Republicans benefit more from July 4th celebrations

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Here is some political information to digest ahead of July 4th: a Harvard study suggests Republicans gain more from Independence Day celebrations.

The three key findings of those attending July 4th celebrations:

  • When done before the age of 18, it increases the likelihood of a youth identifying as a Republican by at least 2 percent.
  • It raises the likelihood that parade watchers will vote for a Republican candidate by 4 percent.
  • It boosts the likelihood a reveler will vote by about 1 percent and increases the chances they’ll make a political contribution by 3 percent.

What’s more, the impact isn’t fleeting. “Surprisingly, the estimates show that the impact on political preferences is permanent, with no evidence of the effects depreciating as individuals become older,”said the Harvard report.

Finally, the report suggests that if people are looking for a super-patriotic July 4th, though should head to Republican towns. “Republican adults celebrate Fourth of July more intensively in the first place.”

Perhaps this makes for a good politicized headline but without a comparison to how other factors influence political behaviors (with particular percentages), it seems like the effects of such celebrations are fairly small.

Based on this, do more Democratic communities celebrate July 4th and express their patriotism on that day in different ways?

Data suggests we have not reached a new McMansion era

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Curbed National summarizes a Wall Street Journal story in a post titled about McMansions Return:

During the economic downturn, McMansion-style housing projects largely fell by the wayside, with average house size shrinking steadily over the past four years. Well, according to new data compiled by the National Association of Home Builders, the Mickey-Ds approach to home building is making a comeback this year. Please, no.

If you were just reading this quick summary, you might think McMansions are “making a comeback.” But the data cited in the Wall Street Journal story doesn’t quite say this:

But the Home Design Trend Survey, released today by the American Institute of Architects, shows a slight change from previous years on home size and buyer sentiment.

The survey, which has been conducted quarterly since 2005, asks a panel of 500 architectural firms that focus on residential properties what customers are asking for in new developments. The percentage reporting that customers wanted smaller houses has seemingly started to drop.

This year, about 52% of firms surveyed reported a decrease in the square footage of the houses they’re designing this year, down from 57% last year. Today’s numbers also show fewer firms reporting decreases in lot size (down to 22 percent from 32 percent) and lot volume (down to 18 percent from 21 percent).

“Overall, home-and-lot sizes showing signs of increasing slightly indicates that the housing market is stabilizing after being in a downward spiral since 2007,” says Kermit Baker, AIA’s chief economist.

So it’s not that homes are getting larger; rather, the decrease in size over the last few years is slowing. The downward trend line is plateauing. This does not necessarily mean that it will go up soon – as Baker suggests, perhaps housing is just “stabilizing.” Both headlines, the Wall Street Journal post is titled “Are McMansions Coming Back in Style,” seem pretty sensationalistic by suggesting McMansions are once again going to be the norm when the data really doesn’t say this.

Also: the WSJ story throws in a paragraph about an uptick in outdoor kitchens. While the rest of the story suggests McMansions are all about size and square footage, this add-in suggests McMansions also are luxurious homes. I would be curious to know how often outside kitchens are used by homeowners that have them.

Considering the ethics of adopting children to study them

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An ethicist look at three scenarios to help sort out the difference between studying one’s biological vs. adopted children:

Ethics has a bizarre blind spot around parents and children. For no justifiable reason that I can discern, we deem it perfectly tolerable for a parent to decide unilaterally to raise their child genderless or under the Tiger Mother or laissez-faire method of parenting, but horror at the idea of someone “testing” one of these parental styles on a child. Recall, there is no test to become a parent, no minimum qualification or form of licensing. In fact, if you are so irresponsible as to unintentionally have a child you do not want and cannot support, you have more of a right (and obligation) to rear that child than a stranger with the means and desire to give that child a better life…

I would like to test this reproduce-rearing correlation with a thought experiment. The details of the thought experiment appear below the fold, but the conclusion is as follows: it would be ethically permissible for a scientist to adopt a large group of children and then perform specific, non-harmful, nature-vs-nurture social experiments on those children…

After running through three scenarios, here is the conclusion:

Therefore, if it is morally permissible for parents to independently decide how to raise their children in regards to gender, it should be morally permissible for a team of scientists to conduct a rigorous experiment with their own adopted children on the impact of rearing on gender and sexual preferences.

I imagine an IRB would have a very difficult time approving a formal proposal for this.

Several other methodological issues come to mind:

1. There could be issues of objectivity: how do we know parents of either biological or adoptive children could “objectively” observe their own kids? This may be a bigger problem in some disciplines than others: ethnographies, for example, utilize participant observation which parents would certainly be a part of. But even then, there are concerns about the researcher becoming too immersed in the setting of the study and losing an outsider’s point of view. Scenario #3 simply suggests that sociologist parents would make “unbiased observations.”

2. How could an experimenter be sure that results from adopted (or even biological) children are the result of the treatment rather than prior experiences and behaviors? Experiments try to isolate the effects of treatments but adopted children could have numerous confounding factors from their pre-adoption days.

The (terrible?) world of “professional” Amazon reviewers

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A recent study of some of Amazon.com’s top 1000 reviewers has PC Magazine writer John Dvorak questions the validity of their reviews:

In the first academic study of its kind, Trevor Pinch, Cornell University professor of sociology and of science and technology studies, independently surveyed 166 of Amazon’s top 1,000 reviewers, examining everything from demographics to motives. What he discovered was 85 percent of those surveyed had been approached with free merchandise from authors, agents or publishers.

Pinch, who also found the median age range of the reviewers he surveyed was 51 to 60, a surprise said Pinch, because the image of the internet is more of a young person’s thing. Amazon is encouraging reviewers to receive free products through Amazon Vine, an invitation-only program in which the top 1,000 reviewers are offered a catalog of free products to review…

This is the fraud aspect of the process that cannot be tolerated. And now to find out they are in a much older demographic makes me think they are just product hoarders who will say what they need to say to get more products. This conclusion is hinted at by the professor.

I do not like man on the street reviews. I never have, and I’ve always thought they could be easily corrupted by smart public relations folks who have already dove into what they call social media. This includes phony personas on Twitter and Facebook that are used to sway public opinion, shipping free goodies to “influential” bloggers, and things like this Amazon scandal.

Dvorak is not really arguing that reviews are not valuable but rather that because Amazon does not fully disclose how these reviewers operate, customers could be duped. The problem here is trust: Dvorak and others might assume that reviewers are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but instead they are “professionals.” Instead, these reviewers are being “paid.” This is a classic gatekeepers problem: how do you know that a reviewer is trustworthy and giving unvarnished opinions? There are plenty of critics these days for various media outlets and websites. I suspect many average citizens have to read through multiple reviews from a single critic to see if their thoughts line up with their own or to see if they are consistent.

Of course, Amazon relies on a crowd sourcing approach, just like aggregator websites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. Do these top reviewers really sway people’s opinions about products since there are often many others who provide reviews of the same products?

Why not ask Amazon whether critical reviewers have been kicked out of these programs? Dvorak is suggesting that these reviewers would speak positively about products just in order to receive more – couldn’t Amazon fight back against this?

My first thoughts when I saw this study a while back was that how confident could Pinch be about his findings based on 166 reviewers. Why not go for a larger sample out of the 1000 Top Reviewers?

(Side note: at the end, Dvorak applauds Pinch for tackling this topic:

By the way (and off topic), you should read my writings over the past 30 years, because I have been hounding sociologists around the world to begin to study these sorts of computer and Internet activities. Give Professor Pinch an award, will you! Maybe that will encourage more studies.

Maybe so.)

Wheaton sells Hubble site, plans for new grocery store

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For over a decade, the City of Wheaton has sought a developer for the Hubble Middle School site on the southeast edge of downtown Wheaton. The city now has an agreement with a developer who wants to build a new grocery store:

The effort to sell the old Hubble Middle School site ended Thursday when Wheaton Warrenville Unit District 200 revealed the terms of a recently announced sale to Chicago-based Bradford Equities LLC.

At a special meeting, school officials said they were thrilled to move on and look forward to seeing a grocery store at the highly visible northwest corner of Roosevelt and Naperville roads…

The sale also prohibits the developer from seeking or accepting tax increment finance help from the city, gives Bradford seven months to inspect the property and obtain permits, and most importantly to some people, asks Bradford to make a “good-faith effort” to work with the park district on 13 acres not suitable for development because they are on a flood plain…

Board President Rosemary Swanson said the resolution meets several goals the school district has had all along, including placing the site on the city and school district’s tax rolls.

This story hints at some of the reasons Wheaton has paid so much attention to this site:

1. Wheaton is a built-out community so there are few opportunities to purchase and develop sizable portions of land.

2. The site has a very important location: it is at the busy intersection of Naperville and Roosevelt Roads. It is also an opportunity to expand Wheaton’s downtown to the south. While the downtown has traditionally been more on the northern side of the railroad tracks, the city has made an effort in recent years to expand to the south. This new development will expand the city’s gateway on Roosevelt Road which currently consists of a large welcome sign at Main Street.

3. A grocery store will help bring in tax dollars. This matters because Wheaton has few opportunities to add commercial property but more broadly, refers back to the city’s large amount of institutional/church property which don’t contribute tax dollars. This new project will broaden the city’s tax base.

4. The grocery store will offset the loss of the Jewel store which closed in early 2008. While the city wanted to save that store, Jewel decided it was too small (and old?) to maintain – and the chain has newer, more modern stores on both the north and south side of Wheaton. This new store fits with the city’s goals of adding residential units to the downtown as residents will now be able to walk to a grocery store.

5. Earlier suggestions for the Hubble site had included a hotel, residential units, and some stores. It sounds like the new development will be much more limited and some of the recreational functions of the property will be retained in parkland and gymnasiums.

6. The whole process has been slowed down by the economic crisis. Earlier requests for proposals generated a good deal of interest but it has taken a lot of time to get to this point.

In the end, it sounds like the final product will be less ambitious than some had hoped for but it will still help bring more tax dollars into the city and a grocery store will return to the downtown.

Possible issues with interstate megachurch sites

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American megachurches have had multiple satellite sites for years. But now at least several have pursued satellite sites in other states:

Pastor Mark Driscoll’s megachurch recently announced plans to expand into Portland, Oregon, and Orange County, California, using multi-site campuses that feature live bands and a sermon piped in from the main campus in Seattle.

The move is part of a trend among megachurches to extend their brand of church to new communities, in hopes of reaching unchurched people with the gospel. But critics fear the out-of-state campuses turn churches into franchises like McDonald’s or Starbucks.

The reason for the new campuses is simple, according to the Mars Hill website.

“Oregon needs Jesus Christ,” claims the introduction of the new location. “The city of Portland is known for many things, but the gospel of Jesus is nowhere on the list.”

What might be the issues with this and responses to these issues?

1. It is unclear how far away a satellite campus has to be to be objectionable. Let’s say Willow Creek opened a satellite campus in northwestern Indiana, still within the Chicago region. Is this a problematic interstate campus or not? The distance between Seattle and Orange County or between Oklahoma and Phoenix does seem larger.

2. The McDonaldization/commodification/branding of churches seems to go against the local community aspect of church. This seems to be typically related to the popularity of a particular pastor/preacher who could draw a viable audience all over.

2a. There is a strong case to be made for emphasizing local community or even a parish model. But, evangelical churches left this behind a long time ago so is this simply a logical extension of this trend?

2b. How much of opposition to these new sites is based on the need for community in church versus how large churches tend to draw their members from existing churches rather than from non-attendees? If a megachurch satellite moves into an area, local churches may lose congregants.

2c. How much will this matter in the future as anybody with an Internet connection can easily access sermons and podcasts? If the primary purpose of a satellite church is to share a sermon, people can get this elsewhere.

2d. This is a reminder of the pastor-centric nature of many evangelical churches.

3. It would be interesting to hear discussions within megachurches that go forward for interstate sites: what is the primary motivation for doing this?

Explaining our social world to alien visitors

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Sociology has a meme involving aliens: what would someone from Mars observe or conclude if they came to Earth and looked at modern society? Although it doesn’t come from a sociologist, here is an update on this idea that includes McMansions:

Since they haven’t answered, we could assume that the humans in space aren’t sophisticated enough to interpret our radio signals.

But just imagine how we can help them when we do find them. We can teach them everything we know and speed up their evolution into modern man in a flash. We could have them skip over the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the industrial revolution, and be flipping microchips and tweeting by sunset. How exhilarating it will be for us to teach them about fire and wheels. We could bypass the telegraph, and give them 3DTV! Imagine their excitement, moving from a cave to a McMansion with granite countertops? Once they learn how to use all the gadgets — iPod, iPad, iPhone — they would only need to learn the basics of reading and math.

The sequence of what we teach would be important. It would be terrible to show them how to accumulate stuff before we taught them how to defend themselves from those who would take their stuff away. Would spears be good enough or would we need to give them guns, guided missiles, or maybe an atomic bomb? And if they come from a tribal background, would every tribe need an atomic bomb?…

Of course, there is a chance that humans, way out there in space, have been receiving our signals. Maybe, they’re a lot smarter than we imagine. Maybe, they know all about us. Maybe, they have decided it’s better not to answer our call.

This may seem like a silly exercise but it has some value: it can be hard to take an outsider’s perspective of our own world. By trying to adopt the viewpoint of someone who might come from a completely different social system (and planet), it helps us take a broader and overhead look at our own actions and social relations.

I sense some satire here about showing our visitors 3DTV, McMansions, and iPads. This sounds like a suggestion that we pay too much attention to technological and physical comforts without remembering the foundation beneath them such as social structures, basic tools, government, and moral values. This seems related to the question of what civilization relies on.

Big cities promote new ideas

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Big cities are generally thought of centers of innovation for both business and culture. This article suggests this effect is particularly pronounced in developing Asian countries:

“Cities are the first to embrace many concepts that are a taboo in towns and villages,” says Sandhya Patnaik, a sociology professor at Delhi University, referring to pre-marital sex, live-in relationships or divorces.

“Anything new or modern touches cities first. Trends percolate to smaller towns at a very slow pace.”

Occasionally in India, the battle between village tradition and liberal city culture can have deadly consequences, such as the “honour killings” seen in Delhi’s migrant areas…

But experts say cities across the world generally serve as a positive melting pot, where different cultures intermingle, encouraging tolerance and the interchange of ideas.

“The freedom in a big city comes from diversity,” Jirapa Worasiangsuk, a sociologist at Thammasat University in Bangkok, told AFP. “It’s the choices and the opportunity to choose that make Bangkok or other big cities a better place.

“People have more choices to choose how to live, to choose their career, to do whatever they want.”…

Sociologists say the freedom of cities often stems from a feeling of anonymity — but this can often tip over into loneliness.

This article seems to suggest that modern, Western ideas are found in the city. I assume most Westerners would look at news like this and think that these changes are long overdue but the article suggests these new ideas are not always met favorably. Such changes are not easy (and some places could argue whether they are desired) as the early sociologists recognized when looking at the changes urbanization was bringing to Western Europe in the 1800s.

It would be interesting to read diffusion studies from these countries that track how new cultural and social ideas leak out of cities and come to dominate social interaction.

Thinking more about this, are there major cities in modern times that have been business centers but also that remained culturally conservative? Or does being open to business tend to correlate with more liberal ideas? This would be interesting as neoliberalism is often thought of as being conservative since it is capitalistic.

Except more communities to challenge 2010 Census counts

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Amidst an economic crisis that has also affected many municipal budgets, expect more communities to appeal the 2010 Census counts:

Cities have two years to contest their counts under the Census Bureau’s appeals process, which began this month…

In recent decades, the peak for challenges was 6,600, or 17 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions, in 1990, when the census missed four million people, including five percent of all blacks and Hispanics.

In 2000, roughly 1,200 jurisdictions, or 3 percent, contested the count. The net change due to census challenges that year was just 2,700 people.

Apart from the challenges, analysts later determined the 2000 census had an overcount of 1.3 million people, due mostly to duplicate counts of more affluent whites with multiple residences. About 4.5 million people were ultimately missed, mostly blacks and Hispanics.

Interestingly, the article suggests that while government dollars are behind these challenges, it is also about the “psychological impact” on civic pride. I wonder who exactly will appeal: St. Louis, Chicago, and a host of other Rust Belt cities lost population and New York City didn’t have the population increase that was expected. Since budgets are tight everywhere, could we even get appeals from places like Houston which experienced sizable growth?

It would also be interesting to hear how exactly the Census Bureau adjusts these figures based on subsequent analyses of overcounts and undercounts. This is a reminder that Census figures are not perfect even as many things, including many social science studies based on population proportions calculated in the Census, are based on these figures. I am not suggesting that the Census figures are wrong but rather that it is a very complicated process that is bound to be tweaked some after the first figures are released.