Determining whether concrete buildings in LA are endangered by earthquakes

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The Los Angeles Times looks at a number of concrete buildings in LA that could be at serious risk in an earthquake:

Despite their sturdy appearance, many older concrete buildings are vulnerable to the sideways movement of a major earthquake because they don’t have enough steel reinforcing bars to hold columns in place.

Los Angeles officials have known about the dangers for more than 40 years but have failed to force owners to make their properties safer. The city has even rejected calls to make a list of concrete buildings.

In the absence of city action, university scientists compiled the first comprehensive inventory of potentially dangerous concrete buildings in Los Angeles.

The scientists, however, have declined to make the information public. They said they are willing to share it with L.A. officials, but only if the city requests a copy. The city has not done so, the scientists said.

Pretty interesting look at how concrete buildings can be built to withstand earthquakes. The key issue here seems to be retrofitting: should it be required and if so, how much would property owners complain about the cost? As the article notes:

Earthquake safety has rarely been an issue that draws deep public passions and outrage. Most seismic regulations are approved in the wake of destructive earthquakes, but there hasn’t been one in California in nearly 20 years.

In other words, occasional disasters allows room for complacency. When the events are rare, people will question whether the money should be better spent elsewhere. This is part of the debate over other disasters as well like: how should buildings in Tornado Alley be constructed if tornadoes might occur? Should New York be protected from hurricanes and rising water levels by constructing gates and barriers? How much should be spent on levees in New Orleans to avoid situations like that after Hurricane Katrina?

When Dominick’s stores close, suburbs lose tax dollars, gathering places

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Amidst the news stories detailing the closing of Dominick’s stores in the Chicago area, one article highlights its effects on suburban communities:

Bruce Evensen, a DePaul University journalism professor, compared the news with the closing of Marshall Field’s in 2006. He said he has been a longtime Dominick’s shopper after living in the Arlington Heights and Mount Prospect area for the past 20 years.

“It’s a sad day,” said Evensen, 62. “To see it close is not just the closing of a store but the closing of an experience. After years of checking out, you get to know the staff, their families and their dreams. It’s the ending of that part of their lives.”…

Naperville City Manager Doug Krieger called the stores significant sales tax contributors, and expressed hope that new tenants would fill the locations.

Michael Cassa, president of the Downers Grove Economic Development Corp., said that it’s too early to know the potential effect, but the village’s only Dominick’s sits in a busy commercial complex along the main business corridor.

There are two arguments as to how closed stores will affect suburbs:

1. They will lose out on tax dollars. Grocery stores are the sort of businesses that have regular consumers – we all have to eat. Additionally, it can be hard to refill big box stores that close down. New businesses might want to construct new buildings and it would be hard for a single large company to take over all of the closed stores. That means individual suburbs will have to try to attract new businesses into large buildings.

2. In suburbs which are marked by fragmentation and more home-centered social life, persistent social institutions are limited. Local schools and religious congregations help fill that void but grocery stores could also play that role. Again, since people have to eat, customers are likely to be in and out regularly. They may even be there enough to know a lot of the details about the store as well as get to know employees and fellow customers. Interestingly, the same claims are rarely made about Walmarts or Targets – but perhaps similar arguments will be made in the future once these stores have been in communities for decades.

It is interesting to watch the sadness over Dominick’s closing. There are certainly lots of workers affected and it is unclear where they will all end up. However, this cycle of corporate merging and sell-offs seems fairly normal to me. Perhaps that is because I grew up in the Chicago area going to other grocery stores. Or perhaps it is because I’m used to our times where companies are viewed less as community institutions and more of places providing services that could be here one year and not the next.

Facebook partnering to build a new mixed-use development for its workers

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Here are a few details about Facebook’s plans to help put together a new mixed-use development near its main campus:

The planned complex, designed by architecture firm KTGY Group, is the first major housing development in Menlo Park in 20 years, and is expected to open in 2016. According to Deanna Chow, a senior planner in Menlo Park’s planning department, the city is largely occupied by single-family homes. This 394-unit residential community will be the first mixed-use development of its scale in the city…

While Facebook’s investment in the complex only extends to subsidizing 15 low-income units, Anton Menlo could very well become a “Facebook Town.” Besides its proximity to Facebook’s campus, the designers also kept the company’s employees very much in mind. A series of focus groups and electronic surveys gauging employees’ needs and desires translated into amenities like a “grab & go” convenience store, sports pub, doggy daycare, bicycle repair shop, and an “iCafe” filled with community WiFi zones, printers, and office supplies. Once construction begins, St. Anton will market the apartments to Facebook employees first before opening up to the general public. The developer is also working to establish a leasing office on Facebook’s campus.

Beyond concerns about Facebook employees becoming slaves to work or the beginnings of a community made up entirely of “brogrammers,” the project is actually a much-needed step in addressing Menlo Park’s housing strain. According to a housing fact sheet from the city, Menlo Park has a “jobs/housing inbalance,” with 41,320 workers but only 13,129 housing units…

On the plus side, housing employees close to work can help reduce traffic and gridlock. In fact, the Anton Menlo project aims to make several specific transit improvements. The Facebook corporate shuttle will be adding a stop at Anton Menlo. On a mission to get people home as soon as possible, the developer is working with the city to put in a bike path that runs directly from the Facebook campus to the new complex. Also in the works are separated sidewalks, crosswalks that light up to caution cars, and an underground tunnel linking Facebook’s campus to the apartments.

So, Facebook might help alleviate some housing pressure in a community that is difficult to live in but there will be questions about this being a “company town.” There are a lot of American companies that could afford similar actions. If they provide housing for their employees without being too controlling, two good things might emerge: (1) the workers might be more productive and (2) the community could be helped. Either way, it will be interesting to watch the outcome of Facebook’s real estate development activities.

While companies might get flack about providing housing, I wonder if developers and those involved in real estate are regarded more highly for their efforts to develop housing. For example, this 2009 Harris Poll regarding occupational prestige has real estate agent/broker at the bottom of 23 occupations. Developers sometimes provide big houses people want but they can also raise the ire of neighbors whose NIMBY hackles are raised.

Chicago McMansion battle reaches the McMansion pumpkin stage

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One battle over a proposed McMansion in Chicago recently turned to pumpkins:

The large pumpkin popped up over the weekend next to his lot at 829 S. Bishop St. It was painted with the words, “When size matters … McMansion Pumpkin.”

Many neighbors have referred to Skarbek’s plan for his home as a “McMansion.” He plans to build a home much larger than the row home that had been there, and the home will eventually interrupt a string of front yards that are all set back from the street…

Later Tuesday, Skarbek’s next-door neighbor, Paul Fitzpatrick, said his wife decorated the pumpkin, which actually sits on his yard to the north of a fence surrounding Skarbek’s lot while the new home is being built.

“I meant it as a good gesture,” Carrie Fitzpatrick said. “He likes big houses, so I thought he’d like a big pumpkin. I spent a lot of money on that pumpkin, and if it backfired, I’ll feel really stupid.”

A holiday-themed McMansion fight turned petty. Both sides appear to be trying to pass it off as no big deal but even in a country of moral minimalism (the argument of M. P Baumgartner in The Moral Order of a Suburb), this is an odd way to go about things. If the neighbors are already pursuing a lawsuit, the other main way for Americans to settle irreconcilable differences, why move to the pumpkin stage?

Journalists: stop saying scientists “proved” something in studies

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One comment after a story about a new study on innovation in American films over time reminds journalists that scientists do not “prove” things in studies.

The front page title is “Scientist Proves…”

I’m willing to bet the scientist said no such thing. Rather it was probably more along the lines of “the data gives an indication that…”

Terms in science have pretty specific meanings that differ from our day-to-day usage. “Prove” and “theory, among others, are such terms. Indeed, science tends to avoid “prove” or “proof.” To quote another article “Proof, then, is solely the realm of logic and mathematics (and whiskey).”

[end pedantry]

To go further, using the language of proof/prove tends to relay a particular meaning to the public: the scientist has shown without a doubt and that in 100% of cases that a causal relationship exists. This is not how science, natural or social, works. We tend to say outcomes are more or less likely. There can also be relationships that are not causal – correlation without causation is a common example. Similarly, a relationship can still be true even if it doesn’t apply to all or even most cases. When teaching statistics and research methods, I try to remind my students of this. Early on, I suggest we are into “proving” things but rather looking for relationships between things using methods, quantitative or qualitative, that still have some measure of error built-in. If we can’t have 100% proof, that doesn’t mean science is dead – it just means that done correctly, we can be more confident about our observations.

See an earlier post regarding how Internet commentors often fall into similar traps when responding to scientific studies.

 

“Our veterans deserve a clean [and mowed] lawn”

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The American quest for a good-looking lawn extends to one man determined to keep the lawn mowed on the National Mall during the government shutdown:

A kind-hearted South Carolina volunteer who has mowed lawns, cleared a fallen tree and emptied ‘hundreds of trash cans’ up and down the National Mall since the federal government partially shut down told MailOnline that an aggressive, ‘bully’ of a U.S. Park Police officer who ‘looked like Robocop’ today ordered him to leave the Lincoln Memorial.

Chris Cox, the one-man landscaping crew, calls himself the Memorial Militia. He said he has been on a mission to spruce up the lawns, trees and trash bins near America’s grandest memorials before the weekend, because a ‘Million Vet March’ event is expected to bring scores of retired servicemen and women to the nation’s capital...

‘I’m calling on Americans,’ the 45-year-old told MailOnline: ‘Find a memorial. Go there. Instead of bringing a picnic basket, show up with a lawn mower and a rake.’

The peak of American patriotism: a cleanly-cut lawn! To me, this hints at the American obsession with lawns. On one hand, there might be safety and health arguments about garbage sitting out or fallen down trees that might lead to some harm. But, keeping the lawn neat? If the grass gets a little long, it is a major problem? The connection to veterans is intriguing as well: we can honor fellow Americans by having a well-manicured lawn.

“Learn to Write Badly: How to Write in the Social Sciences”

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A new book titled Learn to Write Badly highlights the poor writing in the social sciences. Here is an example of such writing as sociologist C. Wright Mills tries to simplify the work of Talcott Parsons:

No reader of The Sociological Imagination (1959) will soon forget C. Wright Mills’s “translations” of a few passages from The Social System by Talcott Parsons, one of the most eminent American social scientists of the day. Here’s a representative selection from The Social System, in the original Parsonian idiom:

“Attachment to common values means, motivationally considered, that the actors have common ‘sentiments’ in support of the value patterns, which may be defined as meaning that conformity with the relevant expectations is treated as a ‘good thing’ relatively independently of any specific instrumental ‘advantage’ to be gained from such conformity, e.g. in the avoidance of negative sanctions. Furthermore, this attachment to common values, while it may fit the immediate gratificational needs of the actor, always has a ‘moral’ aspect in that to some degree this conformity defines the ‘responsibility’ of the actor in the wider, that is, social action systems in which he participates.”

And here is how Mills put the same thoughts into demotic English:

“When people share the same values, they tend to behave in accordance with the way they expect one another to behave. Moreover, they often treat such conformity as a very good thing – even when it seems to go against their immediate interests.”

To get the full effect, you have to see Mills perform the operation upon much larger chunks of ore – a solid page of Parsons, massy and leaden, followed by its rendering into three or four spry statements of the relatively obvious. “I do not pretend that my translation is excellent,” Mills writes, “but only that in the translation no meaning is lost.” He later quotes a suggestion by Edmund Wilson that social scientists get help from their colleagues in the English department.

The short book review suggests the author argues disciplinary jargon is the result of new adherents wanting to fit in. One way to fit in is to talk and write like a social scientist, which includes certain conventions.

Still, I’ve heard this argument for years from within sociology and from the outside (including lots of students): sociologists should be able to explain their ideas in simpler terms. Particularly when the complaint arises that sociology gets less of a public hearing than other disciplines, this topic comes up. But, I haven’t heard too many responses to this complaint that include citing sociologists or journals or book series that do a good job of writing sociologically. Are there widely accepted examples of sociologists consistently writing well?

Who is the most powerful person in the world?

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One commentator argues Janet Yellen would become the most powerful female in history as Chair of the Federal Reserve:

The Fed is as powerful as it is boring. (Alright, maybe not that powerful, but you get the point). See, its job is to make sure the U.S. economy stays in the Goldilocks zone: growing neither too fast nor too slow, but just right to keep both unemployment and inflation low. It raises interest rates when it thinks growth is too high, and cuts them when it thinks growth is too low — and it does all this by controlling how much money is in the economy. But the Fed’s interest rate decisions don’t just set the course for the U.S. economy; its decisions set the course for the world economy too. That’s because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and so many emerging markets have pegged their own to it — which means they’ve decided to import our monetary policy. Think about it this way. If I say my currency will always be worth a certain number of dollars, then I have to print more of it when the Fed prints more dollars. That’s why economists call the Fed a monetary superpower: it’s the world’s central bank all but in name. And, as you can see in the chart below from economist David Beckworth, the Fed’s hegemony isn’t limited to emerging markets. The European Central Bank (light blue line) and the Bank of Japan (black dotted line)  have also followed the Fed’s lead the past 10 years or so.

In other words, Janet Yellen will have more control over the global economy than any other living person once she’s confirmed as Fed Chair. Now, the Fed is a democracy, not a dictatorship, but it’s a funny kind of democracy — the Chair alone sets the agenda. So if Yellen even just talks about slowing down the Fed’s bond-buying, Europe’s troubled economies are liable to see their interest rates rise, and emerging markets are liable to see their currencies collapse.

This might be enough to get conspiracy thinkers going: the Fed Chair, an appointed position, certainly has a lot of international power. This got me to thinking: if Yellen has all this power, who else might be in the conversation for most powerful person in the world? Here are some options:

1. The President of the United States. Political power backed with a lot of economic, military, and cultural power. The “leader of the free world.”

2. The wealthiest person in the world. Bill Gates has $72 billion, the most in the United States, but Carlos Slim has the wealth in the world at $73 billion. Both men are connected to powerful companies. However, just how much can even the wealthiest business leader do compared to the economic prowess of a large country?

3. People that Time names as Person of the Year. It is an American publication so that skews the data with lots of American political leaders. But, still a well-known list.

4. Another Time list: the 100 most influential people in the world. This list tends to make room for more cultural and artistic leaders, in addition to the more typical political and economic leaders.

5. People who subvert international norms on a global scale. Think Adolph Hitler or Osama bin Laden. With some resources put to more nefarious uses, they are able to dominate policy decisions and cultural understandings.

6. The flip side of #5: people who are leaders of successful large social movements. Think Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. They become icons for helping bring about great good.

7. Whomever currently has the most Twitter followers. Justin Bieber currently tops the list followed by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Barack Obama. Definitely more about cultural power and Twitter users are still a relatively small percentage of the population.

I’m sure there are more options out there. From a Marxist perspective, we would want to look more at economic leaders while Weber’s addition of status and power are also helpful. And, we could also think of how big of a structure or number of followers a single person can leverage – by themselves, individuals, even the wealthiest, may not be able to do much.

Older adults like bigger things, like McMansions; younger adults like smaller things, like skinny jeans

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Here is an example of tying consumption of things like McMansions or skinny jeans to certain generations:

If there’s one thing today’s young people know it’s this: size doesn’t matter.

From watching movies on cell phone screens to driving micro-cars like the Honda Fit, less is more with this generation.

Known as millennials, people born in the years just before and after 2000, believe in small carbon footprints and short attention spans. They don’t watch television episodes, they watch YouTube clips. Even email is too cumbersome for them. Millennials prefer to communicate with more instantaneous social media like Facebook chat and text-messages.

Compare this with people from Gen X and older and you see how wide the size-gap has become.

We Gen X’ers wore baggy jeans, flannel shirts and puffy hair. Many (too many) of us have oversized televisions and drive Hummers as big as tanks. We live in McMansions and super-size our lunches while today’s younger people wear skinny jeans, live in small apartments, and eat more salad.

We had record and compact disc collections with gigantic stereo speakers. They have iPod Nanos and ear buds.

The conclusion of the argument is that doing more with less is probably better on a crowded planet. Comparing the consumption of a McMansion to a tiny house (a comparison made a few paragraphs later) is one way to measure things: one house is bigger than the other and requires more resources. But, how do you compare a McMansion to an iPhone? The McMansion might require more resources (though all that goes into making an iPhone is more hidden) but can’t the consumption of an iPhone still be a problem (if younger adults are spending hours and hours with the device – and at least some are)? Plus, if you consume smaller objects, theoretically you might do it more often and collect a lot of stuff in the long run, even if it is more in the form of digital files. And then skinny jeans versus baggy clothes? Is this more about aesthetics rather than the size of consumption objects?

All that said, making sweeping claims about consumption patterns across generations can be difficult. We might be on safer ground by arguing that younger generations today are buying different kinds of products (digital, in particular) and may not be valuing “traditional” American consumption (cars, bigger houses).