Read any news report on the housing market, and inevitably it will include facts or figures from the real estate data giant Zillow.com. The company initially set out to solve two key economic frictions in the real estate industry information asymmetry and the principal-agent problem by empowering users to access real-time housing data and eliminating the need for realtors. The company soon realized, however, that American homeowners and buyers were not willing to give up the traditional real estate agent model and changed course. In the end, Zillow decided to join rather than replace the middlemen in the real estate industry.
Abstract
Objectives
To examine whether neighborhood income and neighborhood safety concerns influence multisystem physiological risk after adjusting for genetic and environmental selection effects that may have biased previous tests of this association.
Methods
We used structural equation modeling with a genetically informed sample of 686 male and female twin pairs in the Midlife in the United States Study II (2004).
Results
Controlling for additive genetic and shared environmental processes that may have biased neighborhood–health links in previous examinations, higher neighborhood safety concerns were associated with less physiological risk among women but not men.
Discussion
Our findings suggest a possible causal role of neighborhood features for a measure of physiological risk that is associated with the development of disease. Efforts to increase neighborhood safety, perhaps through increased street lighting or neighborhood watch programs, may improve community-level health.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s new “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign displays a renewed drive to redistribute surveillance responsibilities to the public. Using this campaign as its point of departure, this article examines the relationship between conditions of sovereign governance and public lateral surveillance campaigns. As the police and other sovereign institutions have receded from their traditional public responsibilities, many surveillance functions have been assumed by the lay population via neighborhood watch and other community-based programs. Comparing this development with the policing functions of lateral surveillance during the Norman Conquest, this article provides a historically grounded analysis of the potential for this responsibilization to fracture the social by transforming communal bonds into technologies of surveillance power.
Dispatches from the neighborhood watch: Using citizen science and field survey data to document color morph frequency in space and time
