Category Archives: Sociology

Planners vote against Illiana Expressway

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The proposed Illiana Expressway is in limbo after the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning rejected the project:

However, because the vote, 10-4, was not a sufficient supermajority, it puts the ultimate fate of the project in limbo.

The Illiana is a proposed tollway linking I-55 in the South suburbs with I-65 in Indiana that would be built as a public-private partnership. While Quinn and the Illinois Department of Transportation are backing it as a vital piece of infrastructure, CMAP experts warned in 2013 it will cost Illinois taxpayers up to $1.1 billion with limited benefits…

Today and Thursday is a rematch of sorts. Officials will vote on what should have been a routine decision — approving an update of GO TO 2040, a blueprint for growth in the region. In this go-round with the Nov. 4 election looming, Quinn has been pushing hard in favor of the expressway, claimed leaders of the Environmental Law and Policy Center who warned some CMAP board members might reverse their votes. ELPC officials quoted a toll industry publication describing the project as a “lemon,” and pointed out that CMAP has prioritized other projects over the Illiana. These include the Route 53 extension and Elgin-O’Hare Expressway expansion. The group has sued over the issue, claiming the MPO essentially lacked authority to override CMAP. The Illinois Department of Transportation estimates construction jobs should total about 9,000 and permanent jobs, mostly in freight and manufacturing, would amount to around 28,000.

However, the Metropolitan Planning Council said the project would drain jobs out of Illinois into Indiana, hurting employment in Chicago, Cook and the collar counties excepting Will County. IDOT officials said they stand behind the Illiana project.

A number of interested parties here and it is not clear how this will turn out. It is a classic urban planning issue: one side claiming economic growth, federal money, and jobs while the other side disputes the growth figures and asks who will be left on the hook if the road doesn’t generate the money it is supposed to. Growth is a pretty powerful motivator – particularly in a state that needs positive economic news as well as a Chicago region that is struggling, if not in reality, then perhaps always in its own perceptions – but difficult financial realities make a $1 billion+ project difficult to quickly approve.

UPDATE: The above article wasn’t the clearest on the next steps in the process. Here is some more details from the Chicago Tribune.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning board needed a 12-vote supermajority of its 15 members to remove the Illiana from its comprehensive plan, but opponents of the project could only muster 10 votes.

The spotlight will now fall on members of a companion agency, the Metropolitan Planning Organization Policy Committee, who will meet on the issue Thursday.

And the voting seemed to go along geographic lines:

One of the CMAP board members whose vote could have helped turn the tide against the Illiana failed to show for the meeting.

Andrew Madigan, an appointee of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, was absent, as he was last year when the Illiana originally came up for the planning agency’s approval. Emanuel’s other four appointees voted against the Illiana.

Madigan is the son of House Speaker Michael Madigan. He could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Also casting votes against the Illiana were four of five suburban Cook County representatives; and the representatives from Lake and McHenry counties.

Voting in favor of the Illiana were representatives from Will, DuPage and Kane Counties, and the representative from south Cook County.

Voters closer to the highway seem to have been in favor while those further away – Chicago and the northern counties – voted against it.

“A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How Infographics Are Made”

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A new book examines how designers make infographics:

A new book from graphic guru and School of Visual Arts professor Steven Heller and designer Rick Landers looks at that the process of more than 200 designers, from first sketch to final product. The Infographic Designers Sketchbook is almost exactly what it sounds like. The 350-page tome is essentially a deep dive into the minds of data designers. Heller and Landers have chosen more than 50 designers and asked them to fork over their earliest sketches to give us insights into how they turn a complex set of data into coherent, visually stunning data visualizations. “You see a lot more unbridled, unfettered work when you’re looking at a sketchbook,” says Heller. “You might be looking at a lot of junk, but even that junk tells you something about the artist who is doing it.”

Heller says there are a few through-lines to all good infographics, the first being clarity. The purpose of a data visualization has always been to communicate complex information in a readily digestible way. “You can’t throw curves,” he says. “If you’re going to do something that is complex, like the breakdown of an atomic particle, for example, you have to make it clear.” Clarity is key even in seemingly simple infographics, like Caroline + Young’s Mem:o, an app that visualizes personal data for things like sleep and fitness. The data viz tool uses simple shapes to communicate the various sets of data. This is no coincidence says Heller, adding that our eyes tend to respond to simple geometric forms. “If you start using parallelograms or shapes like that, it may get a little difficult,” he says. “But circle squares and rectangles, those are all forms we adjust our eyes to very quickly.”…

It’s fascinating to go behind the scenes of a designer’s work process, in the way it’s fascinating to flip through another person’s journal or leaf through the papers on their desk. If nothing else, the book is a testament to the sketching process. It shows how designers, and even non-designers, can use a pen and paper to sort through some hairy, complex ideas.

The post has some interesting examples you can look at. This hints at the larger process of interpreting data. If someone just handed you a spreadsheet of data or a few tables with data, it is not an automatic process between that and coming up with the “right” interpretation, whether that be in a written or graphical format. It takes time and skill to present the data in an engaging and informative way.

Odd poll: Rahm Emanuel more negatively rated than Eisenhower traffic

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One challenger to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used some dubious questions to find how the mayor ranks compared to other disliked things:

The poll, with questions tailor-made to grab headlines, was paid for by Ald. Bob Fioretti (2nd) and conducted Sept. 26-29 by Washington D.C.-based Hamilton Campaigns…

Fioretti’s pollster was apparently looking to put a new twist on the issue by testing the mayor’s unfavorable ratings against some high-profile enemies, including the Bears’ archrival Green Bay Packers.

Of the 500 likely Chicago voters surveyed, 23 percent had a “somewhat unfavorable” opinion of Emanuel and 28 percent had a “very unfavorable” view of the mayor.

That’s an overall negative rating of 51 percent, compared to 49 percent overall for morning traffic on the Eisenhower. Conservative-leaning Fox News Channel had a slightly higher unfavorable rating in Democratic-dominated Chicago while the Packers stood at 59 percent.

Odd comparisons of apples to oranges. As the article notes, it sounds like a publicity stunt – which appears to work because the article then goes on to give Fioretti more space. Giving space to bad statistics is not a good thing in the long run with a public (and media) that suffers from innumeracy.

Two thoughts:

1. I could imagine where this might go if Emanuel or others commission similar polls. How about: “Chicago’s Mayor is more favorably rated than Ebola”?

2. How did the Packers only get a negative rating of 59% in Chicago? Are there that many transplanted Wisconsin residents or are Chicago residents not that adamant about their primary football rival?

Supermarket chains suffering in wealthy countries

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Supermarkets in numerous wealthy countries are having a hard time competing with the wide range of choices offered to consumers:

As they scramble to maintain market share, the big four British grocers can take comfort from the fact that at least they are not alone. The global supermarket industry has its share of epic competitive scraps, too. In Europe alone, the discounters that have wrought havoc for Tesco, Morrisons, Asda and Sainsbury’s have an even more powerful grip on the industry. While Aldi and Lidl control around 8% of the UK market, according to figures from market research group Kantar the share controlled by discounters in France is 10% and in Germany – home of Aldi and Lidl – it is 37%. In the UK, two-thirds of the market is controlled by four players; this is the same as in Germany, while in France 56% of the market is controlled by the top four and in Spain just under 50%. A look at these markets, plus some of the biggest outside Europe, shows that every territory poses challenges for big grocers…

As in the UK, discounters and supermarkets in Germany are faced with shoppers who are less and less willing to drive out of town for their weekly shop, and more likely to do small, frequent trips in urban areas. In recent years, the trend has led to a revival in big cities like Hamburg and Berlin of the traditional Tante Emma Läden or corner shops, which have been able to be much more flexible in reacting to trends or food scandals than their bigger rivals…

Between the discount stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets there is a constant battle going on to woo the increasingly cash-strapped consumer. “Supermarkets are really the only sector [in Italy] where competition has worked out,” said Liliana Cantone of Italian consumer association Altroconsumo. “The players are doing their best to offer lower prices, and consumers can really benefit from this.”…

The market is far from impenetrable, however. Walmart, the only “everyday low pricing” operator in Japan, has forced domestic rivals to keep their prices low where it operates stores. Costco, with 20 stores nationwide, has proved a success, offering prices comparable to those found in the US. Tesco’s foray into Japan was frustrated, in part, by consumer idiosyncrasies.

Sounds like some contradictory forces at work. On one hand, increased globalization means food can travel all over the world. It might seem that such a global market would be controlled by some major players in the grocery industry who could use their size to their advantage. Yet, that same globalization allows other players to get into the game and gives consumers more low-priced options, usually something seen as a good in free-market economies. Throw in debates about subsidizing food production, getting healthy food to places that need it, and genetically modified food and you have a retail sector that is experiencing a lot of flux.

Just one quick thought: I’ve been in supermarkets in England, France, and Japan and they all seem more similar to each other than to the American version. Even not looking at Walmart or other big box stores with groceries, the American supermarket is an amazing size with tremendous variety. In contrast, stores in the other countries are smaller, something that may be cultural as well as economic due to higher rent and land prices.

Splitting America into equally proportioned states by population; options abound

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Here is an interesting yet probably quite absurd set of maps that split the United States into various configurations of states with equal populations. Two of the maps:

140926_CBOX_Map4-EqualPopulation

140926_CBOX_MapCircles

I can see the logic behind this – more equal representation. However, the others are implausible. If anything, more equal populations might be accomplished by breaking states into smaller units that might be more equal in population to each other as pieces of the larger state. But, trying to imagine merging into megastates or different configurations of the 50 states is hard to imagine.

Spoiling a waterfront location with an ugly “mini McMansion”

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Curbed National does not like a development of “mini McMansions” in Detroit:

We’ve been befuddled by the Shorepointe Village at Grayhaven development before. It has such a nice waterfront location and such terrible home exteriors. But this interior seems to be one of the better ones. This 3,000 square foot home previously asking $479K just sold for $440K. It feels very early aughts but who doesn’t enjoy a little throw back? It has a neighbor still for sale asking $420K.

Even looking at the earlier pictures of the development, I’m not sure why this particular project draws much attention. Sure, the houses have some exterior oddities. But, are they really much worse than the average McMansion, let alone some of the more extreme examples involving turrets, features of castles, multi-gabled roofs, and other garish architectural quirks? The development may be cookie-cutter so are a lot of single-family home developments.

Perhaps the key here is the waterfront location. Such desirable property that tends to prompt higher housing values often feature large houses but often not such bland design.

The dangers of tens of thousands of miles of aging metal gas lines

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Big infrastructure failures attract attention but USA Today finds that millions of Americans live near aging gas lines:

About every other day over the past decade, a gas leak in the United States has destroyed property, hurt someone or killed someone, a USA TODAY Network investigation finds. The most destructive blasts have killed at least 135 people, injured 600 and caused $2 billion in damages since 2004…

A review of federal data shows there are tens of thousands of miles of cast-iron and bare-steel gas mains lurking beneath American cities and towns — despite these pipes being a longtime target of National Transportation Safety Board accident investigators, government regulators and safety advocates.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has been pushing gas utilities for more than a decade to replace aging pipes with more resilient materials like plastic, though it’s not required by law. The industry has responded by replacing thousands of miles of pipe, but a daunting amount remains. It can cost $1 million per mile, or more, to replace aging pipe, costs typically passed to customers…

Aging pipes are a high-risk example of the nation’s struggle to replace its crumbling infrastructure, a danger hidden beneath the ground until a pipe fails or is struck by something and a spark ignites a monstrous blast. Natural gas is piped into 67 million homes and at least 5 million businesses, schools and other buildings across the country, with gas distribution and service lines snaking beneath most neighborhoods in American cities.

A long and fascinating look at how gas is delivered to many homes and places underground.

Perhaps the relative lack of outcry regarding this issue is because the events take place at seemingly random times in different places. In other words, a large-scale explosion might draw more attention than the scattered events that do take place. The costs of fixing this are quite high yet given the typical levels of concern about safety, it seems like this will need to happen at some point.

Statistical answer to whether soccer is dull

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One British academic looked at all the English soccer scores going back to 1888 to answer the question of whether soccer is dull:

But Curley used the same approach he uses in his academic career: data, lots and lots of data. By cobbling together game results from several different sources, he has compiled what is almost certainly the world’s biggest compendium of English football scores. Sitting on his GitHub page, devoid of any fanfare whatsoever, are the scores of nearly 200,000 English soccer games played in the top four leagues since 1888, the days of Jack the Ripper and Queen Victoria. These 14 megabytes can tell remarkable stories, dating back more than 125 years to the founding of the English football league…

In 85,694 games — dangerously close to half the total — at least one of the teams forgot to score at all. That led Curley to an answer for one of his questions: “Soccer is a bit dull,” he told me…

Scores are likely to be low. In more than 85 percent of all games, neither team scored more than three goals.

Those low scores help lead to thousands of draws — 47,412 since the foundation of the league system, to be exact. That’s more than a quarter of all games. And 7 percent of games overall have ended with no one scoring, and no one winning — there have been 13,475 nil-nil draws.

Statistical evidence that not much scoring takes place. But, this will only fuel the debate as true fans will argue scoring does not necessarily equal excitement. Baseball fans make similar arguments. Yet, there is a common claim that American sports fans are more interested in more scoring (as opposed to simply movement or action). Does this mean English fans (as well as other soccer fans around the world) are more willing to endure low-scoring games? Is this only because they are used to these games or are there other factors involved?

“Suburdia”: a wide variety of wildlife in cities and suburbs

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A professor of wildlife science finds a surprising amount of wildlife in urban areas:

John Marzluff, the scientist, is well known for his research on, among other topics, the intelligence of crows and ravens. In his new book, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods With Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (Yale University Press), Marzluff examines the effects of urbanization on a variety of birds…In more than a decade of research in and around Seattle, where he is a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, Marzluff and a small army of graduate students discovered a consistent pattern: Bird diversity grew from the city center, peaked in the suburbs, and dropped again in the forested areas between Seattle and the Cascades.

“We had discovered subirdia,” Marzluff writes. “Now I was really perplexed.”…

For many birds, the suburbs, as Marzluff explains, afford a wide variety of habitats. The trees, flowers, shrubs, ponds, and bird feeders that dot our neighborhoods make them attractive to many species. Add the golf courses, office parks, and retention ponds that are hallmarks of many suburban landscapes, and subirdia becomes downright appealing.

The suburbs are often criticized for their environmental faults including sprawl that chews up land and destroys natural habitats. Yet, these findings offer some evidence that the suburbs may not be all bad. It also leads me to two other questions:

1. Does this apply beyond birds? It sounds like it took a lot of work to establish these findings for birds. Yet, I assume some of the ideas would work for other animals as well as some would adapt and thrive to the suburban setting and others would not.

2. Such findings shouldn’t be used as evidence that suburbia is a positive for the natural environment. But, we shouldn’t continue to think in terms of pristine nature versus dirty cities. All of the environments in the United States, whether rural or urban, have been heavily affected by human activity.

Analysis suggests a sociologist in the running to win 2014 Nobel Prize for Economics

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A new analysis suggests five leading candidates for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics and one of them is a sociologist:

But a recent Thomson Reuters analysis predicts five leading contenders for the top honour in economics this year: Philippe M. Aghion and Peter W. Howitt for their contributions to growth theory, William J. Baumol and Israel M. Kirzner for their study of entrepreneurship, and Mark S. Granovetter for his pioneering research in economic sociology.

The first four names are well known in economics while the fifth is not actually an economist. Granovetter is a sociologist but his research appears to be the most interesting among that of the five contenders listed by Reuters. The caveat here is that the Reuters list is merely indicative, based on a quantitative analysis of the number of citations of each scholar in the discipline. The Nobel committee is unlikely to be influenced by quantitative metrics alone though the Reuters analysis claims that most scholars it has identified have eventually ended up winning the Prize…

There are earlier precedents when the Nobel committee has chosen persons outside economics departments for the prize, although a sociologist has never won it till date. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who shared the Nobel in 2009 with Williamson, is the most recent example. Ostrom challenged conventional wisdom by showing that common property resources can be managed successfully by user associations.

But a recent Thomson Reuters analysis predicts five leading contenders for the top honour in economics this year: Philippe M. Aghion and Peter W. Howitt for their contributions to growth theory, William J. Baumol and Israel M. Kirzner for their study of entrepreneurship, and Mark S. Granovetter for his pioneering research in economic sociology. The first four names are well known in economics while the fifth is not actually an economist. Granovetter is a sociologist but his research appears to be the most interesting among that of the five contenders listed by Reuters. The caveat here is that the Reuters list is merely indicative, based on a quantitative analysis of the number of citations of each scholar in the discipline. The Nobel committee is unlikely to be influenced by quantitative metrics alone though the Reuters analysis claims that most scholars it has identified have eventually ended up winning the Prize.

Read more at: http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/j2JrhcKugkycL6kysk1eHJ/Who-will-win-the-Economics-Nobel-this-year.html?utm_source=copy

Granovetter’s paper on the strength of weak ties is one of the most cited sociology articles. Even so, naming a sociologist as a winner of the prize for economics would be an interesting choice given the relationship between the two disciplines.