Interesting Links, 8/14/11

A few weeks ago the Pittsburgh Pirates lost a 19-inning game.  I stayed up late watching that game.  One of the most enjoyable parts of the experience was following other Pirates fans on Twitter, reading their reactions to the game.  Although I have had a twitter account for a couple of years I didn't begin using it regularly until about a month ago.  Because you can choose who you follow, and because there's a real limit to the links of posts, it can be a great resource for information and links.  So, I appreciated Pittsburgh sports reporter Joe Starkey relaying his experience of Twitter that night, which was similar to mine.  (I also owe a thank you to Twitter use @rtjr for helping me find the link weeks later.)

In addition to Pittsburgh sports coverage on Twitter, I have been following sociologists, organizations concerned with urban issues, and news outlets.  Since I began following these twitter users, it has been much easier for me to find  information and news stories that I am interested in.  Here are a few examples of things I found on Twitter first:

Sociologists have been weighing in on the riots in the UK.  Here is David Harvey.  Here is Sennett and Sassen.

Here is a blog with pictures of old mill towns in the southern New England.

Moving on, as I am preparing to teach Sociology of Childhood this fall, a friend suggested this link to me.  Incredible to see the contrasts across the different places children sleep across the world.

Speaking of all over the world, how about the last man on a mountain in West Virgina?
""Jimmy was the only thing standing between Arch Coal and probably some of the best reserves in this state," Lovett remembers. "There's no question they could have sold that land for a lot of money, but he and Sibby stood up to a mining company in a way that no one really had before and said, 'We're not leaving here and you can't make us.' "

Finally, ever since I was a child and my dad watched the show every weekend, I have been a fan of CBS Sunday Morning.  Their reports are not the most investigative, but often they are interesting and good conversation starters.  This morning I saw a story that encourages the viewer to consider if internships are opportunities or exploitation? While internships offer opportunities for many young people, what about those individuals who could use the opportunity an internship would provide, but cannot afford to work for free?  As this story underscores, it is often individuals from the wealthiest of backgrounds who are most able to take advantage of internship opportunities.

I also learned from this episode of CBS Sunday Morning that corporations have a lot of cash on hand.

Earlier this week, NPR decided to have some fun with stock brokers.  Good demonstration of the concept of emotional labor, I suppose.

Interesting Links, 7/26/11

When the magazine was still being printed, I was a huge fan of SEED Magazine.  Unfortunately, since they stopped printing a paper copy, I have had difficulty motivating myself to follow their work as much.  It seems that their bloggers are still hard at work, and the magazine is generating interesting content, though.  For instance, there is this article from last January where Herbert Gans argues for a restructuring of the social sciences.  Interesting.


One of my favorite SEED articles, ever, though was Lehrer's article on applying the idea of metabolism to the metropolis.  Lehrer is the author of one of my favorite books - Proust was a Neuroscientist.  This article, like that book, brings disciplines together to examine what we know about something - in this case, how a city functions.  Similar to an article I linked to in a previous post, this one examines West's approach to understanding the physics of the city. This article specifically looks at how the idea of metabolism might help us understand the city.  Here's some of the interesting stuff in the article: 
"Cities are like elephants. They get more economical with size... every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. In metropolis after metropolis, the indicators of urban “metabolism”—like the per-capita consumption of gasoline or the surface area of roads or the total length of electrical cables—scaled to an exponent of (population)0.8, which is very similar to the biological equivalent of (mass)0.75. This means that a city can double its population without doubling its resource consumption."
Cool. 


Moving on, it seems that some of the current unemployment problem may be attributable to skills mismatch, even among folks who've had some schooling after high school. 


The hubbub about the temporary closing of the 405 in Los Angeles last week remind me of this article I saw a while ago about how some cities are moving away from building new highways, even occasionally tearing down freeways.  It seems that some cities are finding it more cost effective to close a freeway than to maintain it. And as the author of the article notes: 
"This is the city planner's dream: Take out an underused freeway, open up land for new businesses or parks and magically more workers will move back to the city and property values will soar. So far, though, the results have been mixed."


And here are two interesting articles that have something to do with housing.  First, there is a house at which 2,000 companies are registered.  A new kind of urban density, I suppose.  


Next, how many people do you know who have experienced homelessness?  What sense do you have of homelessness?  Have you ever volunteered at a shelter, or heard the story of a homeless person?  Here is a great article about a project to bring young adults into contact with ex-homeless individuals.  This is cool stuff.


Since becoming active on Twitter and following individuals and organizations doing work relevant to urban sociology, I have been seeing some interesting stuff.  A call center moving from a blogger's home city to another city has him wondering if people, particularly local politicians should be thinking in terms of a new regionalism.  I liked this quote:
"Also importantly, metro regions don't necessarily need to conceive of themselves as businesses trying to "steal" market shares away from other regions. Indeed, under constructive regionalism, our cities (and their hinterland) could aim to create (vs. attract) wealth and well-being using their own resources (human, natural, agricultural, technological, artistic, etc.) in a way that is ecologically responsible, socially beneficial and economically efficient. I hope you will excuse the use of this old cliché, but there's not reason why we can't make the pie bigger (as opposed to serving smaller and smaller portions of the same size pie)."


Also found on Twitter and relevant to regionalism is this post comparing the economies of metropolitan areas to countries of the world (there is a cool map, too).


Finally, several films have been filmed in Pittsburgh recently.  I saw this trailer before the midnight showing of Harry Potter I attended, and while the movie looks iffy, the parkour scenes filmed in PNC Park look awesome.  But as interesting as these movies being filmed in Pittsburgh is,  it is  this one that is kinda a big deal.