posted on by

Even though colleges have their own Internet domain, .edu, some colleges are thinking about branching out into .com addresses:

Some observers worry, though, that an influx of new names might dilute the power of “.edu,” which has been the online way to say “a legitimately accredited institution of higher education in the United States.”

Weber State University is among those that have already started branching out, with “getintoweber.com” as an online destination. It is “a vanity URL we pursued to dovetail with our ‘Get Into Weber’ marketing campaign that started in 2007,” says John L. Kowaleski, director of media relations. “We wanted something catchy and easy to remember, since the intended audience for “getintoweber.com” was prospective students.”

Why not simply add a “getintoweber.edu” address to the existing “weber.edu“? Because “.edu” is restricted by the “one per institution” rule that has been in effect since 2001, says Gregory A. Jackson, a vice president of Educause, the higher-education-technology group that administers the “.edu” domain. “The U.S. Commerce Department, which gave us the contract to administer the domain, views ‘.edu’ as something that identifies an institution, not multiple names that mean the same institution,” he says…

Asking the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers for a domain of one’s own—”.weberstate” or “.trinity,” for instance—would avoid some of those problems. But that’s an expensive route to go. A college has to pay Icann $185,000 to become the administrator of a domain, and then $25,000 each year to maintain it. And the college has to adhere to strict rules about who gets the domain and who doesn’t, which could cause other problems. “What if you say that alumni can have ‘.dartmouth’ in order to strengthen connection to the school?” Mr. Jackson says. “And then an alumnus involved in some shady dealings uses that address? You can’t ban them. Icann won’t let you pick who you like and who you don’t.”

If the .com addresses are just for marketing purposes, why haven’t more colleges gone this route already? It isn’t very hard to set up a targeted site and then link through to the college’s main page.

It sounds like some of the issue is the meaning or symbolism behind the .edu domain. If prospective students and parents are searching for schools, they know the .edu domain is pretty safe. The .com realm is more open and there could be some confusion about who put the site together. Particularly for less comfortable web users, going to a .edu could be a safer and trustworthy proposition.

Of course, the rules about the use of .edu sites hints at bigger problems across the internet: a need for more domains to provide more online pages.

(With all of this talk, shouldn’t some enterprising people buy up a bunch of the possible .com sites? For example, wheatoncollege.com is available but wheaton.com is not. )

No new lawsuits for Righthaven

Posted on by

David Kravets over at Wired notes today that Righthaven appears to be on “life support” since it hasn’t filed any new lawsuits in a while:

With [a bunch of sanctions and adverse fee awards] now on appeal, the litigation factory’s machinery is grinding to a halt. A review of court records shows Righthaven has not filed a new lawsuit in two months, after a flurry of about 275 lawsuits since its launch at the beginning of last year. A court filing indicates there have already been layoffs (.pdf) at Righthaven’s Las Vegas headquarters, and even some already-filed lawsuits are falling by the wayside because Righthaven isn’t serving the defendants with the paperwork.

I think Wired may be a bit premature in its prediction of Righthaven’s demise.  Litigation factories have a tendency to rise again and again from the ashes.  Still, it’s nice to hear that no new bloggers are being hassled by Righthaven, at least at present.

What’s good for Amazon.com may not be good for California (or America)

Posted on by

Even though I just used this phrase (“What good for [company X] is good for America”] when looking at the impact of AT&T on American history, I agree that the deal Amazon is trying to offer California, jobs for no sales tax, is a bit strange:

Amazon has spent more than $5 million loading up their More Jobs Not Taxes campaign for a referendum that would repeal the legislation that started charging them taxes. Meanwhile, the latest turn in the political fight has been that Amazon offered to create 7,000 jobs if the state postpones enforcing its sales tax on the company until 2014.
Here’s why that offer is a big deal. It transforms a debate that is fundamentally about a value — fairness — into a numbers game. The next step will be that Amazon’s political operatives will plant the seed that the bill will kill jobs, probably a nice round number like 7,000 of them. According to our calculations, the politicos will say, California is killing the exact number of jobs that Amazon offered to add! Taxes are bad!
I don’t mean to pick on Amazon here. Every company is after as many tax advantages as they can get. Walmart, for example, which pushed the effort to get the Amazon sales tax bill passed, skirts some online sales taxes, too. And every company has realized that it is good politics to say that taxes kill jobs, whether they have real evidence for it or not…
Now, by transforming tax fights into skirmishes over how many jobs this or that tax will “kill,” every single tax becomes something that hurts America. The narrow (and self-serving) interests of every tax-fighting corporation become part of our national project. And the battlefield becomes the competing spreadsheets of political opponents who say that one plan or another will create more jobs, when it’s pretty obvious that no one knows precisely how that whole mechanism works.

Some observations:

1. Perhaps taxes are supposed to be about fairness – but corporations and municipalities have been playing this tax break game for years. Why wouldn’t Amazon think that it has enough clout to pull this off? Many communities and governmental bodies have been more than willing to give in to others.

2. The math is interesting: no sales tax = 7,000 jobs. I haven’t seen many details about this: does the value of these jobs equal the sales tax revenue that would be lost without Amazon? Couldn’t California hold out for more jobs or make this information public to try to worsen Amazon’s hand?

3. It is interesting that this battle about sales tax revenue between California and Amazon is getting attention; a number of states have already gone through this. Granted, California is bigger so perhaps this is about more money than elsewhere. But, additionally, California was home to some of the biggest property-tax revolts in the United States several decades ago, meaning that homeowners, and not just corporations, are interested in paying fewer taxes.

You know you are thinking like a sociologist or a statistician when…

Posted on by

Last week, I received a phone call from the news editor of the campus newspaper regarding a story: this year’s freshman class is 52% male, a change from recent years where it tended to be 51/49, 52/48 female. (For those who don’t know: Wheaton College tries to have an even gender ratio.) I was asked, “how would this affect the freshman class?”

My first thought was to check how much of a percentage change this was from previous years. Having a freshman class that is over 50% male might be a symbolic change might a 3% difference between last year and this year is less important than a 5 or 7 or or 10% difference from the previous year. Thinking about this possible story in this way takes the shock value of the percentages away and puts it in a more proper context.Second, in absolute numbers, how many more males does this mean are in the freshman class? Since it is likely a small percentage change, this is perhaps a shift of 10-20 people, not a huge number among roughly 600 freshman. Even if the next three freshman classes had these same percentage distributions, this is only a shift of roughly 40-80 males throughout the entire college of about 2,400 underclassmen.

While this might make a good example of thinking statistically for my Statistics class, there could be broader implications about who I now am as a person…

Quick Review (recent reads): The Social Animal, Love Wins, Connected, In the Garden of Beasts, Heat Wave, Travels with Charley

Posted on by

As the summer ended and school started, I was able to get through a backlog of intriguing books. Here are quick thoughts on this varied collection:

1. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks. I thought I might not like the “story” that Brooks uses to convey research findings but I found it a helpful way to think about the growing body of research about how our brains and emotions affect our lives. Overall, I like Brook’s argument that we should pay more attention to the British Enlightenment than the French Enlightenment emphasis because of how much humans are truly influenced by their emotions and subconscious and not just reason and rationality. I’m not quite sure what Brooks wants us to do with this information in the end (and why use the term “the big shaggy” to describe our subconcious?) but I do enjoy Brooks skewering certain groups in hilarious paragraphs that mirror some of his commentary in earlier books like Bobos in Paradise. And perhaps I’m required to say this as a sociologist but I think Brooks gives short shrift to the role of culture plays in shaping the subconscious. (See a preview post about the book here.)

2. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell. This book created quite a stir in evangelical circles earlier this year as some, like John Piper, essentially kicked Bell out of their circles. On the whole, I would say the book is uneven: some chapters are quite orthodox in their understanding of God, love, and evangelism while other chapters stray and Bell is not as careful with his words as he pushes boundaries. Also, the book seems aimed less at the general population and more at disaffected evangelicals, an interesting group to address, who can’t come to grips about their beliefs about hell rather. Taking a broader view, the book and the debate around it illustrates several interesting sociological issues: subcultures and drawing symbolic boundaries about who is in and out as well as the how theology and culture influence each other. As a follow-up, I ran into these two videos: MSNBC’s Martin Bashir asks Bell some tough questions (considering the issue of media types asking people about religion, Bashir’s Wikipedia profile includes a quote saying he is a “committed Christian”) in contrast to a fluffier interview with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America.

3. Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler. This text could serve as a general audience introduction to the study of social networks. Many of the examples in the book are physiological as these researchers are known for their work on how things like obesity, emotions, and diseases are spread throughout social networks. The takeaway of the book: three degrees of separation is what connects us (those are your friends of friends of friends) and the actions and emotions of those people trickle down to us. I like the emphasis on how people seemingly beyond our immediate control have an influence on us.

4. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and An American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson. This book provides a look at Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s through the eyes of American ambassador William Dodd and his daughter Martha. The story of Germany is of course fascinating: Hitler consolidates power while hardly anyone inside or outside the country challenges him. However, Dodd and his daughter figure it out but they are marginalized, Dodd because he won’t live the opulent lifestyle most US ambassadors were accustomed to and Martha because of her romantic forays and developing ties to the USSR. Even though you know the outcome of the larger story, the story is still interesting as an American academic tries to sound the alarm about the rising tide of Nazism.

5. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg. I’ve been meaning to read this for some time as it concerns the 500+ deaths that occurred as the result of a heat wave in Chicago in 1995. Klinenberg performs a “social autopsy,” looking at the various factors and institution involved in the situation. The elderly who were alone were susceptible, particularly in neighborhoods without much street life, the morgues were unprepared, the media was behind in covering the story, and the City of Chicago and Mayor Daley tried to pass the blame. A lot went wrong in this situation, leading to one of the most deadly natural disasters in American history. (Perhaps this book was ahead of its time in looking at the sociology of disasters.)

6. Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck. I like Steinbeck and regard The Winter of Our Discontent and East of Eden as two of the best books I have read. However, this travelogue seems the opposite of his best novels: Steinbeck rambles around the country and offers some disconnected commentary. It seemed like he was trying to not do what he does in his novel: offer sweeping stories with big points about American life and culture. The only part that really grabbed my attention: Steinbeck passed through New Orleans during protests against the integration of New Orleans’ schools in 1960 (immortalized in a Norman Rockwell painting President Obama recent selected to hang in the Oval Office) and talked with some of the residents.

On reporting on statistics

Posted on by

Felix Salmon has a great post about the journalistic use of statistics, and it’s well worth the read.  Here’s his summary, complete with thoughtful reminders:

Before you start quoting statistics, then, it’s always worth (a) knowing where exactly they come from; (b) verifying them independently if you were fed them by some pressure group; and (c) making sure that they say what you say that they say. Otherwise, you just end up looking credulous and silly.

What journalists should know about religion

Posted on by

In the last week, several journalists have addressed the issue of how journalists should talk with politicians about religion. Ross Douthat followed up on his August 29th column with a blog post providing examples of what he is trying to address. And last Friday, Amy Sullivan provided a number of steps journalists could take in order to write intelligently about the religious beliefs of politicians.

This brings several thoughts to mind:
1. What happened to religion writers among major newspapers or magazines? I think most of them have disappeared, even respected ones like Catherine Falsani who used to write for the Chicago Sun-Times. At a time when religion is alive and influential around the world, media sources don’t have dedicated people who can comment on these particular issues. Asking political writers to write about topics they don’t regularly cover seems like a problem. I know media outlets have had to make major cutbacks in certain areas but there are repercussions for this.
2. The burden seems to be on politicians who have “non-mainstream” religious beliefs to explain how they are not dangers to society. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Americans have more unfavorable feelings toward minority religions like Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists/non-religious (not quite a minority “religion”). Of course, much of this debate could really be about whether evangelicals are mainstream or not. Their size would suggest they are mainstream as would their political influence since the late 1970s.

Netflix’s distribution problems

Posted on by

Netflix has had a lot of bad press in the last few months.  First, they decided to split their online-only streaming service from their mailed disc service, substantially increasing their customer’s prices.  Second, word came that they are losing their Starz distribution agreement, which will severely curtail the availability of (genuinely) recent movies on their streaming service.

Now, here comes a potential supply shock on the physical distribution side:

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances….

Missing the $5.5 billion payment due on Sept. 30, intended to finance retirees’ future health care, won’t cause immediate disaster. But sometime early next year, the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks, officials warn, forcing it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly.

To be sure, a long-term interruption in mail service would be an economic catastrophe extending well beyond Netflix.  Nonetheless, viewing this problem from Netflix’s perspective shows just how dependent even web-savvy companies are on physical infrastructure and distribution systems.  There will be a lot of collateral damage if businesses can no longer count on a robust and dependable USPS.

The Guardian starts a series about London riots written by sociologists who have talked with those involved

Posted on by

Now that some time has passed since the London riots (earlier posts here, here, and here), The Guardian is beginning a series consisting of sociologists talking about what they have learned about the riots from talking with those who were involved. The series starts here:

Many interviewees identified deprivation and inequality as root issues. Some spoke about the lack of work opportunities and access to education, as well as the EMA cuts. Some believed that getting an education was the key to the golden gate, but a year after graduation they were still struggling to find work. For others, also out of work, a university degree had never been on the cards.

But much of the anger was directed at the police. Young people spoke of incessant stop-and-search accompanied by rudeness, arrogance and racism. Some young people talked of Duggan’s death not as a unique injustice, but as yet another example of police murder. Young people spoke of the riots as a means of “sticking two fingers up” at the authorities, and for a couple of nights relishing having the upper-hand…

Finally, many young people talked about the riots as a consequence of the anger and frustration felt at not seeing a future. Unable to see education, jobs and pensions on their horizon, some explained how they sought pleasure in consumerism. But while those they looked up to accessed and displayed these objects freely, for young people they were often out of reach. As consumers first and foremost, the inability to shop made them feel unfulfilled and lacking in self respect. In some places the signs of these divides were part of the architecture around them – the upward mobility of the cityscapes of global capitalism looked increasingly remote.

Some young people hoped the government would hear the riots as a call to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots. But they didn’t think this likely.

I’ll be interested to read the subsequent pieces in this series. While the riots were often narrated by outsiders (particularly here in the United States),

interviews with those involved could reveal the internal motivations that led to actions that outsiders would see as out of line. Such broad and faraway views can be interpreted in different ways as Darnell Hunt illustrated how race influenced how people viewed news coverage of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. I hope we can soon to get to a point where we have some harder data, beyond even the vague statements from interviews offered in this opening piece. While the public may not want to hear the motivations of those who participated (particularly since it may be interpreted as justifying their actions), this is needed information in order to alter structural conditions and help prevent and/or predict future riots.

Indeed, a criminologist also thinks we need more “credible research” regarding the riots. (A side note: I use Newburn’s 2001 piece on evaluation research in my research methods class.)