Category Archives: Sociology

Utah legislator suggests sociology degree may be “degree to nowhere”

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A legislator in Utah made some comments recently that sociology, along with several other disciplines, do not provide helpful degrees for some students:

Stephenson, who has a four-year degree and master’s from BYU, said colleges aren’t giving sociology, psychology and philosophy majors the real story.

“These colleges refuse to inform them,” Stephenson said. “They refuse to give them the data.”

Stephenson is clarifying to say he is not calling four-year degrees undesirable. Nonetheless, his message is already being met with opposition from his legislative counterparts.

“Clearly it sends the wrong message,” said Senate Minority Leader Ross Romero, D-Salt Lake. “Basically, what we need to be saying is that these are all important and not to be pitting one against the other, because they all provide value.”

Romero pointed to sociology majors, which sometimes turn into lawyers and earn good paychecks.

“What’s most important is getting a liberal education, getting a well-rounded education and learning how to think,” he said.

Even some Republican colleagues are questioning the strength of Stephenson’s message. Tuesday, Sen. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George, told Stephenson he was overstating the lack of value in a college degree.

Stephenson appears to be finding support for his rationale in a new Harvard University report out Wednesday. It says the education system is failing a lot of students that need to be career-ready, not college-ready.

Stephenson is calling certain four-year degrees “degrees to nowhere” as he pushes for an increase in funding for applied technology colleges.

While Stephenson is pushing for more vocational training, it is interesting that he picks on sociology (along with psychology and philosophy). A few thoughts about this:

1. These degrees do lead to some jobs or career paths. For example, sociology can often feed into social work or work in the criminal justice field. But some of these ties are not as obvious as perhaps business, pre-law, or pre-med.

2. It would be interesting to see the data to which Stephenson refers. Does this data say these majors can’t find work? Does it say that they earn less over a lifetime compared to some other majors? Do these majors have more student loans or debt after college? Does it say they have less meaningful jobs? Just curious.

3.  The skills of knowing how to interact with other cultures and people from different backgrounds seems valuable. See David Brooks’ argument about the difficulty of working with people.

4. The legislator Romero tries to defend these degrees but makes two interesting points of his own:

4a. The idea that these degrees and the skills developed in earning the degree have value even if it is not monetary value is a broader comment about society. If social workers, for example, are important and needed, shouldn’t the profession be better paying and more prestigious? Pay does not necessarily equate with social prestige or value.

4b. Romero then suggests that sociology can be fine if it is paired with a law degree. So the only way sociology is valuable is when paired with a prestigious and higher-earning degree?

5. The way this story is presented, the argument breaks down along party lines: the Republican thinks these degrees are not as worthwhile, the Democrat tries to defend them. Can we simply say that Stephenson thinks these degrees are not worth much because they support or promote values he disagrees with?

Blog and order

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Overthinking It has posted some analysis from a painstaking survey of Law and Order seasons 1-10 (hat tip:  Above the Law):

[I]n November 1993, at the same time the DAs of L&O were stumbling to a 59% success rate, Rudy Guiliani was elected Mayor. One of his big campaign issues had been, well, law and order, and tackling the crime rate was the centerpiece of his first year….Giuliani didn’t just fight crime, he fought crime in a lot of very visible ways that average New Yorkers would take note of. I don’t mean to take anything away from his acheivements [sic] — there was a remarkable drop in crime during his administration. But even before the murder rate started dropping, Giuliani created a strong public perception that there was a new sheriff in town. He restored people’s faith in law and order, and Law & Order immediately responded.

Here’s where art really started imitating life:

The [L&O] murder rate dropped by about 15%, and the L&O conviction rate shot up by more than 20%. There was a whole new feeling of optimism in the city and on the show (not to mention a young new DA by the name of Jack McCoy).

For those of you who want to dig into the data for yourselves, Overthinking It has posted the dataset here (Excel spreadsheet).

While no one would accuse L&O of being 100% realistic, I would never have suspected that it tracked real-world aggregates this closely.  It is one thing to base a single episode loosely on a true story, but it is impressive that the show statistically mapped NYC crime rates so directly.

Bringing nature back to the city while still accepting cars and suburbs?

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In modern history, the city has often been seen as the antithesis of nature or the countryside. With dirty factories, a multitude of noisy vehicles, and buildings crammed on top of each other, Americans (and others) responded in part by moving out from the city and into suburbs when the opportunity arose.

But there are still arguments about whether nature can return to the city and what exactly it might mean:

The following lies at the heart of the agenda of a growing number of designers and architects who refer to themselves as “landscape urbanists”: “the notion that the most important part of city planning is not the arrangement of buildings, but the natural landscape upon which those buildings stand.”…

“Proponents envision weaving nature and city together into a new hybrid that functions like a living ecosystem. And instead of pushing people closer together in service of achieving density … landscape urbanism allows for the possibility of an environmentally friendly future that includes spacious suburbs, and doesn’t demand that Americans stop driving their convenient cars. Americans have decided how they want to live, they argue, and the job of urban designers is to intelligently accommodate them while finding ways to protect the environment.”

And that’s the rub—the bit about cars and “spacious suburbs.” Architects who believe that a fresh commitment to urban living offers the best path to a sustainable future are deeply disconcerted by this quasi-green rhetoric, and by the way it’s catching on at trendy architecture schools. They call it a “a misguided surrender to suburban sprawl.”

This is part of a larger debate about land, density, lifestyles, and government funding: can we be truly “green” as long as there are any suburbs and cars? It sounds like one side says we need to compromise with the pro-suburban forces in America while another is holding out for a more urban world. Such a dividing line affects issues including sprawl, gas taxes, land use, high-speed rail, and more.

I’m not sure why it has to be an either/or question. Cities could adopt different tactics. Is Central Park a failure because it is compromised by several roads running through it? This seems more like an ideological battle rather than a discussion about what could happen in American cities in the near future.

On the hidden or out of the way yet sometimes thriving web forums

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This is something I have noticed recently in several sites I visit frequently: there is a little community of consistent posters who have been drawn together and slowly get to know each other. While one of these sites, the Ask Amy column posted on the site of the Chicago Tribune, is not exactly hidden, The Economist discusses some web groups that have formed in really hard to find or unlikely places:

The programming crew had accidentally created a community of the sort that crop up all over the internet. Most online discussions take place in discussion forums designed to allow people to create an identity and interact in threaded, chronological conversations. But the hidden recesses of the web provide enough soil to root entire worlds, too. Wherever one person may post words which more than one other may read and respond to, a world is born.

Read the article to hear how devoted fans of Douglas Adams founded a group in a forum that was an afterthought and how some people unhappy with Sonic Drive-In’s service found each other.

Sounds like a start to a very interesting research study: what exactly motivates people to (1) seek out these spaces and (2) then continue with discussions and getting to know each other. The description of what happens in these settings in out of way parts of the Internet is hilarious:

It’s been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It’s somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.

I would guess that the people who participate in groups like this are a limited number of total web users. I wouldn’t tend to be drawn to such forums: read a comment section of any blog or news story and you would likely find the conversation to be quite tedious or inflammatory. But I can remember the heady early days of AOL when chat rooms were the exciting feature of the Internet (and content took forever to load).

And these groups can be like real-life groups, meaning that they become territorial and protective:

Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it. They will flame and troll and otherwise make it difficult for potential new members to join, and they will invent in-jokes and jargon that makes the conversation unintelligible to outsiders, as a way of raising the bar for membership.

It sounds like there is a starting period when the group might be somewhat fluid as people stumble unto such forums. But once the group coalesces and becomes a collective entity, others are not welcome and sharp boundaries are drawn to limit the influence of outsiders. So if one wants to become part of such a group, does one simply have to be lucky or have good timing?

Another question: what do the users get out of participating in such long digressions?

Politicians and their responses to snow (and other events)

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Is it any surprise that Mayor Daley of Chicago has been absent from the response to snowstorm of recent days? What exactly could he gain at this point in his career?

We know from recent history that politicians have plenty to lose in such circumstances. Look at Mayor Bloomberg in New York a month or so ago – if he can’t even get the snow plows working, how could he achieve higher office? Past Chicago mayors, such as Michael Bilandic, have been burned by snow.

My guess is that this is one of those situations where people in charge get little credit if all goes smoothly but proportionately more blame if things go poorly. People expect that services like snow plowing or garbage pick-up are just going to happen and tend to only notice this when that service is interrupted. Right now in Chicago there seems to be game of political hot-potato over the number of people trapped overnight on Tuesday on Lake Shore Drive. Who exactly is responsible – should Mayor Daley have to answer for this? Shouldn’t someone have had some plan in place? More broadly, do most cities sit and think about worst-case scenarios so that they have at least thought about some of these issues?

This may not be a fair process on the part of the public: the leader can’t control everything. But when something goes wrong, the public also expects that the leader is ultimately responsible and is responsive to the needs of the citizenry. If not, if those basic services don’t come through, the blame often goes right to the top.

The “science of shoveling”

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Reading an article like this about the “science of shoveling” makes me glad that someone out there is seriously concerned about the best way to shovel:

The science of shoveling was invented by the Progressive Era efficiency expert (and father of Taylorism) Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor observed laborers shoveling varying weights and concluded that the shovel load with which “a first class man would do his biggest day’s work” was about 21 pounds. That’s remarkably close to the current recommendation from Canada’s Center for Occupational Health and Safety (keep per-shovel snow loads below 24 pounds). At the Bethlehem Steel works in Pennsylvania, Taylor gave out shovels specifically designed to hold 21 pounds—small ones for shoveling iron ore, big ones for shoveling ash—and made “thousands of stop-watch observations” to calculate the most efficient shoveling method.

Taylor’s purpose was not to preserve workers’ health but to maximize output; by following his recommendations, Bethlehem was able to increase the daily weight shoveled by each laborer from 16 to 59 tons. But because physical endurance was a necessary component to maximizing output, Taylor’s shoveling method also reduced wear and tear on the human body…

The other change is that, even taking into account that Taylor’s subjects were all experienced manual laborers, people must have had much stronger backs back then.Today, ergonomists worry less about manual laborers’ arms than about their backs, because the lower back (specifically the lumbosacral junction) is now understood to be the weakest link in the “body segment chain.” The same goes for anyone in the general population who shovels snow. Various technological innovations have been attempted to protect the back and reduce muscle strain generally, thereby lowering the risk of heart failure. A shovel with a longer shaft makes the initial part of the job easier, but it makes the part where you actually lift the snow harder. Many stores sell a snow shovel with a bent shaft, which is widely recognized as the optimal ergonomic design. This type of shovel has the opposite problem. It makes the initial part of the job harder (you have to stoop, especially if you’re tall or fat), but makes the part where you actually lift the snow easier.

It makes sense that Taylor is behind some of these ideas, particularly since shoveling was tied to manufacturing. I have seen these ergonomic shovels and may just have to purchase one after reading this in order to protect “the weakest link in the body segment chain.” So why aren’t there more strenuous advertisements for the health benefits of these ergonomic shovels?

In my shoveling yesterday, my technique was generally to use a smaller shovel (actually the biggest one we have but still relatively smaller) and lift and throw snow more frequently. I imagine the throwing motions I was using are not optimal – however, they were necessary in order to clear the four foot snow drifts that were already there. It sounds like I would be better off with a slightly bigger shovel so that I don’t have to lift as often.

And a couple of links in this story are interesting:

-Harvard provides some guidelines about shoveling. Basically, you shoveling may be problematic if you are out of shape or don’t exercise often, shovel first thing in the morning, and are exposed to extreme cold. (This is part of a full page about health for older men. Are older men the primary shovelers or are they are the ones most at risk?)

-One might wonder about the relative risk of shoveling: is this more dangerous than other activities? On the whole, heart attacks while shoveling represent a small proportion of the total heart-related deaths in the US each year: “The absolute risk of death-while-shoveling is low. An often-quoted statistic holds that 1,200 American die from a heart attack or other cardiac event during or after a blizzard every year, and that snow-shoveling is frequently to blame. This figure is sometimes attributed to the Centers for Disease Control, although an agency spokeswoman could not verify its source. Even if this statistic were correct, it’s nothing in comparison to the total number of annual heart-related deaths. According to the American Heart Association, there are 425,425 deaths per year from coronary heart disease.” That comes out to 0.3%.

h/t Instapundit

Thoughts on plowing intersections, runs on bread, having places to turn around on major roads (like LSD), and more

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Now that the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 has stopped (though arctic wind chills are next), I have a few thoughts about the storm:

1. I drove home yesterday at about 4:45 PM. The roads weren’t too bad and the traffic was light – I assume this meant many people went home earlier. But there a problem in this sort of weather and any snow that always pops up: intersections that are difficult to move through. The roads can be quite passable but then everything bottles up at slushy intersections where people can’t start quickly and have great difficulty in turning. Someone needs to figure out a way to solve this problem. Would it be better to close an intersection for a minute or two so plows could do diagonal runs through the intersection square to clear snow? Are there people concerned about the science of plowing?

2. Why there was a run on bread in times like this is an interesting question to ponder. There are a lot of food one could buy before a storm hits that would be better in bread in that it would last longer and be more fulfilling. When did runs on bread begin and why do people still do this?

3. One of the stories in Chicago was the people who got stuck on in northbound traffic on Lake Shore Drive for hours. Why doesn’t every main road, particularly highways, have a certain number of points where people could turn around if a situation like this (or even a major crash in regular conditions) occurs? Lake Shore Drive has a number of exits in this area but those were blocked with crashes as well. Concrete barriers are helpful in separating traffic but this is an issue that someone should solve.

4. The warnings the police and state officials were giving overnight and this morning were intriguing that they must have to give these warnings because there are people who go out driving in such conditions when they don’t have to. This morning, one official suggested that if people wanted to go out, they needed to consider whether they were willing to risk their lives. This seems like common sense – but perhaps it is not.

5. When I woke up at 7:30 AM, the street in our residential subdivision wasn’t bad – perhaps 5-6 inches of snow. By 12:30 PM, a plow had done several runs on the street and it was clear. I was tempted to go drive and see what everything looks like but see point #4 above.

6. The blizzard is over – the total snowfall was the third biggest storm in Chicago history. Now it is time for the bitter cold. In the grand scheme of things, is the extreme cold more dangerous to more people than the blizzard conditions and the snow?

Exactly how many American homes are vacant?

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Two bloggers have a disagreement about how many vacant homes there are in the United States. Check out the debate and the comments below.

The moral of the story: one still needs to interpret statistics and what exactly they are measuring. The different between 11% and 2% is quite a lot: the first figure suggests 1 out of 10 housing units are vacant while the second figure suggests it is 1 out of 50. If you look at Table 1 of this Census Bureau release regarding housing figures from Quarter 4, it looks like the vacancy rate is 2.7%. But there may be confusion based on Table 3 which suggests the vacancy for all housing units is roughly 11% for year-round units. And later in the release, page 11 of the document, gives the formula for the vacancy calculation and an explanation: “The homeowner vacancy rate is the proportion of the homeowner inventory that is vacant for sale.”

There are some other figures of note in this document. Table 4 shows that the homeownership rate is at 66.5%, down from a peak of 69.2% in the fourth quarter of 2004. (It is interesting to note that this rate peaked a couple of years before the housing market is popularly thought to have gone downhill. What happened between Q4 2004 and the start of the larger economic crisis? Table 7 has homeownership rates by race: the white rate has dropped 1.1% since 1Q 2007 while Blacks and Latinos have seen bigger drops (3.2% and 3.3%).

How the John Edwards affair became news

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How exactly certain scandals come to light when they do is often an interesting tale. The former editor of the National Enquirer explains how his investigative team put together the story of John Edwards’ affair. The tale involves the use of technology and a profiler who provided insights into how to trap Edwards in his lies:

I knew there was no viable scenario for Edwards to confess to the Enquirer. I faced the bitter realization that another news organization would reap the benefits of our team’s hard work and get the confession, but I also knew that ultimately that confession would validate the Enquirer‘s earlier story as well as the new one.

Behind the scenes we exerted pressure on Edwards, sending word though mutual contacts that we had photographed him throughout the night. We provided a few details about his movements to prove this was no bluff.

For 18 days we played this game, and as the standoff continued the Enquirer published a photograph of Edwards with the baby inside a room at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

Journalists asked if we had a hidden camera in the room. We never said yes or no. (We still haven’t). We sent word to Edwards privately that there were more photos.

He cracked. Not knowing what else the Enquirer possessed and faced with his world crumbling, Edwards, as the profiler predicted, came forward to partially confess. He knew no one could prove paternity so he admitted the affair but denied being the father of Hunter’s baby, once again taking control of the situation.

Perhaps this story isn’t anything unusual – technology makes information gathering a lot easier. Yet it is somewhat shocking to me that plenty of powerful people, like John Edwards or Tiger Woods, think that they can get away with things in the long run. Sure, the National Enquirer had to spend months tracking down this story but in the end, it was doable and effectively changed the public perception of John Edwards forever. Is there something that happens when people are put in powerful positions that changes their perceptions of what they can and can’t get away with?

Is it even possible for the powerful to get away with things like this any more? How many “scandals” are lurking out there somewhere? It is certainly a far cry from the days of the 1950s and before when sportwriters routinely shied away from reporting on what athletes did away from home and political reporters didn’t talk about everything.

Pictures of “uncontacted” Amazon peoples

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There are still areas of the planet where people have little contact with the larger world. The country of Brazil has just released photos of some people groups with limited contact in order to draw attention to their condition:

FUNAI has released similar photographs in the past and acknowledged that Peruvian loggers are sending some indigenous people fleeing across the border to less-affected rainforests in Brazil.

The coordinator of Brazil’s Amazon Indian organization COIAB, Marcos Apurina, said he hoped the images would draw attention to the plight of the indigenous peoples and encourage their protection.

“It is necessary to reaffirm that these peoples exist, so we support the use of images that prove these facts. These peoples have had their most fundamental rights, particularly their right to life, ignored — it is therefore crucial that we protect them,” he said.

FUNAI says there are 67 tribes in Brazil that do not have sustained contact with the outside world. Some are often referred to as “uncontacted” tribes even though they have some kind of, albeit limited, contacts.

The future of a number of these groups has been threatened in recent decades primarily by people who want their land, either for its natural resources or who want to convert it into farmland. And there are some interesting discussions about how these cultures can continue to remain fairly distinct from outside influences, even if most now have had some contact with the larger world.