Neighborhood patterns of Netflix rentals
January 9, 2010 at 1:31 pm | Posted in amenities, consumption, geography, NYT, personality, scenes, what to read | 1 CommentThe New York Times has an excellent interactive feature on the distribution of 2009 rentals of particular films across neighborhoods, for New York, Chicago, Boston, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and a few other cities. For example, in the Hyde Park zip code (site of the University of Chicago), the most rented film in 2009 was Slumdog Millionaire. Yet in 3 of the South Side zip codes that surround it, the most rented film was Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys. MadMen Season 1 made the top 50 in many of the zip codes in Manhattan and in those sections of Brooklyn nearest Manhattan; it was virtually absent in the rest of the metropolitan area. Relationship to Terry Clark’s amenity-based scenes indexes? To the neighborhood distribution of personality types? Long live the spatial sociology of consumption….
The costs of calulating poverty
September 14, 2009 at 12:35 pm | Posted in news, NYT, poverty | Leave a commentTags: New York City, poverty, welfare
If you’re raising a family of four on $26K, you may believe that your current checkbook balance is enough to qualify your household for federal assistance. And in New York, at least, you’d be right. Beginning with recommendations provided by the National Academy of Sciences, NYC set out to reform their decades-old guidelines by issuing new measures of poverty based on 2006 census data. The new calculations go a step further than traditional measures, considering living expenses such as healthcare and childcare costs. The result, according to backers of the new formula, is a more realistic picture of today’s world. They’re pushing the federal government to make a similar change.
To read the full article and listen to the story on National Public Radio, please click here.
To see the working paper on which this story was based, click here.
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