Author Archives: legallysociable

An interesting social experiment: restrict social media access at a college for a week

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Social media is ever-present on college campuses. It appears that some institutions are thinking about ways to encourage thinking about using social media – by restricting it:

Professors have experimented with assigning technology fasts for their students—by discouraging gadget use for five days, for example, or rewarding extra credit for a semester without Facebook.

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is going one step further with a “social-media blackout.” Starting Monday, the Pennsylvania institution will block Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace on the campus network for a week. Faculty and staff members will be affected as well as students.

“Telling students to imagine a time before Facebook is like telling them to imagine living in a world with dinosaurs,” said Eric D. Darr, Harrisburg’s executive vice president and provost. “It’s not real. What we’re doing is trying to make it real.”

Ah, equating life with no social media with the age of dinosaurs – this is quite funny (though probably accurate).

When I first saw this headline, I thought this school might be doing this to help students to use the time they might spend on social media in other ways. To discover the world outside of Facebook. Alas, the school has other aims:

Mr. Darr said his hope is that people…would take the week to reflect on outside-the-box ways to use social media—such as for entrepreneurship or political advocacy.

So the goal in restricting social media use is to help people think about social media use? And I was hoping for a social experiment where students might discover other virtuous things to do with their time…

Reasons for using The Wire in class

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Two Harvard professors, one is sociologist William Julius Wilson, explain why they have built a course on urban inequality around the television show “The Wire.” In addition to how the show illustrates how the chances of the urban poor are limited by institutions, the professors argue “The Wire” is unique in its abilities to show the complexities of the real world:

“The Wire” is fiction, but it forces us to confront social realities more effectively than any other media production in the era of so-called reality TV. It does not tie things up neatly; as in real life, the problems remain unsolved, and the cycle repeats itself as disadvantages become more deeply entrenched. Outside the world of television drama, sociologists aim to explain what causes certain social conditions and then assess the merits of competing theories. The solutions, however, are usually less clear. “The Wire” gets that part right, too.

In my experience, television shows and movies are often terrible at depicting the real world. Perhaps it is difficult to avoid following a typical narrative arc or the need to entertain wins out. However, I’ve always thought that real life situations are usually more interesting than created stories.

When reviewing this show back in June, I mentioned about this course at Harvard and added thoughts about the sociological value of the show.

Quick Review: Lost Season 6 special features

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I was excited to check out the final disc of Lost Season 6 to see the special features. Alas, I was disappointed – here’s why:

1. The feature I was anticipating the most was “The New Man in Charge.” This roughly 10-minute epilogue featured Hugo Reyes as keeper of the Island with Ben Linus working for him. While this feature provided a few answers about the overall story, it didn’t do enough. And since it didn’t do enough, it didn’t seem very necessary.

2. What I found more interesting was the roughly 8 minute feature titled “See You In Another Life, Brotha.” While this is probably my favorite phrase from the TV show, it featured the producers and cast talking about how they interpreted the sideways story arc that distinguished season 6. The sideways world was meant to represent a better side of the characters, what they could have been if they had not encountered the Island.

3. The feature titled “A Hero’s Journey” quickly showed how the show’s story arc followed Joseph Campbell’s outline of the hero’s journey. This was not terribly useful, particularly if you had been reading Doc Jensen in the final season where he already made this connection.

4. The making-of featurette, “THE END: Crafting a Final Season,” was an opportunity for the producers, writers, cast, and others to explain a little what it was like to film the last season. The writers and producers said they felt the pressure to produce the perfect ending (which I do not think they did – this will be the subject of a future post) and they were satisfied with the final product. They all said the things you might expect: we all became a family, I really enjoyed the opportunity, and so on.

5. The blooper reel and deleted scenes were fairly worthless.

My opinion: the special features were not that special. I was hoping for more answers to questions about the Island but the answers were not given. Instead, the overall theme was that the producers and writers (and the cast went along with it with seemingly few complaints) wanted to end by focusing on relationships.

One thing positive that did come out of watching these features: I want to rewatch the final episode of the series. I’m looking forward to this task and seeing if I feel differently after watching it another time.

Critic compares quality and appeal of current TV shows and movies

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A.O. Scott, film critic for the New York Times, compares the television and movie industries. He seems to suggest that television, particularly in light of a poor summer movie season, has pulled ahead in creativity and captivating its audience:

The salient question is this: Will any of the movies surfacing this fall provoke the kind of conversation that television series routinely do, breaking beyond niches into something larger? This bad summer movie season, in what seems to be one of the best television years ever, reinforces a suspicion that has been brewing for some time. Television, a business with its own troubles, is nonetheless able to inspire loyal devotion among viewers, to sustain virtual water-cooler rehashes on dozens of Web sites and to hold a fun-house mirror up to reality as movies rarely do.

Look back over the past decade. How many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological density of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”? Engaged recent American history with the verve and insight of “Mad Men”? Turned indeterminacy and ambiguity into high entertainment with the conviction of “Lost”? Addressed modern families with the sharp humor and sly warmth of “Modern Family”? Look at “Glee,” and then try to think of any big-screen teen comedy or musical — or, for that matter, movie set in Ohio — that manages to be so madly satirical with so little mean-spiritedness.

I swear, I’m not trying to horn in on my colleagues’ territory. But the traditional relationship between film and television has reversed, as American movies have become conservative and cautious, while scripted series, on both broadcast networks and cable, are often more daring, topical and willing to risk giving offense.

One wonders what has happened with both the television and movie industries to lead to this outcome. This could be just a temporary blip (maybe just a spurt in creativity in television shows?) or perhaps it signals something that will last longer.

A quick thought: a number of the TV shows that Scott mentions as noteworthy are ones that take advantage the extra time that television shows have to tell their stories. Even the best movie can only go on for so long and with most clocking in at two hours or under, writers and directors are limited in what can be conveyed. Story arcs are important to these superior television shows and viewers can invest more time (which leads to more conversations, deeper attachments, more money to be made in advertising, etc.).

Teaching 9/11 in schools

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Now that we are nine years removed from September 11, 2001, this is something I’ve wondered: how do schools teach about this day? According to the Christian Science Monitor, there seems to be a variety of approaches.

Another place to look would be school textbooks. With evidence that textbooks either just plain get it wrong or present biased perspectives, how younger generations learn about 9/11 will be something to watch.

Overall, both specific school lessons and textbooks will help shape the American collective memory regarding the event. This collective memory can take time to develop and is likely to be controversial; just look at how long the 9/11 memorial is taking to shape up at Ground Zero.

Starting salaries by college major

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The National Association of Colleges and Employers has released a new study looking at 2009 starting salaries by college major. Average starting salaries for all graduates dropped a small amount from 2009:

NACE’s Fall 2010 Salary Survey shows that the overall average offer to Class of 2010 bachelor’s degree graduates stands at $48,288, compared with $48,633 offered to the Class of 2009. This represents a drop of 0.7 percent.

Liberal arts majors were below the average starting salary:

The average starting salary offer to liberal arts graduates—as a group—dipped 3 percent from last year to $35,508. Salary offers to sociology majors climbed 3.1 percent to $35,357 and history majors saw a slight increase of 0.7 percent to $38,731. Meanwhile, offers to English majors dropped 1.8 percent to $35,946 and offers to psychology majors fell 6.7 percent to $32,260.

The top five salaries? Four of five involve engineering – from number 1 to number 5, petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, mining and mineral engineering, computer science, and computer engineering.

Discussions about student-learning outcomes among college boards

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As discussions about assessment and student-learning outcomes build on college campuses, a new report looks at what governing boards think about their discussions of student-learning outcomes:

While oversight of educational quality is a critical responsibility of college boards of trustees, a majority of trustees and chief academic officers say boards do not spend enough time discussing student-learning outcomes, and more than a third say boards do not understand how student learning is assessed, says a report issued on Thursday by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

According to members, boards tend to focus on business matters. But this issue of assessment and student-learning outcomes is one that is likely to affect all levels of colleges and universities.

(A note about how the results were obtained: the survey was sent to “1,300 chief academic officers and chairs of board committees on academic affairs how boards oversee academic quality.” The response rate was only 38%.)

Japan’s difficulty in tracking people over 100 years old

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Japan is known for having a high life expectancy: according to 2008 public data, the world’s life expectancy is 69, the US’s is 78, and Japan’s is 83. With this higher life expectancy, Japan has a large number of centenarians, people who are over 100 years old. But there is a problem: the Japanese government has had problems keeping track of this population group.

More than 230,000 Japanese citizens listed in government records as at least 100 years old can’t be found and may have died long ago, according to a government survey released Friday.

In August, the Justice Ministry ordered a review of records that found about 77,000 people who would be at least 120, and 884 people who would be 150 or older. The head count followed a flurry of reports about how elderly people are falling through the cracks in Japan as its population ages rapidly and family ties weaken.

In all, the survey of family registration records nationwide found that 234,354 centenarians were still listed as alive, but their whereabouts were unknown, the ministry said.

While this could be chalked up as simply a bureaucratic problem, the news story suggests these findings line up with concerns about how the elderly are treated in Japan. This then could be a larger issue that concerns social and family relationships and the fabric of Japanese society.

What matters in a hybrid: financial value or something else?

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A recent study compared hybrid models to their traditional counterpart models and found that the hybrids are not a very good value:

Everyone knows hybrids get better fuel economy and emit less CO2 than their conventional counterparts, but they also cost more because of the added technology. And that makes them a lousy value because you won’t recoup that added cost in fuel savings.

So say the car gurus at CarGurus.com, who repeat a common argument against hybrids but back it up with some stats. They examined the purchase price and operating costs of 45 popular hybrid models and discovered the average gas-electric automobiles costs 25 percent more to own and operate than its gasoline-only sibling.

This may help explain why hybrids still are only a small part of the market – just under 3% according to this study.

But for those who currently drive hybrids, is financial value the primary reason? While this seems to be key to the larger market, I would guess there are a lot of current hybrid drivers who drive them for other reasons like being (or perhaps appearing) green. If more people truly wanted to be green or were worried about pollution from cars as opposed to saving money, then they would probably purchase more hybrids.

In war, blurring the lines between video game and real life

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It is common in video games to be able to play both sides, usually as a member of some sort of good vs. bad team. Where this might become problematic is in battle zones:

Military bases across the U.S. have banned the sale of a new video game that lets a player pretend to be a Taliban fighter and “shoot” U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“Medal of Honor” by Electronic Arts, a major game developer based in Redwood City, Calif., hits stores Oct. 12. Gamers are scoffing at the decision, saying that advanced technology has made it commonplace in the gaming world to let players switch sides and play the bad guy.

After public protests, including by British Defense Secretary Liam Fox, U.S. military officials decided not to stock the game in any of the nearly 300 base exchange shops.

The game also won’t be sold at any of the 49 GameStop stores located on various military bases. Troops will be allowed to own copies, but they would have to buy them off-base.

While shooting Nazis may be acceptable, this situation is not palatable to the US military.

Note: although the game hasn’t yet hit the stores, might we saw protests in the broader American culture over the ability to play as the Taliban?

Another note: there are 49 GameStop stores on military bases? Do they do better business than typical GameStop locations?