Will Beatles songs eventually become as well known as nursery rhymes?

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Scientist and musician Daniel Levitin wrote about the ubiquity of Beatles songs a while back:

One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they’ve always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.

Why can we listen to certain songs across a lifetime and still find pleasure in them? Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture’s music. Through a lifetime of listening, we have learned what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities of what chord is likely to follow what, and how melodies are formed. Skilful composers play with these expectations, meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory we’ve found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as sex or opiates do. But there is no one song that does this for everyone; musical taste is both variable and subjective…

On the bus to my office, the radio played And I Love Her and a Portuguese immigrant my grandmother’s age sang along. How many people can hum even two bars of Beethoven’s Fourth, or Mozart’s 30th? I recently played one minute of these to an audience of 700 people – professional musicians included – but not one recognised these pieces. Then I played a half-second of two Beatles songs – a fraction of the first “aah” of Eleanor Rigby and the guitar chord that opens A Hard Day’s Night – and virtually everyone shouted out the song names, more than could recognise the Mona Lisa.

To a neuroscientist, the Beatles’ longevity can be explained by the fact that their music creates subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex. To a musician, each listening showcases subtle nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that slowly reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of listenings. I have to admit, they’re getting better all the time.

While the neuroscience piece is interesting in its own right, a sociologist might be more interested in thinking about what songs make it to this level of common knowledge or become part of cultural narratives across societies. How many times does a song have to be played? Does it matter in what venues the song is performed? I could imagine a mega radio hit vs. a lesser known song that gets licensed dozens of times in the coming decades in commercials. Does the relative importance of the musical artist matter? Some of this has to do with diffusion and the various gatekeepers at play. The Beatles likely have all these factors (except the commercials) in their favor as they were a cultural phenomenon, produced numerous #1 singles around the world, changed the music industry (from recording to stopping touring), and were generally liked by critics.

Just thinking back, I feel like I only tend to hear this argument about what songs will last into the future when people are worried about their idea of bad music (maybe boy bands of the late 1990s, Brittany Spears, Lady Gaga, etc.) becoming the equivalent nursery rhymes.

Urban residential segregation continues to decline

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Analysis of recent Census data suggests residential segregation is decreasing in many cities:

Between 2000 and 2014, segregation between blacks and whites declined in almost all of the nation’s 53 metropolitan areas with a population of over a million, the analysis shows.

Some of the biggest declines occurred in cities long divided by race, including Detroit and Chicago, but the progress was more modest in New York and Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest metropolitan areas…

But the migration into suburbs isn’t the whole story. Detroit and Kansas City, Mo., for instance, had the two biggest gains in integration, but while the change in Kansas City came from a large movement of blacks from the central city to the suburbs, the drop in Detroit’s segregation level reflected many blacks leaving the region entirely, said John Logan, a sociologist at Brown University who studies residential diversity.

Logan attributed most of the decline in segregation to what he called the phenomenon of “global neighborhoods” — areas that were once all white where blacks have moved into, typically after Latinos, sometimes along with Asians, had integrated the neighborhood.

Three quick thoughts:

  1. This is a reminder that the effects of race and ethnicity on neighborhoods and communities has changed in recent decades from a strong white-black divide to a more mixed movement of people.
  2. On the other side, even with the spreading out of Latinos and Asians, there are persistent divides between blacks and whites. In other words, we cannot point to many (any?) neighborhoods that have gone from black to white though some black neighborhoods have become less black.
  3. It is interesting to monitor these changes over time but I would be interested to know what the “desirable” desegregation numbers are. For example, the dissimilarity index suggests what percent of the minority group would need to move to be spread out throughout a region. Do sociologists expect the dissimilarity index to hit 0 or is there a threshold that would be good for society and the groups involved?

A “sociological record” of inside all of Poland’s homes

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One woman aimed to photograph every Polish home and create a “sociological record”:

In 1978, there were 35 million people living in Poland, but that didn’t stop Zofia Rydet trying to photograph the homes of every single one. That summer, the 67-year-old began the monumental project she called her “sociological record,” travelling the length and breadth of her country on foot and by bus.

By the time she died, in 1997, the series, which is currently on show at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, comprised nearly 20,000 images from more than 100 villages and towns…

Over the years Rydet perfected a particular method for obtaining the best portrait possible. “I knock on the door, I say ‘hello’ and shake hands. I enter the home, look around carefully, and I immediately see something beautiful, something unusual, and I compliment it. The owner is pleased that I like it, and then I take the first photograph. Everyone has something in his house that is most precious to him. If I manage to notice this, then this person submits at once.”…

Rydet preferred photographing rural homes to those in the city, whose interiors she found sterile and uniform. She believed wholeheartedly in the socio-historical value of her endeavour, convinced that her pictures of personal objects and private spaces defined the people who owned them, and “revealed their psychology.”

Sociologists may often be associated with large-scale surveys but there are creative ways to obtain sociological data in everyday life, whether walking all the streets of a city or photographing thousands of homes. Of course, taking the photographs is not enough (even with the massive effort it would be to travel around and interact with all the residents): sociologists would want to look for patterns which might include things like decorations, spatial arrangements, markers of social class, the setting of the home, and so on. If this Warsaw museum put out all of her images – nearly 20,000 according to the article – it would be interesting to walk through them all several times to see what pops out.

The massive traffic generated by an Amazon fulfillment center

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Labor practices in Amazon’s warehouses may be one issue but another issue for nearby residents is the traffic around the facilities:

Traffic grinds to a halt for miles when the fulfillment center’s more than 4,000 employees are going in and out of the facility during rush hour.

Robbinsville Mayor Dave Fried is threatening to sue  Amazon over the traffic that’s clogged area roads after a senior official failed to show at a meeting to discuss the problem…

The company’s fulfillment center, called the “busiest warehouse on the planet” is located on New Canton Way in the township…

In a statement on the township website Fried says:  “Children cannot get to school, residents cannot pull out of their driveways, and this has become a very serious public safety issue.  According to police department crash data, there have been 25 accidents that can be attributed to workers coming to and from the Amazon warehouse over the past six weeks, compared to just one accident over the previous six weeks.”

A common NIMBY concern about new developments is the traffic generated. Nearby residents complain about the traffic associated with schools, churches, shopping centers…basically, any sort of new development, particularly in more residential areas. Sometimes, these concerns seem like a stretch: a smaller church is really going to disturb local streets all week long? Yet, traffic can truly be an issue for an area is the roads can’t handle all the new volume. This Amazon facility in New Jersey is a good example: all the sudden, thousands of vehicles are now flooding local roads at relatively short periods. This is why the staggered start and stop times might be a good solution; roads are often constructed to handle rush hour type flows but they typically only happen twice a day and the roads sit emptier for much of the rest of the day. (Carpooling might be another good suggestion – how many Amazon workers drive solo? – but getting Americans to do this consistently is quite difficult.)

This is also a good reminder of the physical world footprint of an online company like Amazon. The products may come through the mail but all the infrastructure happens somewhere and affects various communities.

A need to better measure financial support and wealth passed to Millennials

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A look at how race affects the financial support given by parents to Millennials includes this bit about measurement:

Shapiro said the numbers of Millennials receiving support from family are “absolutely underestimated” because many survey questions are not as methodical and specific as those a sociologist might ask. “As much as 90 percent of what you’ll hear isn’t picked up in the survey,” he said.

Shapiro’s more careful research found this:

Shapiro’s work pays special attention to the role of intergenerational family support in wealth building. He coined the term “transformative assets” to refer to any money acquired through family that facilitates social mobility beyond what one’s current income level would allow for. And it’s not that parents and other family members are exceptionally altruistic, either. “It’s how we all operate,” Shapiro said. “Resources tend to flow to people who are more needy.”

Racial disparity in transformative assets became especially striking to Shapiro during interviews with middle-class black Americans. “They almost always talk about financial help they give family members. People come to them,” Shapiro said. But when he asked white interviewees if they were lending financial support to family members, he said, “I almost always get laughter. They’re still getting subsidized.”…

To many Millennials, the small influxes of cash from parents are a lifeline, a financial relief they’re hard pressed to find elsewhere. To researchers, however, it’s both a symptom and an exacerbating factor of wealth inequality. In a 2004 CommonWealth magazine interview, Shapiro explained that gifts like this are “often not a lot of money, but it’s really important money. It’s a kind of money that allows families to obtain something for themselves and for their children that they couldn’t do on their own.”

Two quick thoughts:

  1. Americans tend not to like to talk about passing down wealth but decades of sociological research (as well as research from others) shows that it happens frequently and is quite advantageous for those who have wealth passed to them. I recommend looking at Shapiro and Oliver’s book Black Wealth/White Wealth.
  2. Polls like those cited here from USA Today could lead to lots of problems just because the measurement is not great. Why not ask better poll questions in the first place? I understand there are likely limits to how many questions can be asked (it is costly to ask more and longer questions) but I’d rather have sociologists and other social scientists handling this rather than the media.

Shift in US toward more inequality across cities

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The differences in per capita incomes across US cities have grown in recent decades:

Until the early 1980s, a long-running feature of American history was the gradual convergence of income across regions. The trend goes back to at least the 1840s, but grew particularly strong during the middle decades of the 20th century. This was, in part, a result of the South catching up with the North in its economic development. As late as 1940, per-capita income in Mississippi, for example, was still less than one-quarter that of Connecticut. Over the next 40 years, Mississippians saw their incomes rise much faster than did residents of Connecticut, until by 1980 the gap in income had shrunk to 58 percent…

Yet starting in the early 1980s, the long trend toward regional equality abruptly switched. Since then, geography has come roaring back as a determinant of economic fortune, as a few elite cities have surged ahead of the rest of the country in their wealth and income. In 1980, the per-capita income of Washington, D.C., was 29 percent above the average for Americans as a whole; by 2013 it had risen to 68 percent above. In the San Francisco Bay area, the rise was from 50 percent above to 88 percent. Meanwhile, per-capita income in New York City soared from 80 percent above the national average in 1980 to 172 percent above in 2013.

The article has a long discussion of the various reasons behind this. But, I think the conclusion is correct:

Growing inequality between and among regions and metro areas is obvious. But it is almost completely absent from the current political conversation.

Inequality may be a broad issue for the entire country to address but what is happening in different places is unique. This may make it difficult to address variations within a presidential race where the candidates are supposed to represent everyone. Imagine a Republican or Democrat trying to appeal to a particular metropolitan region: “my platform is built around what Detroit needs!” or “the success I’ve helped create in Burlington, Vermont is what we should bring to the entire country!” (This does highlight the unique role mayors or former mayors could play in national elections. They are likely to think more at the city or metropolitan level but it is really hard for such experience to translate into national electoral success.) But, city-level issues certainly could be addressed by Congress or by states.

Wearable fitness devices might not be very reliable

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The FDA uses different criteria for consumer fitness devices compared to medical devices:

Sehgal should know: he and his colleagues at the Center for Digital Health Innovation have compared the data reported by consumer wearable devices to relevant clinical gold standards in multiple studies over the past two years. They’ve found that very few devices currently on the market perform with the reliability one would expect from a medical-grade device.

And in fact wearable devices such as the Fitbit haven’t been clinically validated to perform at the same standards for reliability that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration uses for medical devices, such as the traditional blood-pressure cuff in a doctor’s office. Consumer wearables are marketed under the FDA’s less rigorous “wellness-focused” rubric.

Trister says that rather than tracking general activity, the most promising wearables target a specific thing. He cites startup Empatica’s Embrace wristband, which measures skin conductance—a signal that tends to rise as you get stressed—to detect an oncoming seizure (see “A Sleek Wristband That Can Track Seizures”). And Sehgal also points to devices being used in research labs that similarly measure the conductivity of the skin to help determine the severity of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers returning from war.

The end of this article suggests we’ll need time to see whether these devices can actually be used to help treat certain conditions. In the meantime, it would be interesting to know two things.

  1. What would it take to upgrade wearable devices for the masses: is it an issue of cost (all the testing an0d regulations would drive up the average price too much) or technology (these devices can’t yet be always reliable)?
  2. How would the average user know whether their particular device is unreliable? And if they could figure it out, do they have grounds for financial recourse?

Designing “porous cities” for regular interactions by all people

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Sociologist Richard Sennett observes a heterogeneous marketplace in India and wonders why more urban spaces can’t have a broad mix of people:

Nehru Place is every urbanist’s dream: intense, mixed, complex. If it’s the sort of place we want to make, it’s not the sort of space most cities are building. Instead, the dominant forms of urban growth are mono-functional, like shopping centres where you are welcome to shop but there’s no place to pray. These sorts of places tend to be isolated in space, as in the offices “campuses” built on the edge of cities, or towers in a city’s centre which, as in London’s current crop of architectural monsters, are sealed off at the base from their surroundings. It’s not just evil developers who want things this way: according to Setha Low, the most popular form of residential housing, world-wide, is the gated community.

Is it worth trying to turn the dream of the porous city into a pervasive reality? I wondered in Nehru Place about the social side of this question, since Indian cities have been swept from time to time by waves of ethnic and religious violence. Could porous places tamp down that threat, by mixing people together in everyday activities? Evidence from western cities answers both yes and no…

If the public comes to demand it, urbanists can easily design a porous city on the model of Nehru Place; indeed, many of the architects and planners at the Urban Age events now unfolding in London have made proposals to “porosify” the city. Like Nehru Place, these larger visions entail opening up and blurring the edges of spaces so that people are drawn in rather than repulsed; they emphasise true mixed use of public and private functions, schools and clinics amid Tesco or Pret; they explore the making of loose-fit spaces which can shift in shape as people’s lives change.

Three quick thoughts:

  1. These thoughts sound similar to what sociologist Elijah Anderson was getting at in The Cosmopolitan Canopy. Anderson asked of American cities: what happens in the rare public spaces where people of different class, race, and ethnic backgrounds regularly mix? Sennett has asked this of international contexts which have their own unique mixes of people.
  2. Key to the mixing of people may be the presence of “normal” commercial activity. Anderson observed a shopping mall in central Philadelphia; Sennett references an electronics market in India. Prices have to be low enough for everyone to have access and there needs to be a range of mixed use activity with some nearby places to work, shop, and eat.
  3. It strikes me that exclusivity is something imposed by the upper classes. One function of higher priced stores is that it tends to keep certain people out. Gated communities, cited by Sennett, are a function of class. As people acquire more wealth, they tend to design or buy into settings where people below them are minimized or removed. Thus, having more porous cities or spaces within cities would likely require significant changes from those with more power and wealth.

“[O]ne of a sociologist’s prime traits is extreme nosiness”

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A public sociologist describes how she interacts with what others say online about her opinions:

They say you should never read below the line after you publish an article in the public domain. Yes, but what if you’re a sociologist? You have to read the comments – it’s your job to know how society reacts to a particular viewpoint. Besides, one of a sociologist’s prime traits is extreme nosiness. So I look. My favourite comment came after I had written in a national newspaper about being a working-class academic and living on a council estate: “Where is her child’s father?” a reader demanded. That was just class – in every sense of the word.

Nosiness or someone who likes observing other people and social interactions? When sociologists describe what makes them tick (or at least how this is written in textbooks for Introduction to Sociology), people watching or a curiosity about social behavior is typically invoked. This could happen through reliable and valid data (in its more scientific and publishable forms) or through eavesdropping, seeing with your own eyes, and even acting within social situations (see breaching experiments as an example). Sometimes this is described as a sociological imagination. Such interest in the actions of others could be interpreted as nosiness, particularly if social norms are violated, but I hardly think reading online comments counts: reading such comments is observing actions taken in the public domain.

Building tiny houses for Chicago’s homeless

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A future community of tiny houses in Bronzeville could help Chicago’s homeless:

Tiny Homes Chicago, a venture from AIA Chicago, Landon Bone Baker Architects, Windy City Times, Pride, is of the firm belief that the tiny homes can help this group of people who are trying to positively contribute, but who are also being negatively affected by the transience of moving from shelter to shelter. Small homes would afford folks the ability to study and seek safety.

That’s why they’re creating a competition to create a Tiny Homes community in Bronzeville to alleviate affordable housing. This neighborhood would be a pilot prototype for other interested communities.

If you think you can come up with a solid design for a home, then attend the upcoming meeting on Wednesday, December 2 for Interested parties. The final proposals will address planned 12-unit developments, where residents have a safe secure space to sleep, study, and store their possessions. In addition, there would be a 1,200 s.f. communal space, as well as secure bike storage.

The 350 s.f. units themselves will have bathrooms, storage, and sleeping space. With a $30,000 limit on material and mechanical systems, the units need to come to life for under $60,000 and follow city building codes.

Tiny houses have been proposed for the homeless before (see here and here) and this effort in Chicago could serve to spur similar efforts. I imagine several important questions will arise during this competition:

  1. How many locations in Chicago could support even small tiny house developments like this one? While affordable housing is needed and the homeless need help, there may not be many neighbors who would want to be near such sites.
  2. Is the budget reasonable both to build lasting units and to make this an affordable project for funders?
  3. How will these housing units be paired with social services? Providing more permanent shelters could go a long way but so would jobs, education, health care, and other needs.