Author Archives: legallysociable

Blagojevich wins round 1

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While sitting in the Atlanta airport waiting to return to Chicago, I saw the big news of today live on CNN: Rod Blagojevich wins round 1 as he is convicted on only 1 of 24 counts brought against him by the federal government.

Amazing.

The jurors started speaking tonight. According to the foreman:

But in the end, he said, the “lack of a smoking gun” was too much of a hurdle for jurors to reach more than the one unanimous decision.

And the charge of trying to selling the Senate seat might have been held up by one juror:

[A young juror] said a female juror who was the lone holdout on convicting Blagojevich of attempting to sell the Senate seat “wanted clear-cut evidence, and not everything was clear-cut.”

The court proceedings will continue.

And what does this mean for the State of Illinois, politics, and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald?

Behind the curtain of the Bozo show

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The Bozo show was a long-time institution on Chicago television. The clown, televised on WGN, started on the air in 1960 and spread to stations around the country.

A new book commemorates the 50th anniversary of the show’s beginning. Among the stories in the book:

The Chicago show was so popular, Susan Harmon confirmed, that mothers would sign up for tickets the day their child was born, so six or seven years later, or even longer (at one time, there was a 10-year wait), their kid could attend the show.

Now that good evidence about the local impact of the show.

I attended the show when I was younger after seeing it for years on TV. (I have photographic evidence that I will not share here.) I’m pretty sure my mom got tickets from someone at work. I don’t remember much about the experience…but it was probably fun.

Knowing about college freshmen

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Before the start of each college school year, Beloit College publishes the Mindset List. This list is intended to provide an overview of how incoming college freshman understand the world. While the list certainly serves to get Beloit College on media outlets throughout the country, the list has some value. According to the creators, it is meant to help professors in the classroom:

Being aware of the generation gap helps professors craft lesson plans that are more meaningful, said Ron Nief, a former public affairs director at Beloit College and one of the list’s creators.

Developing lessons that students can relate to can be a challenge, particularly if technological and cultural changes accumulate as a professor ages.

The list is also a good reminder of generational differences. While students and faculty may inhabit the same academic classrooms, their experiences and perspective of the world can differ greatly.

Colleges have debt too

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The New York Times has published an opinion piece by Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, that puts a slightly different spin on the perennial college-costs-are-out-of-control argument.  He suggests that the institutions of higher education are themselves as indebted (and troubled) as their students:

There is a similarity between the debt crisis on Wall Street and what threatens higher education. Just as investors borrowed more and increased their leverage in volatile markets, many colleges and universities are borrowing more and betting on an expanding market in higher education at the precise moment their product is becoming affordable for fewer people.

It’s an interesting observation with potentially far-reaching implications.  There is always going to be demand for higher education, but it’s hard to see how a university like N.Y.U. can sustain debt levels higher than its endowment (“a staggering $2.22 billion debt with a relatively modest $2.2 billion endowment,” according to the article) in a world where “four years at a top-tier school will cost $330,000 in 2020, $525,000 in 2028 and $785,000 in 2035” if present trends continue.

Conspicuous consumption during a recession

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Trying to make sense of how recent events like the lavish wedding of Chelsea Clinton, the furor over Michelle Obama’s trip to Spain, and other similar events, can take place during this recession, Bella English of the Boston Globe turns to the concept of conspicuous consumption.

Sociologist Juliet Schor comments:

“It’s adding insult to injury at a time like this when so many Americans are suffering such extreme economic pain,’’ says Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and author of “Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.’’ “Those kinds of conspicuous displays of wealth undermine everyone else. They make us feel poorer and less satisfied with what we have.’’

Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption. According to Veblen, consumption is not just about buying necessities; it is about projecting an image and establishing status. The wealthy intentionally are wasteful in their consumption in order to show that they can afford to be wasteful.

Schor is expressing what the people toward the bottom of the economic ladder feel when the rich show off their riches. Should the rich cut down on their spending in times like these? Or perhaps they could draw less attention to themselves? My guess is that if one has the money, one is going to spend it whether it is a boom time or a down time. The only barrier to this may be a popular backlash – if the consumption actually leads to decreased status (rather than increased status), it may not be worth it.

Hotbed for exports is…Wichita?

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The Financial Times reports that according to a Brookings Institution study, Wichita has the highest percentage of exports of any metropolitan region in the country:

Thanks to a cluster of aircraft manufacturers such as Learjet, Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft, the economic focus of Wichita – population 366,000 – is very different from the emphasis on services and consumer demand typical of 21st century America. According to a study published late last month by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, nearly 28 per cent of the city’s gross metropolitan product is sold abroad. That makes it the most export-oriented in the country, just ahead of Portland, Oregon – noted for its computer and electronics companies – and San Jose in California’s Silicon Valley.

Wichita is not who I would think is leading this list. But the article goes on to say that Wichita and some other places have figured out how to move beyond two lagging sectors of the economy, consumer goods and housing, to move forward. For the rest of the country’s economy to move forward, they may have to follow Wichita’s model.

The ill effects on men of competing for a spouse

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A study in the August issue of Demography found “guys who lived in areas where there was more competition for women wound up dying younger.” The findings were based on data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (a fantastic data source: “a long-term study of a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957“) and Medicare and Social Security records.

According to the authors, there are multiple reasons why this might occur:

Perhaps the increased competition to find a wife made them feel more stress, which can have negative consequences for long-term health.

The men might have had to wait longer to get married, which could be bad for their health. A number of studies have shown that spouses (especially wives) play a role in contributing to one another’s health and survival.

In places where men outnumbered women, the men (on average) had to settle for what the researchers described as a “lower-quality spouse,” which could translate into less coddling and pampering from the wife and thus worse health.

This study is part of a growing body of research that suggest social factors, like the weight of our friends, have a profound influence on our well-being and lifespan.

Also: will the calculators of RealAge add this to their formula?

Determining the best colleges…using RateMyProfessor.com?

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Forbes recent published another installment of their rankings of the best colleges in America. One of the question that arises with such a list is the methodology behind the rankings. To their credit, Forbes provides a lengthy explanation.

Even as the ranking is supposedly from the point of view of students, I initially had some questions about one of the major criteria which accounts for 17.5% of the score for a college: using student evaluations of professors at RateMyProfessor.com. At first, this sounded crazy to me – how representative is the data from RateMyProfessors.com and does it accurately reflect what is going on in the classroom?

Forbes sums up why they used this data:

In spite of some drawbacks of student evaluations of teaching, they apparently have value for the 86% of schools that have some sort of internal evaluation system. RMP ratings give similar results to these systems. Moreover, they are a measure of consumer preferences, which is what is critically important in rational consumer choice. When combined with the significant advantages of being uniform across different schools, not being subject to easy manipulation by schools, and being publicly available, RMP data is a preferred data source for information on student evaluations of teaching–it is the largest single uniform data set we know of student perceptions of the quality of their instruction.

To recap why these used data from RateMyProfessors.com:

1. RMP ratings are similar to evaluation scores gathered by colleges. There is some scholarly research to back this up.

2. RMP ratings are “a measure of consumer preference.” This is data generated voluntarily by students. If Forbes wants the students’ perspective, this website offers it. (Though it is still a question whether it is a representative measure – but point #1 may take care of that.)

3. RMP ratings are perhaps the only data source to answer the question of what students experience in the classroom. It may not be perfect data but it can be used as an approximation.

Overall, Forbes logic makes some sense: RateMyProfessor.com offers a unique dataset that when cleaned up (and they describe how they weighted and standardized the scores) offers some insights into the classroom experience.

However, I’m still leery of giving 17.5% of the total score over to RateMyProfessor.com evaluations. Perhaps the scholarly literature will continue to examine this website and determine the value of its ratings. And you can see that Forbes is tweaking their measurements: the 2009 methodology explanation has some differences and the RateMyProfessor.com score then counted for 25% of the total score (compared to 17.5% in the 2010 edition).

Quick Review: Despicable Me

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I recently saw Despicable Me – I know I’m a little late to the game as this movie was released over a month ago. But I had read some good reviews and was interested in seeing it for myself. Some quick thoughts:

1. I don’t think the film will stick in my memory for long. A lot of it felt like an extended cartoon one might see on TV. Some of the characters, like Gru and Vector, are over the top. The three children alternate between being interesting and mawkish. It was somewhat entertaining but ultimately forgettable.

2. I know there are some funny scenes but I hardly laughed during the movie. Perhaps I wasn’t in a laughing mood…or perhaps the movie isn’t really that funny. Also, we were in a theater with about 10 other people so any semblance of group laughter was missing.

3. The small minions became tiresome. Sure, they may look cute but they started wearing on me after a while. I feel like if movies have to resort to characters like this to keep people interested, the story probably isn’t that great.

4. The music in the film is interesting, alternating between orchestral music and quirky modern numbers. Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes was involved and helped the score develop into something much more varied than a typical animated film.

On the whole, I was not impressed. Not terrible and not great with what seemed like too many switches between styles and ideas, this film settles into the land of average animated films.

(Overall, the movie was well-received by critics: it is 79% fresh (112 fresh out of 142 total reviews) at RottenTomatoes.com.)

Evaluating Scottie Pippen as “window into your [pro basketball] soul”

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I recently had a discussion with a colleague about Scottie Pippen, who is entering the Basketball Hall of Fame. My colleague, a long-time Detroit Pistons fan, could not help himself from laughing when I suggested that Pippen was one of the best 25 NBA players of all-time. Miffed, I used my own years of watching Pippen play for the Bulls, Bill Simmons’ ranking in The Book of Basketball (these rankings were the best part of the book – Simmons has Pippen at #24), and stats from basketball-reference.com to make my argument.

Apparently this interaction was not as isolated as I thought. Kevin Arnovitz at Truehoop writes that Pippen was a polarizing player and “how you feel about Scottie Pippen is window into to your soul as a fan of the pro game.”