Over the past 40 years, the War on Drugs has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for more than 45 million arrests.
Category Archives: Reporting
Inequality For All: Robert Reich’s Powerful Message: Not “Trickle Down,” But “Middle Up”
The documentary Inequality For All, directed by Jacob Kornbluth, features Robert Reich, former Secretary Of Labor under Bill Clinton, author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, in an impassioned exposé on why the chasm between the rich and the poor has much further reaching implications than a mere income gap.
What’s In A Number: Can We Meet UN Poverty Reduction Goals?
The High Cost Of Unpaid Internships
Unpaid internships have become increasingly common in the current career landscape, becoming almost a requisite milestone in “growing up.”
The Buzz Over The Dire Decline In Bee Populations
Nearly 40 percent of U.S. domesticated hives did not survive this past winter, making it the worst loss to date. Far more than just giving us honey, bees are a crucial player in our food production; they are responsible for pollinating many flowering plants–by some estimates, almost one out of every three bitesof food that we eat was produced with the help of these natural pollinators. Cashews, beets, broccoli, cabbage, watermelons, cucumber, strawberries, macadamia, mangoes, apricots, almonds are just a few of many of the delicious crops our six-legged worker friends toil on.
Dunbar’s Number–Why Your 1000+ Friend-Having Friends on Facebook Are Really *Not* Paying You Any Mind
My post for the Ministers Of Design Blog
Revolutionary evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has the answer to the question of how many friends do you need. The Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University earned the coveted honor of having a number named after him when he posited that 150 is the number of people we can maintain a meaningful social connection with.
Robin Dunbar arrived at that number by conducting a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the British. Amongst some of the findings of the study were that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The chief finding, however, was the number of cards sent out always seemed to converge around the number 150. Over the past two decades, he and other researchers have arrived at 150 as the magical Pi-like number of social relationships. “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” Dunbar explains. “Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
Dunbar’s work has been of tremendous interest to social media architects who initially conjectured that this number could very easily climb in the baseball-card-version-of-friends world of Facebook and its ilk. Facebook conducted research on this: while the median friend count on Facebook is 100, for most people (84%), the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count. “Facebook has muddied the waters by calling them all friends, but really they are not,” Dunbar states. He regards Facebook’s main impact on social circles as an ability to preserve long-standing or long-distance friendships that might otherwise decay rapidly. The downside, he suggests, is hanging onto old and remote friendships prevents us from making new non-remote ones: “Since friends exist to be shoulders to cry on (metaphorically speaking!) and shoulders that are physically remote aren’t much use for crying on, this might not be ideal.”
The scope of Dunbar’s work is significantly larger than the rather reductionistic concept of 150 and he has continued to conduct research and expand his study of human social interaction. And while Dunbar’s number has been critiqued, it has managed to withstand the test of replication, remaining relevant event two decades later ( for example, research conducted in 2011 on Twitter found the average number of people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200). Dunbar agrees that people have different social networks for different purposes, but he qualified the term “friend” as a person we have an emotional connection with, independent of his/her utility to us: “Someone like your boss, or the person you borrow $50 from to pay the drug dealer, these people are meaningful in your life, but they’re not meaningful to you as relationships.”
The ultimate question remains not how many friends one can have on Facebook but how many friends one actually pays mind and heed to. As Dunbar explains, “Yes, I can find out what you had for breakfast from your Tweet, but can I really get to know you better? These digital developments help us keep in touch, when in the past a relationship might just have died; but in the end, we actually have to get together to make a relationship work.” Dunbar was first inspired to conduct this sort of research when he examined the grooming patterns of apes–what differentiated the humans was not just brain size but, much more importantly, the capacity for language. This capacity, funnily enough, is what is hyper developed in the world of social networking, yet Dunbar would argue words are hardly the glue of a strong emotional bond. Real meaningful interaction, research shows, still remains face-based and not word or baseball-card-collection-based.
Geography Of Hate
My post for the Ministers Of Design Blog
How do we measure racism and homophobia across the United States? Humboldt State’s Dr. Monica Stephens teamed up with Floating Sheep, the same group that mapped post-election Twitter hate speech to broaden the scope of the study and give a more panoramic view of America’s bigotry. The Geography Of Hate map was created by geo-coding 150,000 hate tweets between June 2012 and April 2013, dividing the tweets in three categories–racist, homophobic, and disability-hating, including the words “chink,” “gook,” “nigger,” “wetback,” “spick,” “cripple,” “dyke,” “fag,” “homo,” or “queer,” amongst others. You might argue, however, that context is everything when it comes to these words so how did the research control for that variable? They used humans (probably woefully underpaid or even unpaid Ph.D. students, natch) to analyze and code the 150,000 tweets, eschewing machine inability to read tone and coding the usage as negative, neutral, or positive.
To add more rigor to the study, the researchers accounted for tweet density by creating a scale, essentially measuring something akin to per capita hate, accounting for population density.
So, what can we conclude from all this? On a micro level, there are some rather surprising results–click on the n word, for example, and you will see for yourself…the Deep South is not the hotbed of racism it is often stereotypically cast as. On a more macro level, hate speech is clearly alive and well-spread across America. In addition, the study demonstrates that Twitter has become a really vibrant (and vociferous) platform for the spreading of hateful ideas and even recruiting people with that sort of rhetoric. Now you might argue that 150,000 tweets is not a wide enough sample to make conclusions on, but this is a prime example that Twitter *can* have scholarly utility (don’t worry, consider me as shocked as you are).
I Am A Walking Contradiction: Deconstructing The Concept of Personality
My post for the Ministers Of Design Blog
In his 2013 Wesleyan commencement address, Joss Whedon talked about the inherent contradictions of being human–“the contradiction between your body and your mind, between your mind and itself. I believe these contradictions and these tensions are the greatest gift that we have.” The notion of our “self” or “personality” as something established and fairly long-lasting is being replaced by a new, much more apt paradigm–as something malleable and negotiated, and more importantly, through a process that requires work as opposed to something one is born with. “You have, which is a rare thing, that ability and the responsibility to listen to the dissent in yourself, to at least give it the floor, because it is the key – not only to consciousness, but to real growth. To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in.”
Embracing our inner contradictions is important. This is quite a shift from the prevailing popular mild disdain for “flip floppers” (John Kerry should feel vindicated). “This contradiction, and this tension … it never goes away. And if you think that achieving something, if you think that solving something, if you think a career or a relationship will quiet that voice, it will not. If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.”
In his book The Ego Trick, Julian Baginni argues that the self is really a “bundle” of thoughts and while it still very much exists, it is merely a collection of things and not an immutable monolith: “We are these very remarkably ordered collections of things. It is because we’re so ordered that we are able to think of ourselves as being singular persons. But there is no singular person there, that means we’re forever changing.” Yet, while we are our thoughts, memories, and parts, Baginni does believe we are more than a sum of our parts. The fact that we are dynamic, changing systems means that we are constantly in the process of negotiating our identity, questioning our assumptions, and reveling in our contradictions instead of castigating yourself for your inconstancy.
Whedon concludes his speech by addressing the penultimate graduation speech trope, changing the world: “So here’s the thing about changing the world. It turns out that’s not even the question, because you don’t have a choice. You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world.”
In other words, don’t feel quite so bad about being a walking contradiction and be more accepting of your flip-flopping ways, taking comfort in the fact that being able to “argue yourself down” makes a little more aware and able to pull aside the stage curtain, if you will. So what then are the implications of this inherent mercurialism for brand loyalty? What impact does your oft-renegotiated “personality” have on your lifestyle choices then? Food for thought.
Less Than Cheery–The Cheerios Ad Serves Up Some Unanticipated Indigestion
My post for the Ministers Of Design blog
It’s an ad like any other Cheerios ad–heart-warming (and heart-healthy) and family-oriented so why the hoopla? The interracial-family-featuring ad elicited a veritable maelstrom of responses emblematic of the darkly vitriolic racist underbelly of Internet trolldom and prompting Cheerios to disable YouTube commenting. Camille Gibson, Cheerios’ Vice President of Marketing, explained: “The [YouTube] comments that were made were, in our view, not family friendly. And that was really the trigger for us to pull them off. Ultimately we were trying to portray an American family. And there are lots of multicultural families in America today.” Noteworthy is that the tagline of this ad, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, is “Love,” while previous ones were “Smile,” and “Happy Mother’s Day.”
The commercial has also received an equally vocal positive response for doing its part in “normalizing” biracial families by making them more visible in the media zeitgeist. The response from the multicultural community has been, overwhelmingly, “I finally get to see a representation of me on TV.” As Ad Week points out, however, TV ads have been notoriously behind the curve in “envelope pushing” in comparison to shows or movies, as brands are very fearful of making political statements in their casting choices. Arguably, multicultural families are a far cry from the shocking and subversive category, considering that 1 in 10 families would fit that definition, a 28% jump from 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, race representation concerns are starting to become much more prominent of a consideration in brand strategy, considering the multicultural ad market spending is rising in a serious way.
So was Cheerios being socially progressive or were they attempting (rather successfully, in this case) to divert public attention away from the GMO-labeling scandal which roiled their Facebook page less than several months ago? Clever brand repositioning notwithstanding, it seems like the ad did earn the company some “love” back.
Share My Dabba: The Big Impact Of A [Small And Sticky] Message
My Ministers of Design Blog Post
Mumbai is a city of gross disparities, a monolith of have and have nots, where the chasm between the rich and the poor is more like an uncrossable abyss than a gap, with over 8 million of its dwellers living in slums. The growing income disparity is a sweeping trend that has, sadly, become all too prevalent in an increasingly globalized world, driving a wedge between the rich and the poor, who are having a hard time accessing even the most basic of social services. As the Share My Dabba video shows, every day 1.6 million people in Mumbai have food in their dabba, while 200,000 children go starving. The Happy Life Welfare Society, an Indian NGO, decided to do something about this, having worked on previous campaigns like Spread Some Warmth and Share Your Wealth.
Advertising agency McCann came on board to help the NGO figure out the strategy and came up with the “share” sticker. Whoever wanted to share his/her lunch put a sticker on the dabba. Next, however, came the more difficult step–how to collect the food and distribute it to the children without disrupting the to-the-minute-precision of the daballawah system, a Forbes Six Sigma certified system for its accuracy and a Harvard Business School case study. Every day, 5000 Dabbawalas deliver 200,000 boxes per day using only bicycles, relying on a complex series of collection zones, sorting points, and delivery zones, supported only by a manual coding system.
So as not to disturb the intricate time balance of the system, volunteers gathered at the point where dabbawallahs assemble after having collected the tiffin boxes after lunch; there, they initially used to empty the food from the containers into plastic bags and plates and give it to the children. But a much better system was devised–The Happy Life Welfare Society went to the slums and told kids and their families about the distribution point so, now, they just come there with their own utensils and are served food directly from the dabbas. All of this has to work with clockwork precision as there can be no delay in the dabawallah system–so the whole process is completed in 15 minutes.
The lesson that The Happy Life Welfare Society also learned is the importance of actually talking to people to get one’s message across, i.e. literally the legwork. To accomplish the involved planning needed for the success of this operation, volunteers had to talk to shopkeepers, workers, and office goers to make them want to share the dabba and involve them in the process, as well as the children living in the slums and their families. It would be impossible to introduce the system into a new part of the city without that educational campaign, states Kanupriya Singh, the Vice President of The Happy Life Welfare Society. There was a PR challenge from another avenue as well–addressing the critics who took umbrage to children eating messy leftovers, so the people sharing their dabbas had to also be encouraged and educated on only sharing clean food.
Share My Dabba is an excellent example of the wonderful confluence that happens when the message aligns with the successful execution of the thought behind it. A minimalistic approach lends itself well to snappy branding and messaging, but the importance of some good ol’-fashioned talking to people is also clearly underscored in this example.