mike bader

I often joke that corporations want to hurt puppies, kittens, or children for profits. Unfortunately, a recent press release by the National Grocers Association (NGA) makes this a little less funny by actually arguing that profits should be valued over children's health. The press release responds to an inter-agency request for comments regarding marketing food to children.

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While writing scripts is one of the most important skills for reproducible quantitative sociology, the typical convention is to pick up the skills through more experienced colleagues in graduate school or at the workplace. Below are a few tips that I have learned from others, picked up on my own, or otherwise accumulated in my arsenal of tricks that I thought that I would pass along. There are great resources out there, but I thought it would be helpful to pass along what I think are the most important and helpful tips.

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Rolf Pendall posted a short, interesting piece on the suburbanization of poverty at the Urban Institute's new Metro Trends Blog. In it, he questions the basis of determining cities from suburbs in the service of understanding the "suburbanization of poverty."

His criticism stems from the ambiguity of defining suburbs and cities based on their urban design and physical infrastructure. He demonstrates this ambiguity through examples of Houson, Texas (a city with extensive sprawl); Fremont, California (a suburb with its own employment base and denser development than Houston); and Silver Spring, Maryland (an inner-ring suburb with all of the accoutrements of urban living).

His question is valid and one we face often in our work on New York: how relevant is work on New York City for the rest of the country. Just to provide an example of my own, the picture below that looks much like the Silver Spring neighborhood my family is preparing to move into is actually in New York City.

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