Category Archives: Sociology

Don’t confuse community-building “little free libraries” for bird McMansions

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Don’t make the mistake of confusing a “little free library” with an oversized birdhouse in your neighbor’s front lawn:

Zooming by in your car, you might mistake them for bird McMansions…

Based on a map on the Little Free Library website and chatter among local “stewards” — people who erect the boxes and maintain them — we’d say the Kansas City area has at least 20 little libraries so far, typically about the size of a recycling bin.

The idea germinated in a small Wisconsin town in 2009, when Todd Bol built a diminutive one-room schoolhouse out of an old garage door as a tribute to his late mom, a teacher. He stocked it with books and put it on a post outside…

“This is just a way to build community, and people can put in books that they love or just want to get rid of,” says Theiss, who’s an actual librarian. She works at Rockhurst University.

Several things are interesting here:

1. People with these libraries still believe in the power of books. How many people in the U.S. would agree?

2. From this article, it sounds like many of these small libraries are in fairly well-off suburban-type neighborhoods. The irony is that such neighborhoods are supposed to have community but need these small book outposts to bring community.

3. While these small libraries may have benefits, does this suggest people don’t want to spend the time to travel to the library? Perhaps this is more about convenience than community?

I’ll be curious to see if this is just a fad or something longer lasting.

Argument: the problem isn’t technology as it is our choice how to respond

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One writer suggests humans can no longer escape technology so we had better get used to resisting it:

The phone isn’t the problem. The problem is us—our inability to step away from email and games and inessential data, our inability to look up, be it at an alpine lake or at family members. We won’t be able to get away from it all for very much longer. So it’s vitally important that each of us learns how to live with a persistent connection, everywhere we go, whether it’s in the wilderness or at a dinner party.

I still love the wilderness, and I can’t wait for my next trip to the backcountry—to walk for miles without crossing a road, without fielding a call or an email or a tweet. To once again drink deeply from a mountain stream. And to stretch out under the open sky at night, gaze up at the stars, and use my phone to name each and every one.

The argument here is that the technology itself is not the problem but rather how it is used that matters. Used well, it can enhance our experiences, bringing knowledge or social connections that otherwise would be impossible. Used poorly, it can become addicting and distract us from what is going on in front of us.

Two possible issues with this line of thinking:

1. Those who are younger, even right after birth, only know a world immersed in technology. They may never see technology is bad or really not know of scenarios when it is unavailable.

2. This ignores the social pressure of having to have and use technology. Sure, individuals can make choices but the people around you will push you to use what is available. Perhaps the trick is to find friends who also don’t want to use technology much.

At the least, many of us will need to be taught how to resist technology. What might we gain, or perhaps even more importantly given loss aversion, why don’t we lose by not using technology? Given our society’s emphasis on efficiency and progress, this is becoming harder and harder.

It is easy to eavesdrop on conversations while on mass transit

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A writer highlights how easy it is to overhear conversations on mass transit:

On Amtrak, powerful people talk loudly and spill secrets.

This is my conclusion based on five years’ field research commuting on Amtrak’s Acela between cities along the East Coast.

By now, you’ve heard about former NSA director Michael Hayden, who on Thursday talked nonstop to a reporter—on background—as the train went north from Washington, D.C. toward New York City. A few seats behind Hayden was Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of political group MoveOn.org, who started live-tweeting his eavesdropping…

As someone who rides the Acela two to three times a week, I can tell you that what Hayden and Matzzie each did—talking loud and tweeting louder—isn’t unusual. In fact, private conversations are so often broadcast across the train car that it’s become fertile ground for competitive intelligence gathering, business development or, as in Matzzie’s case, gaining a whole bunch of new social media followers.

While it may be relatively easy to hear on Amtrak trains, this is also not hard on subways, buses, and other trains. There are plenty of people who talk loudly, particularly on cell phones. I wonder if the best way to stop such loud conversations is to tell people their safety (or even national security!) is at risk – the people around them could learn a lot and then harm them down the road.

Webb argues at the end that most people listening to these public conversations are “accidental spies,” people who would prefer not to hear. However, isn’t this part of participating in public spaces? One doesn’t have to go so far as to strain to hear what people are saying to analyze and/or enjoy human conversation. Why not listen to the lives of others? Doing so can be a lot more interesting than “reality TV” that is heavily edited and scripted.

A final thought: I wonder how many people read this commentary and then think how nice it is to drive themselves to work and elsewhere. No nosy people nearby then, particularly if you have tinted glass…

h/t Instapundit

Sociologist recommends designing libraries and community centers so people can use them in disasters

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Sociologist Eric Klinenberg says more libraries, community centers, and other public spaces should be rethought and redesigned so that they could help people in times of crisis:

“Think about this: you’re in the midst of an extraordinary crisis, it’s so profound that the systems in your city have shut down. You don’t have power, you might not have water, you don’t have communications. Is that the moment you want to go into some strange, random public institution you’ve never spent time in before — one that’s likely to be overwhelmed by people with real needs and problems, and that might not be capable of giving you what you need. Or is that the moment you want to go a place that you feel comfortable in and familiar with, a place where you know the faces and are likely to see your a lot of your neighbors. It’s kind of a no-brainer.”

“Every neighborhood in this country should have a designated emergency safe space, and it will work well if its also a place that people use in their lives everyday, or every week. And if we can do that right, we can do something amazing. Not just protecting ourselves from the next crisis, but improving the quality of our lives and our communities all the time.”

And then speaking about a new design competition, Rebuild by Design:

Yeah. This is such an exciting competition. We had 148 design teams from around the world apply to come up with innovative solutions to deal with the threats of climate change, and there are 10 teams that are finalists that are doing their projects now.

I took them to the Red Hook Initiative because it’s an example of a community institution adapting its mission and changing the way its space worked during the crisis to become a relief operation. And they wound up serving thousands and thousands of people in that neighborhood because the staff knew the place well. Residents of the community felt very comfortable and at home there and because the design of the building allowed them to change the space according to the acute needs of that situation.

Klinenberg goes on to say that building resilient communities is important. Designing public buildings and spaces so that they can meet multiple needs could help a neighborhood or community get back on its feet quicker after a disaster. It would then be worth hearing more about what these redesigns could look like. How much different would a “resilient library” look?

It strikes me that pursuing this could be quite difficult in the suburbs. Because of the density of the city, it could be easier to find public spaces suitable to this task every so often. But, when people are more spread out and some suburban communities offer little in the way of public spaces, this would be harder.

Who pays in and receives tax money for transit in the Chicago metropolitan region

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Amidst the fight over tax dollars for mass transit in the Chicago region, here is a breakdown of where the tax money comes from and who gets to spend it:

Metra, the CTA and Pace receive around half of their operating revenues from fares, but most of the remainder comes from sales taxes. It’s calculated using unbelievably complicated state formulas that incorporate geography into divvying up the spoils. However, a 2008 state law change raising the sales tax left the disposal of some of the money up to the Regional Transportation Authority. That’s meant power struggles the last two years.

A look at 2012 sales tax dollars received by the RTA shows that 27.5 percent of that revenue derives from Chicago. The biggest chunk, or 50 percent, comes from suburban Cook County. Elsewhere, DuPage County contributed 8.6 percent, Lake 5 percent, Will about 4 percent, Kane about 3 percent and McHenry not quite 2 percent.

There are two different ways to interpret those numbers. Cook County, including Chicago, delivers 77 percent of transit funding. Or — the suburbs combined provide 72 percent of transit funding compared to Chicago.

In terms of revenue going out in 2014, the CTA will get $661 million in operating funds from the RTA, Metra receives $365.4 million, and Pace $151.6 million. When you cut up that pie, it’s 56 percent CTA, 31 percent Metra and 13 percent Pace.

So it sounds like complaints from DuPage County about the money they are contributing is a smaller slice of the pie overall – it is suburban Cook County that is chipping in the most.

Another issue: suburbanites might complain that they are not getting in return the money they put in but isn’t more expensive to run good mass transit in the spread-out suburbs? In other words, if the collar counties wanted mass transit similar to that of Chicago, wouldn’t it cost more from everyone?

Is the media narrative that bullying directly leads to suicide a social construction?

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A member of the Poynter Institute argues the media narrative that bullying leads to suicide is too simple:

The common narrative goes like this: Mean kids, usually the most popular and powerful, single out and relentlessly bully a socially weaker classmate in a systemic and calculated way, which then drives the victim into a darkness where he or she sees no alternative other than committing suicide.

And yet experts – those who study suicide, teen behavior and the dynamics of cyber interactions of teens – all say that the facts are rarely that simple. And by repeating this inaccurate story over and over, journalists are harming the public’s ability to understand the dynamics of both bullying and suicide…

Yet when journalists (and law enforcement, talking heads and politicians) imply that teenage suicides are directly caused by bullying, we reinforce a false narrative that has no scientific support. In doing so, we miss opportunities to educate the public about the things we could be doing to reduce both bullying and suicide…

It is journalistically irresponsible to claim that bullying leads to suicide. Even in specific cases where a teenager or child was bullied and subsequently commits suicide, it’s not accurate to imply the bullying was the direct and sole cause behind the suicide.

I don’t know this literature too well outside of reading some work by Michael Kimmel on gender and bullying and Katherine Newman et al. regarding school shootings. Some thoughts:

1. Bullying is not a good thing, even if it doesn’t lead to tragic outcomes.

2. Even if a majority of kids who are bullied don’t commit suicide, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a relationship. It might be that under certain conditions (perhaps social and environmental conditions or perhaps it has to do with more individual physiological traits) this relationship is more likely.

3. It seems that the media does not generally do very well in conveying complex stories. Perhaps it is because they don’t lend themselves to soundbites and headlines. Perhaps it is the need to find the winners, just like on ESPN. Perhaps the audience doesn’t want a complex story. But, look at any of the major events of recent years that have drawn a lot of media attention – from invading Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to the Trayvon Martin case – and you see relatively simple narratives for incredibly complex situations. Context matters.

As researchers look more at this issue, this is a reminder that the public perceptions of tragic events matter.

h/t Instapundit

Smokey the Bear is needed in urban areas like Chicago

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Smokey the Bear is present on billboards in Chicago – and he is needed. According to the Chicago Tribune several days ago:

Helene Cleveland, fire prevention program manager for the U.S. Forest Service, said wildfires are more common in the Chicago area than people think…

Tom Wilson, forest protection program manager for Illinois, said a study by the Chicago Wilderness organization noted more than 1,500 wildfires from January 2005 to March 2011 in the six-county Chicago area.

There are plenty of houses adjacent to forests and grassland areas that have potential to catch fire, Wilson said.

Such a message might seem out of place in Chicago but there are plenty of urban areas that are more visibly affected by wildfires more frequently: Los Angeles and other cities in the American Southwest or the fires currently outside of Sydney, Australia. Chicago might not see fires like this but there is still plenty of open land near the metropolitan area or within it as part of forest preserves and other entities.

These Smokey the Bear billboards are also a reminder of the relationship between cities and nature. The average Chicago street  might appear to have little nature beyond a few trees and a few small animals. Yet, cities can’t quite get away completely from nature, whether it is dealing with wildfires, water and flooding issues, responding to natural disasters, or the limited exposure children have to the natural world in books.

Argument: The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’

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Two professors argue being good at math is about hard work, not about genetics:

We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability…

Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:

  1. Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input.
  2. On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
  3. The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.
  4. The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.

Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Interesting argument: if you believe you can’t do well at a subject, you probably won’t. The authors then go on to hint at broader social beliefs: Americans tend to believe in talent, other countries tend to emphasize the value of hard work.

This lines up with what I was recently reading about athletes in The Sports Gene. The author reviews a lot of research that suggests training and genetics both matter. But, genetics may not matter in the way people typically think they do – more often, it matters less that people are “naturally gifted” and more that some learn quick than others. So, the 10,000 hours to become an expert, an idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, is the average time it takes one to become an expert. However, some people can do it much more quickly, some much more slowly due to their different rates of learning.

New York City seeing a rise in super-rich mansions (not McMansions)

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Curbed highlights a Gizmodo story about “McMansions” in New York City – and both get it wrong as these new homes are far beyond McMansions:

But developers may be reaching a breaking point in Manhattan, where warehouses are being bought to build $100 million single-family homes.

A handful of real estate stories this week question whether NYC is reaching peak development. First off, we have a mind-boggling report about the rise of single-family “palaces” in Manhattan. According to the New York Times, the super-rich are buying up warehouses, parking garages, and other commercial buildings to turn them into gigantic McMansion-style homes (including what will soon become the largest single-family home in the city). According to one broker, the new “benchmark” price is going to be $100 million, as opposed to the almost austere $50 million buyers expected to pay a few years ago.

It’s one thing to get rid of warehouses and garages—but another set of trend pieces alert us of a more problematic trend: The disappearance of gas stations in the city. As developers strive to find new plots of land that can be rebuilt from the ground up, they’re buying up gas stations left and right. We’ve covered at least one of these developments before, but according to the NYT and the Village Voice, it’s becoming a problem for cab drivers who can’t always find a station in time.

Note: the New York Times article cited above which starts with the story of a new 40,000 square foot home does not use the term McMansion. Calling them McMansions is just wrong; these are unusually large and expensive homes that go far beyond the typical, mass-produced, large suburban home.

More on these new homes from the New York Times:

“The town-house buyer doesn’t want a multi-unit condominium that is mass-produced,” said Wendy Maitland, a senior managing director of sales at Town Residential, who just closed a deal on a town house at 45 East 74th Street for $26 million. “This is an entirely private home, built for the lifestyle of someone who has multiple staff, a private driver. These people do not need a doorman, and they aren’t sharing amenities.”

Such buyers don’t exactly need a discount, but the value of private homes compared with condominiums is a draw anyway. “There is a gap in the marketplace — mansions are an area that is undervalued,” said Louis Buckworth, a broker at the Corcoran Group. He recently represented the British real estate magnate Christian Candy in buying a $35 million 30-foot-wide mansion for his family on the Upper East Side. (“Mansion” is typically defined as a town house at least 25 feet wide.) Mr. Candy’s new home, at 17,000 square feet, cost less than $2,100 a square foot. Meanwhile, “an 11,000-square-foot apartment at One57,” said Mr. Buckworth, referring to the glass tower in Midtown that Extell Development is building, “sold for $10,000 a square foot, making what we paid a joke.”

McMansion owners may want similar things – privacy, more space – but these homes are a step above.

Interestingly, even with their size and price, they tend to compare favorably to expensive homes in other global cities:

And for many buyers — especially foreigners who see real estate as more affordable in New York than in cities like London or Hong Kong — the numbers are eye-catching. Mr. Candy, for example, just sold a $250 million apartment in London and a $400 million home in Monaco, Mr. Buckworth said. “So as a foreigner, you say to yourself: ‘I can spend £20 million for an average-size flat in London, or get a mansion in prime Manhattan.’ And you can see why these numbers aren’t going to be particularly scary.”

So instead of pitching the story on Curbed and Gizmodo as the excesses of the American wealthy in New York City, this could be told as a story of relative value for big homes in a major global city. Same data, different contexts and narratives. Just bringing up the word McMansion implies selfish owners out to live in ostentatious homes.

Can Wikipedia rally the common good to improve?

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MIT Technology Review gives an overview of the troubles at Wikipedia and how the limited group behind the website wants to improve it:

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

In response, the Wikimedia Foundation, the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path…

Whether that can happen depends on whether enough people still believe in the notion of online collaboration for the greater good—the ideal that propelled Wikipedia in the beginning. But the attempt is crucial; Wikipedia matters to many more people than its editors and students who didn’t make time to read their assigned books. More of us than ever use the information found there, both directly and via other services. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search results. In 2009 Microsoft closed Encarta, which was based on content from several storied encyclopedias. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which charges $70 a year for online access to its 120,000 articles, offers just a handful of free entries plastered with banner and pop-up ads.

So if Wikipedia was created by a collective, can it be saved by a collective? The story goes on to describe a common process for human groups: as they grow and over time, they tend to take on bureaucratic tendencies which then make it more difficult to change course.

The larger question may be whether modern humans can regularly pursue the common good on the Internet. If it can’t be done on Wikipedia, what other hope is there? The average comments section at a major news website? Reddit? YouTube? Are we at the point when we can say that big corporations have “won” the Internet?