Read an interview with D. Michael Lindsay, a sociologist formerly at Rice University, who was just named the new President of Gordon College. The interview questions note that Lindsay is “unusually young for a college president” (39 years old), well-regarded by Mark Noll (who calls him “the right choice for the right college at the right time”), and has “long been touted as a star in the making.”
Author Archives: legallysociable
Cabrini-Green site: from housing project to possible Target store
Since the mid 1990s, the area around the Cabrini-Green housing project on the north side of Chicago has been changing (see an overview of this change here). As the high-rises have come down (with the last residents leaving just recently), new mixed-income neighborhoods as well as new commercial buildings have gone up in the area. News comes today that Target may be building a store on this site in the near future:
Target Corp., the cheap-chic discount chain, is in talks with the Chicago Housing Authority to build a store at the site of the former Cabrini-Green Housing Project.
The retailer’s proposal was brought up for consideration at a CHA board of commissioners meeting earlier this month, said Matt Aguilar, CHA spokesman. “We are in discussions and hope to help bring additional investment to the neighborhood,” Aguilar said.
Demolition of the last high rise at Cabrini-Green is scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The seven-acre complex, once among the most notorious housing projects in the nation, is just blocks away from Chicago’s glitziest shopping districts on North Michigan Avenue and close to the wealthy enclaves of the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park.
Target declined to comment on the proposal.
If Target does move forward with this, it would be the second high-profile space they have recently obtained in Chicago. (Read here about their plans for moving to State Street.)
As redevelopment of this space continues to take place, how long might it be until residents and shoppers of the area forget altogether that the Cabrini-Green complex was once there?
Another question: is a big box store in the city such as Target okay or the best move? Does it depend on which store moves in (see the long-running battle between Wal-Mart and the City of Chicago) or are big box stores okay in the city but not good in the suburbs because of their contribution to sprawl?
Two ways to deal with drug offenders
Whatever your stance on U.S. drug policy, I think few people could disagree that courts deal with infractions very differently depending on who is breaking the law, as two recent news items painfully illustrate.
Way #1: Throwing the Book at Them
This American Life has a podcast this week telling
the story of Lindsey Dills, who forges two checks on her parents’ checking account when she’s 17, one for $40 and one for $60, and ends up in drug court for five and a half years, including 14 months behind bars, and then she serves another five years after that—six months of it in [Georgia’s] Arrendale State Prison, the other four and a half on probation.
Listening to the hour-long program, I thought I had mistakenly swapped the podcast out for a Dickens and/or Kafka audiobook.
Ms. Dills is, needless to say, not particularly wealthy or well-connected…
Way #2: Making Them Sing
…unlike the subject of today’s Daily Mail article:
Singer-songwriter and marijuana enthusiast Willie Nelson could have faced a lengthy jail term after he was arrested for possession in November.
But perhaps the Texas prosecutor has been smoking some of Willie’s special cigarettes, because he has agreed to let the 77-year-old legend avoid prison but only if he gives the court a song.
Hudspeth County Attorney Kit Bramblett said: ‘I’m gonna let him plead, pay a small fine and he’s gotta sing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” with his guitar right there in the courtroom.’
In addition to the injustice implicit in the wildly divergent outcome faced by Mr. Nelson, I have the same question for the prosecutor and judge as a commenter over at the ABA Journal website:
Isn’t there some personal benefit in the “command performance”? Charges should be settled for the state, not the personal benefit of court officers.
Updated 3/30/2011: The Associated Press is now reporting that Willie won’t have to sing after all. The prosecutor was just “joking”.
Will future historic preservation districts include McMansions?
From the concluding portion of a recent column, it appears columnist James Lileks does not like McMansions. But, he also brings up an idea I recently described in discussing how a 1920s suburban home could now be considered authentic and worth preserving:
Everything is historic. Doesn’t mean it’s good; doesn’t mean everything must be preserved ,without exception. But what’s contemporary to you is history to your kids, and hence boring — and a relic of a golden past to the generation after that. Ah, to live long enough to see them fight for the preservation of a ghastly overscale McMansion. It’s the only example of substandard poisonous Chinese drywall we have left!
Just how long might it before McMansions are considered historic homes that are worth saving? And if they are not worth saving, what else might be done with them?
Sugrue: “It’s not clear that this new [black] migration [to the suburbs] is a positive step”
Recent figures suggest more minorities are moving to the suburbs (see here and here). But looking at evidence from Detroit (see a related story here), historian Thomas Sugrue suggests blacks moving to the suburbs may encounter a lot of the same issues they faced in the city:
So far, Detroit’s black suburbanization has followed a well-trodden path. Those blacks heading outward from Detroit aren’t moving to all suburbs equally. Rather, they move into places with older houses, rundown shopping districts and declining tax revenues. Such towns also typically have poorer services and fewer job opportunities than wealthier suburbs — where, despite strong antidiscrimination laws, it is still harder for blacks to find housing.
It’s not clear that this new migration is a positive step, even if it allows blacks to escape the city and its troubles. For whites, suburbs have often been a big step up — but as long as most blacks find themselves in secondhand suburbia, the American dream of security, prosperity and opportunity will remain harder to achieve.
This term “secondhand suburbia” is an interesting one. Perhaps this term lines up with the concept of “inner-ring suburbs.” A number of commentators, notably Myron Orfield (in texts like American Metropolitics), have discussed how inner-ring suburbs, those closest to the big city, have many of the same issues of the city: large and growing minority populations, declining white populations, limited tax bases, crowded conditions and an older housing stock, crime, and more. Sugrue’s phrase, however, seems to emphasize the racial transition these suburbs, probably classifiable as “inner-ring suburbs,” are experiencing as he describes how these “second-hand” places are changing over from white to black. The implication is that these places are hand-me-downs: the whites used them up and are now using their wealth to move further from the city.
In the long run, if these suburbs don’t offer suburban opportunities but simply reproduce problems like residential segregation, has anything been gained?
The fair use dragon
Justin Levine over at Against Monopoly points us to a controversy at the recent San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and reminds us that many content owners believe that fair use in U.S. copyright law is about as real as a mythical fire-breathing creature.
John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle explains:
"Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded," a compelling new documentary that critiques the portrayal of Asian women in U.S. visual media, has drawn protests from an unlikely quarter. It wasn’t from Hollywood, which was deservedly scoured for its depiction of Asian women in films from "Rush Hour 2" to "Sex and the City." It wasn’t from conservative commentators claiming political correctness run amok.
Instead, the objection to the documentary by Elaine Kim, a UC Berkeley professor of Asian American studies, emerged from six Asian American filmmakers just before its premiere last week at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Their complaint: that she used clips of their work without seeking their permission.
Never mind that fair use is written into the copyright statute and explicitly allows for “criticism” and “comment” and “scholarship.” Never mind that Kim’s documentary seems to fall well within the guidelines laid out by the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use – and that four separate companies write errors-and-omissions insurance for filmmakers based on the Statement guidelines.
No, the owners of films being criticized by Kim want to get paid:
The documentary addresses images of Asian American women in film, and while that is a worthy subject for a documentary and we respect Ms. Kim’s skills, as filmmakers, we do not consider this "fair use." Every filmmaker knows that he or she has to ask permission before using any intellectual property not belonging to him/her.
Using a clip of our films for review or promotional purposes is standard; however, using it in a documentary to illustrate that filmmaker’s point of view is a creative choice by the documentarian and therefore not subject to fair use.…We feel that Ms. Kim should either license our film footage properly for use in her documentary or remove it before the documentary’s world premiere at the upcoming San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.
The Chronicle reporter was shocked, though readers of this blog shouldn’t be (unfortunately):
For me, as a journalist and champion of free expression, the upshot seemed clear: You cannot give the targets of social commentary the ability to veto it. Does anyone think for a second that the copyright holders of "Rush Hour 2" [which includes a scene where Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan are presented with a buffet of scantily clad Asian women] would consent to allow scenes of that movie to appear in Kim’s documentary at any price?
Kim did end up screening the movie at the festival, but
Kim deleted the clip from "The People I’ve Slept With."
"We did not remove the clip because we were concerned it was not fair use," Kim emphasized in an e-mail. "We removed it because we do not have the time or resources to fight against a filmmaker that personally attacked us and was being unreasonable."
Given the brutal economic and personal realities of litigation, Kim probably made the “right” choice. Even if she found lawyers to represent her for free, fighting this in court would probably consume a large portion of her personal time and energy for years. I certainly don’t blame her for her apparently rational choice.
Nevertheless, let us be clear: this is what happens when copyright law is written to give one side (i.e., copyright owners) sweepingly clear rights but the other side (i.e., fair users) only an amorphous defense. You don’t get copyright as “an engine of free expression”, as the Supreme Court continues to think. You get censorship by people who think that fair use is a fairy tale.
The origins of Oregon Trail
While looking at a column that included some thoughts about the book American Grace, I stumbled across the story of how the computer game Oregon Trail became a sensation. Here is what happened in those early days:
Minnesota’s City Pages tells the story of the game’s early days, when it was an underground sensation, played only by Minnesota schoolkids through a teletype machine installed in a janitor’s closet.
The Oregon Trail — a computer game in which players go on a simulated wagon journey out West, making key decisions along the way (take the Donner Pass or go around?) — was invented by a group of nerdy, computer-programming public school teachers in 1971. It was originally conceived as a board game, but Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger (all Minnesotans) quickly realized its potential as a computer game, and spent two weeks programming it on a middle-school teletype terminal. Their students played the game without a screen, by taking turns pecking out commands on the console, which forwarded them on by telephone to a mainframe computer; the game’s prompts (“You have dysentery”) came out of a printer. In subsequent years, the game was accessed by kids statewide through the same method.
Everything changed in 1978, after a handwritten bid was submitted by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, then just two years old. Apple IIs were installed in schools throughout Minnesota, and the game was rewritten in the form in which millions of students have encountered it since then. Over the past 40 years, 65 million copies have been sold, making The Oregon Trail the most widely played educational game of all time. Nowadays, you can play it on your iPhone for 99 cents.
The Oregon Trail wasn’t just one of the first computer games — it was, as City Pages’ Jessica Lussenhop points out, “one of the first simulation computer games.” In fact the emphasis, for its creators, was on simulation. Looking back, one of the most striking things about the game is its accuracy: The programmers pored over actual settlers’ journals to figure out exactly how often players should break their wagon wheels, get sick, or meet helpful Native Americans, and painstakingly integrated those probabilities into the game. The Oregon Trail made pioneer history more fun — but it also made it more accurate.
Another innovation brought to you by Apple.
In conversations with other people my age, many of whom grew up playing Oregon Trail at school or at home, there is both joy and nostalgia when anyone brings up this game. Looking back it, it isn’t terribly complicated, the graphics were limited, and I’m not sure how much we actually “learned.” Perhaps it was the fact that it was a video game that one was allowed to play at school (along with other beloved games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?). However, I must ask: by playing this educational game and the others that followed, have students become more knowledgeable? Have these games contributed to rising educational achievement? (I think the answer to both of these is probably no or the impact is very limited.)
It is also interesting to see this idea that Oregon Trail was one of the first simulation games. I have long been a player of a few of these games, most notably Simcity, starting with a 386 version on a monochrome screen.
Status update: P2P still in litigation
Nate Anderson at Wired reminds us that “the first file-sharing case in the US to go all the way to trial is still going”:
Filed on April 19, 2006 and progressing through a remarkable three trials, the recording industry case against Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset continues to burn through cash and judicial attention.
Thomas-Rasset was at first hit with a $222,000 fine in 2007, which was set aside in 2008. Another jury trial in 2009 ended with a $1.92 million judgment, which was set aside in 2010. In November 2010, a third trial ended with a $1.5 million verdict, which the judge is unlikely to allow (his previous orders suggested that a few thousand dollars per song would be the maximum permissible damages). At the moment, both sides are still arguing over the appropriateness of that $1.5 million damages award.
Almost five years. Three trials (so far). What a colossal waste of economic, judicial, and personal resources.
How to discover hidden racial profiling in McHenry County police data
McHenry County is located northwest of Chicago, has just over 300,000 residents, and is part of the six-county Chicago region. In recent years, the county has had a growing Hispanic population (2009 Census figures estimate Hispanics make up about 11% of the population) and there was data to suggest that Hispanics might have been racially profiled by local police. Here is how the Chicago Tribune describes the data between 2004 and 2009:
Racial profiling is difficult to prove. That’s why researchers push for data collection, to flag potential problems. In 2004, the first year data were collected, McHenry County’s indicators were high.
Statewide, minorities were 15 percent more likely to be stopped than what would have been expected based on their respective populations.
McHenry County’s disparity rate, however, was 65 percent, more than double that of the Chicago area’s five other sheriff’s departments.
The county’s rate, however, began dropping dramatically in 2007, and by 2009 was average for area sheriff’s departments.
On the surface, this data suggests the problem might have been solved: police were made aware of the issue and McHenry County’s numbers were back in line with regional figures within a few years.
But the Chicago Tribune goes on to say that a statistical analysis suggests it isn’t that racial profiling actually decreased; rather, McHenry County police simply marked Hispanics as white in their reports:
By 2009, the statistical analysis showed, 1 in 3 Hispanics cited by deputies likely were mislabeled as white or not included in department data reported to the state.
•If mislabeling and underreporting are taken into account, the department’s official rate of minority stops would have towered over its Chicago-area peers rather than appearing average.
•Department brass repeatedly missed warning signs of potential problems, even after a deputy complained that some peers targeted Hispanics.
So how exactly did the Chicago Tribune do this analysis: how does one look between the lines of arrest data to make a claim about current racial profiling? As a sidebar in the print edition and an extra link to click on online, the Tribune describes how they did their analysis:
Drivers’ names from the court and department data were compared with names in the census database to find each driver’s likelihood of Hispanic ethnicity. Mirroring methodology of similar research, drivers were deemed Hispanic only if their last names were 70 percent or more likely to be Hispanic.
The department data were used to analyze accuracy of labeling by deputies — comparing the rate of likely Hispanics with what each deputy logged. But the department database lacked records of all cited drivers, so the Tribune used the court data to determine the extent of mislabeling and incorrect logging departmentwide. The rate of likely Hispanics, as shown by the court data, was compared with the rate of Hispanics that the department told the state it cited.
In doing the departmentwide analysis, the Tribune counted only the labeling of likely Hispanics as white, because such mislabeling artificially improved the state’s rating of the department. Deputies at times also labeled likely Hispanics as other minorities, such as when a driver who looks like Sammy Sosa was labeled African-American. The analysis didn’t count that type of mislabeling because it didn’t affect the state’s rating.
Researchers say the census-based analysis is commonly used in studies but has limitations: It counts non-Hispanic women who marry Hispanics, and misses Hispanic women who marry non-Hispanics. It also misses Hispanics who have nontraditional surnames. With the limitations taken into account, it’s generally considered an undercount of Hispanics.
This is an interesting methodological process involving several moving parts. The analysis used and compared multiple sources of data. This triangulation method then doesn’t just rely the data that police report – such data can have issues as the TV show The Wire illustrated. Surnames from the records were compared to US Census records to determine the likelihood that the name is Hispanic. This isn’t going to catch all cases but the Tribune says other researchers claim this actually produces an undercount. If this is the case, perhaps McHenry County police are even further engaged in this practice. Also, what counts as a correct labeling or not is determined by the state.
A few lessons could be learned from this:
1. “Official data,” as self-reported police records here, are not necessarily trustworthy.
2. There are often multiple sources of data one can use to describe or evaluate a situation. Relying only on one source of data gives a part of the story – in this case, the one the police wanted to tell, which is interesting in itself – but having multiple sources can give a more complete picture.
3. If the Chicago Tribune analysis is correct, it is a reminder that “hiding” or “disguising” data can be difficult to do if people are interested or determined enough to look into what the data actually means.
New York City to challenge 2010 Census figures
While 2010 Census figures have shown population drops in places like Chicago and St. Louis, New York City gained population in the 2000s. However, some think the Census undercounted the population growth:
Apoplectic city leaders Thursday scrambled for words to convey their shock after Census numbers seemed to lowball Gotham’s population growth since 2000.
The figures show the city grew only 2.1 percent, to 8,175,133. Mayor Michael Bloomberg contended that a 0.1% increase — a mere 1,343 people — of Queens residents and a wee 1.6 percent rise in Brooklynites “doesn’t make any sense.” The city will challenge the findings, though some observers suggested a surge in harder-to-count recent immigrants and mobile, elusive young people could in part explain a possible undercount…
Joe Salvo, NYC’s chief demographer, expressed disbelief that just 166,855 more people were added to the city, when city data showed that 170,000 new housing units had been built since 2000.
The Census Bureau will be accepting challenges starting in June. New York City last appealed its count in 1990…
The Census Bureau agrees. “The pattern in New York City is like that seen in many other large cities – higher rates of growth in suburbs than in urban cores,” the Bureau said in a statement.
Just because more housing units were built during the 2000s doesn’t not necessarily mean that the population should have gone up more. I wonder if these NYC officials have more data or evidence on which they would base their claim.
The article also notes the consequences of these figures. On one hand, federal money and Congressional seats depend on population counts. Particularly in a time of economic crisis, losing money because of an undercount would mean that the city will have to fill some financial gaps. On the other hand, there is the matter of “civic pride.” A sociologist describes this dynamic:
Unacknowledged is that modest growth injured the “pride of place” in an immodest metropolis that likes to be perceived as ever increasingly majestic and magnetic, said John Logan, a Brown University sociology professor. As Chicago winced when it fell from the nation’s second largest city to third, NY is similarly loathe to lose any ground on growth. “Some see the numbers as a sign of how good you are,” said Logan, “but that’s a mistake.”
Measuring the status of a community just by numbers is tricky, particularly when the numbers are not as strong as one would like. But American communities like to see growth – losing population (or perhaps even being stagnant) is often construed as a failure.
Even with this (undercounted?) population growth, New York City still has a sizable population lead on the next largest city: NYC has more than 4 million more people than Chicago.
