The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
July 31, 2011 at 2:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Why Does Time Fly?: Scientific American
Time perception depends…
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…people accurately judge whether a dot appears on the screen for shorter, longer or the same amount of time as another dot. However, when the dot increases in size so as to appear to be moving toward the individual — i.e. the dot is “looming” — something strange happens. People overestimate the time that the dot lasted on the screen. This overestimation does not happen when the dot seems to move away. Thus, the overestimation is not simply a function of motion. Van Wassenhove and colleagues conducted this experiment during functional magnetic resonance imaging, which enabled them to examine how the brain reacted differently to looming and receding.The brain imaging data revealed two main findings. [read on]
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Class Dismissed – Magazine – The Atlantic
Brilliant analysis of class in America today, using Paul Fussell’s 1980s work as springboard, and touching on Maslow, Bill Bishop, and Richard Florida along the way.
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It’s not just that Romantic Selfhood—Walter Pater’s notion of burning with a “hard, gemlike flame,” which is the true emotional underpinning of bohemia—has become commodified. Fairly harmless is the $4 venti soy latte purchased amid Starbucks’s track lighting, Nina Simone crooning, and a story about Costa Rican beans that have sailed around the world just to see YOU! It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression. In the relatively affluent post–Cold War era, the search for self-expression has evolved into a desire to not have that self-expression challenged, which in turn necessitates living among people who think and feel just as you do. It’s why so many bohemians flee gritty Los Angeles for verdant Portland, where left-leaning citizens pride themselves on their uniform, monotonously progressive culture—the Zipcars, the organic gardens, the funky graphic-novel stores, and the thriving alternative-music scene. (In the meantime, I’ve also noticed that Portland is much whiter than Los Angeles, disconcertingly white.)
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Can Urban Acupuncture Cure Cities? @PSFK
Weird, or just common sense (to create pocket parks, etc.)?
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“Urban acupuncture is a surgical and selective intervention into the urban environment,” said Los Angeles architect and professor John Southern in an interview, “instead of large scale projects that involve not only thousands of acres, but investment and infrastructure that municipalities can no longer provide.”
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Compare this to other reports on Tokyo’s stalled development climate, where sites are turned into surface parking lots (awful, malignant) instead of parks. -
A refresh for open government in British Columbia – O’Reilly Radar
Good for British Columbia and Gov2.0 initiatives.
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“BC’s open data license allows entrepreneurial use,” tweeted Bowen Moran (@bxmx) in response to a question about the open government initiative. Bowen works on the B.C. public engagement team. “Part of the story there is how it’s different from the UK license,” Moran continued in a series of tweets. “BC’s privacy protections are more robust than the UK’s, so the links to the Act are more clearly defined … the direct emphasis on combining it with other information or by including it in your own product or application is an explicit (and thus very open) invitation to entrepreneurs to build on what we have here. Open government is more than just data being available — it’s about an entirely open approach to working with citizens. That’s the license’s spirit.”
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Wouldn’t mind going to this…
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Creative problem-solvers and innovators will be gathering at the Design Thinking unConference (DTUC) on August 19-20 at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design on Granville Island.
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Seattle’s golden ticket: Could land-use changes make us wealthier? | Crosscut.com
Lots of good sense in this article. I can think of a few NIMBYs who’d benefit from its insights…
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When it comes to land use, local city councils can’t suspend the laws of economics any more than they can suspend the laws of physics. …opponents of density have acted as if the Seattle City Council might suddenly lose its mind and increase zoning from the square’s current squat 40-foot buildings to mile-high sky scrapers. Local land use politics being what they are, that’s not going to happen. But even if it did, the developers would only build what they thought they could sell. (…)
But what the Seattle City Council can do is allow developers to act in the interest of profit. Private profit isn’t a bad thing, but our process often behaves as if it is. Listening to local elected officials talk with derision about “private property interests” ruining our city would be laughable if it wasn’t such a serious and almost deliberate misreading of basic economics. When private interests are profitable, jobs are created. That’s equally true for small companies stamping out widgets or developers who create housing. When developers create successful and profitable projects, people are put to work, new tax revenue is generated, and our plans to sustainably support growth can succeed.
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‘Guerilla Activist’ Releases 18,000 Scientific Papers – Technology Review
Couldn’t agree more with Aaron Swartz and fellow activists:
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“We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks,” wrote Swartz.
Maxwell says he released the papers for similar reasons. He says the papers come from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and were published before 1923, which means they’re in the public domain (his claim has not been independently verified). “This knowledge belongs to the public,” he argues. For the sake of scientific progress, Maxwell says, such databases shouldn’t keep research under lock and key at all, let alone beyond their copyright expiration, as is the current practice. “Progress comes from making connections between others’ discoveries, from extending them, and then from telling people,” he says.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
July 24, 2011 at 2:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
The Truth About The Economy In 2 Minutes | MoveOn.Org
He’s so right.
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Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said he could explain the problems with the economy in less than 2 minutes, 15 seconds—and he did it (with illustrations to boot). It’s great! Check it out.
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Location Matters in Manufacturing – Technology Review
Title says it all.
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The findings add to a growing awareness that manufacturing plays a critical role in driving innovation. Harvard Business School professors David Pisano and Willy Shih argue, for example, that innovation capacity often disappears if a country loses its manufacturing sector, because the knowledge and abilities needed to develop new technologies are often closely linked to the skills and expertise associated with manufacturing (see “Innovation Depends on a Robust Manufacturing Sector”). Fuchs builds on this idea by showing that regional manufacturing differences can cause the most advanced technologies to fall by the wayside. “Manufacturing locations can affect the evolution of technology globally,” she says.
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How America Can Rise Again – Magazine – The Atlantic
James Fallows makes a compelling case. Refreshing to read amidst the currently fashionable jeremiads.
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As the one truly universal nation, the United States continually refreshes its connections with the rest of the world—through languages, family, education, business—in a way no other nation does, or will. The countries that are comparably open—Canada, Australia—aren’t nearly as large; those whose economies are comparably large—Japan, unified Europe, eventually China or India—aren’t nearly as open. The simplest measure of whether a culture is dominant is whether outsiders want to be part of it. At the height of the British Empire, colonial subjects from the Raj to Malaya to the Caribbean modeled themselves in part on Englishmen: Nehru and Lee Kuan Yew went to Cambridge, Gandhi, to University College, London. Ho Chi Minh wrote in French for magazines in Paris. These days the world is full of businesspeople, bureaucrats, and scientists who have trained in the United States.
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Hilarious and Surprising Predictions of the Future…From the 1960s! (video) | Singularity Hub
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Nothing should make a futurist more wary than looking at the history of the profession and seeing how hilarious its mistakes have been.
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Exactly. That’s why futurologists (whether of the happy-happy or the often *much* more profitable doom-and-gloom school) give me hives. -
A healthy lifestyle could cut Alzheimer’s risk – CTV News
Ok, remember to kick the depression if you want those synapses to fire well into old age…
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… a mathematical model to estimate how the seven risk factors affect the likelihood of someone developing the disease. The factors are:Smoking
Depression
Low education
Diabetes
Too little exercise
Obesity
High blood pressure in mid-lifeIn the U.S., inactivity has the biggest impact on the number of cases because a third of the population is sedentary, Deborah Barnes, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California and lead author of the study, told The Associated Press.
Depression is also a key factor, followed by smoking and high blood pressure.
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VINTAGE PHOTOS: Take A Tour Of Manhattan In The 1940s
Lovely series of photos of New York City, mostly from the 1940s, some from the 60s.
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Amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad capturing daily life from 1938 to 1969.His works have been donated to and maintained by Cushman’s alma mater Indiana University, which has kindly given us permission to publish his gallery of New York City photos taken in 1941, 1942 and 1960.
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The “Johnny Depp Effect” – An evolutionary explanation for homosexuality | Psychology Today
Interesting hypotheses to tease out genetic aspects of how homosexual “reproduction” might work:
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Overly simplified, this “tipping-point” model (originally introduced by G. E. Hutchinson in 1959, and then later popularized by Jim McKnight in 1997 and Edward Miller in 2000) posits that genes associated with homosexuality confer fitness benefits in their heterosexual carriers. If only a few of these alleles are inherited, a males’ reproductive success is enhanced via the expression of attractive, albeit feminine traits, such as kindness, sensitivity, empathy, and tenderness. However, if many of these alleles are inherited, a “tipping point” is reached at which even mate preferences become “feminized,” meaning males are attracted to other males.”
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Why I quit my job: « Kai Nagata
Admittedly, I ignored this post when it first came out because, given my current interests, I didn’t think I’d find anything worth reading from a Canadian journalist. Wow, was I wrong. This essay is brilliant and a must-read. Nagata is not your average 24-year-old or average anything.
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Consider Fox News. What the Murdoch model demonstrated was that facts and truth could be replaced by ideology, with viewership and revenue going up. Simply put, you can tell less truth and make more money. When you have to balance the interests of your shareholders against the interests of the viewers you supposedly serve, the firewall between the boardroom and the newsroom becomes a very important bulwark indeed. CTV, in my experience, maintains high standards in factual accuracy. Its editorial staff is composed of fair-minded critical thinkers. But there is an underlying tension between “what the people want to see” and “the important stories we should be bringing to people”.
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Do trees communicate? Networks, networks… | Abject
Fascinating.
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Dr. Suzanne Simard writes:
Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent and architecture of this network through the use of new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree’s roots from another. He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees.Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker, a recent undergraduate student in Forestry, found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees. This research provides strong evidence that maintaining forest resilience is dependent on conserving mycorrhizal links, and that removal of hub trees could unravel the network and compromise regenerative capacity of the forests.
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Cities Soak up More Carbon Than We Thought – Environment – GOOD
Several studies recently, one claiming that cities aren’t so green (whereas this one counterindicates it). I like this article because it argues for more trees.
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While this news may just be common sense (trees are good!), it’s another important argument for why urban planning needs to incorporate green space, particularly the shady kind. The human population is on track to add more than two billion people to our ranks in the next fifty years. Much of that growth will happen in urban areas, which currently shelter more than half of the globe. We’ll need that urban land to absorb as much carbon as possible if we have any hope of fighting climate change.
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Pixels are too uniform
July 20, 2011 at 8:11 pm | In authenticity, just_so | 4 CommentsI’ve been decluttering for what seems like eons now. I’m sorting through old papers, selling things off on Used Victoria, and calling tradespeople to get things done around the house.
This afternoon I lifted the lid off one of those cardboard storage boxes, thinking I could tackle a boatload of old letters and postcards.
Of course I got stuck on the first binder of postcards, which offered notes from old friends who had drifted through my commune when I lived in Munich.
Fact is, it was fun – and interesting. I “saw” old friends who, thirty-five years ago, were in the process of turning into the people they are today. I’m not sure whether thirty-five years from now, it will be a commonplace to open a box that contains artifacts you can just touch, hold, turn over, and ponder. Opening old IMs or emails (even if that will be possible – and it’s not likely, is it?) just won’t be the same – you won’t be squinting at the idiosyncrasies of handwriting (or writing utensils), and remembering (as you do) the sing-song of a voice or accent. Pixels are uniform and all look the same individually, even if in the aggregate they make a compelling picture.
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
July 17, 2011 at 2:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Industry clusters: The modern-day snake oil – The Washington Post
Self-explanatory title. Vivek Wadhwa’s point about the importance of people is something that could apply to where I live, too:
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The prerequisite for a regional innovation system is knowledgeable people who have the motivation and ability to start ventures. To succeed, these people need to be connected to one another by information-sharing networks. (…) …the key drivers of innovation in Norway are the communication channels that local entrepreneurs maintain to the outside world and their open-mindedness toward foreign cultures, change and new ideas. Companies that are “regionally minded” — that maintain ties only with players within the same cluster — are four times less likely to innovate than the globally connected. The study found that regional and national clusters are “irrelevant for innovation.
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Why I Oppose the Lightbulb Law – NearWalden
Dave Douglas nails it.
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Why I Don’t Like the Law
(…)
1 It treats Americans like dirt. In my experience supporters of the law have had two views on consumers: 1) they’re being stupid for not understanding the long term cost benefits, or 2) they have reasons to want to still use the old ones, but GHG reduction is more important. I believe US consumers are smarter than people believe, and are making rational decisions based on their own situation. As a result, I find both of these views disrespectful and outside of the founding ideals of this country.2 Other industries will try the same thing. If you think the success of this ploy by GE and Philips hasn’t been noticed in other parts of those companies and in other industries, then you’re quaintly naive.
3 It’s setting a really bad precedent. The federal government now believes it has a new tool in its efficiency toolkit: outlawing inefficient products, irrespective of whether they are popular or there exists a true replacement in the market. Many have said “relax, its only lightbulbs”. Beyond the fact that sometimes lightbulbs matter to people (see #1 above), lets see what products the government tries to apply to tool to next.
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How much more should we give up for parking? | India lives in her cities too!
Fascinating post on how the “needs” of Motordom (as per Gordon Price) screw over residents/ people and nature.
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I have written previously about parking spots replacing parks and playgrounds in cities like Bangalore and Chennai. Now we learn that even houses will be demolished and river beds covered up to make parking lots. It is time we asked our government – in this case the Chennai Corporation – why parking should be given such high priority. How much more should we give up for parking?
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Frank Gruber: Planning and Building for the Future, Dead: Round Up the Usual Suspects
Right on. Excellent critique.
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While Campanella says that we need a muscular government to accomplish such great things, he for the most part blames a citizenry that no longer shares values about the public realm that are necessary to support a bold course of government action. He attributes this to a sense of self-interest that he finds rooted in the various “cultural revolutions” that started with the civil rights movement.It seems bizarre, at least to this reader, to blame America’s failure to maintain and modernize its transportation systems, its schools, and every other aspect of the public realm (with the exception of sports stadiums!) on the social and cultural gains of minorities, women, gays, etc., when a much more obvious explanation is the fact that for 40 years America’s economy and fiscal decisions have largely been in the hands of the intellectual, economic, political, and actual descendents of those who fought tooth and nail the New Deal that Campanella appropriately admires.
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Elgan: How Google+ ends social networking fatigue – Computerworld
Must re-read this later. Good info.
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Canada’s knowledge economy: not so much – Inkless Wells – Macleans.ca
Uh-oh, Canada?
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As the Globe wrote this morning based on a leaked copy of the report (sigh), “Canada ranked worse or stagnated in 18 of 24 benchmarks tracked by the council since its 2008 report.”
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KPMG – Cleantech Report Card for British Columbia
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The cleantech industry is one of the fastest growing industries in British Columbia, with the province being home to one of the largest industry clusters in Canada and North America.
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Umair Haque: Capitalists Who Make vs. Capitalists Who Take | Dylan Ratigan
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We find ourselves at a point in the world where the main tool to measure economic success and progress — Gross Domestic Product, or GDP – is outdated. Do we need a new set of rules for our economy to effectively begin to measure real, productive growth? Umair Haque, author of “The New Capitalist Manifesto” and director of the Havas Media Lab, believes it’s critical to the future of our country and our global economy.
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Includes audio/ interview. -
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If you accept my notion that it’s time to update productivity to encompass not merely how much toxic mass produced junk we churn out, faster–but to reflect whether or not said junk actually makes a difference to how meaningfully well our lives are lived–then perhaps a next-generation BLS’s job isn’t merely computing labor productivity, but socio-productivity as well–and making the figures public every month, quarter, and year. If it were to do that, I’d bet our economy would spin on it’s very axis: the numbers we use to track its health, gauge its performance, and that Wall St uses to (mis)allocate our hard-won capital would all be dramatically altered–the informational structure of incentives would shift, and the great gears of prosperity might find a newer, more, well, productive, rhythm–because we’d optimizing not just for the greatest amount of industrial age junk to line the bleak exurban shelves, but for groundbreaking, socially useful breakthroughs.
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Downloadable PDF of a Land Lines Article, “Cities and Infrastructure; A Rough Road Ahead,” by Gregory K. Ingram and Anthony Flint. Published July 2011.
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American cities have promising long-term prospects as hubs of innovation and growth, with expansion in technology and health sciences beginning to offset the decades-long erosion of manufacturing. Cities also remain places of vitality, offering urban design, density, and transport options that attract residents of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, nine of the ten most populous U.S. cities gained population over the last decade, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.Yet the short-term prospects for cities are fraught with challenges. The recent sharp decline in tax revenues, caused by the 2008 housing market collapse and related financial crisis and economic slowdown, has made it extraordinarily difficult for state and local governments to maintain basic services, let alone plan for investments in infrastructure. Federal funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) helped local governments offset revenue declines in the past three years, but ARRA funds are no longer available for the coming fiscal year (a transition now termed “the cliff”), leaving local officials to confront the full force of revenue shortfalls.
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Geoffrey West on biology, networks, metabolisms, …and cities and more. Fifty-two minute video.
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The great thing about cities, the thing that is amazing about cities is as they grow, so to speak, their dimensionality increases. That is, the space of opportunity, the space of functions, the space of jobs just continually increases. And the data shows that. If you look at job categories, it continually increases. I’ll use the word “dimensionality.” It opens up. And in fact, one of the great things about cities is that it supports crazy people. You walk down Fifth Avenue, you see crazy people. There are always crazy people. Well, that’s good. Cities are tolerant of extraordinary diversity.
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Sheryl Sandberg & Male-Dominated Silicon Valley : The New Yorker
The following observation (by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, director of the Gender and Policy program at Columbia) is, sadly, very very true. There is a male unwillingness to mentor and/or sponsor women. I only have to look at my own academic experience and my PhD advisor…
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“Sandberg, to her great credit, had Larry Summers. She has had sponsors in her life who were very powerful, who went to bat for her. That’s very rare for a woman.”
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47 Mind-Blowing Psychology-Proven Facts You Should Know About Yourself
Dopamine isn’t what it’s cracked up (ha) to be…
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It’s all about seeking — The latest research, though is changing this view. Instead of dopamine causing us to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases our general level of arousal and our goal-directed behavior. (From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps us motivated to move through our world, learn, and survive). It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.
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Simon Lewis: Don’t take consciousness for granted | Video on TED.com
Fascinating account by Simon Lewis of his “descent” into non-consciousness and his subsequent return to it. Along the way (in an 18minute talk), Lewis discusses neuroplasticity, mental health, IQ, disability, and more.
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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Greening Cities – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
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San Francisco led the list, followed by Vancouver, New York City, Seattle and Denver. The cities with the lowest rankings were mostly in the old rust belt. The bottom five were Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Cleveland, St. Louis and (in dead last) Detroit.
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Umair Haque interviewed by Thinkers50 | The Big Picture
Great 20-minute video interview with Umair Haque. Double-entry bookkeeping as a legacy institution – time to update/ reboot.
Moving soon – wish to glide, not skid
July 13, 2011 at 10:33 pm | In just_so | Comments Off on Moving soon – wish to glide, not skid
The paragliders were out at Dallas Road cliffs today, on another windy (good for them) non-summery (not so good for the rest of us) day. (We have had a spectacularly disappointing spring and summer here on the northwest coast of North America.)
I set myself a goal of writing again. But on this, the first day, I’m failing. Flailing.
Why? I’m in the process of moving, and it’s a tough slog. I wish, really, it were as easy as setting off to glide over the cliffs at Dallas Road…
(The paraglider is suspended in his cushioned chair, hanging below the red splotch that is the glider sail itself. For more on Victoria BC paragliding, see this page. I took the photo about here, looking east.)
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
July 10, 2011 at 2:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
100 Examples of Corporate Social Media Policies
Useful reference for …
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The following table contains the names of over 100 companies and organization that have published their Employee Social Media Policies or Guidelines online
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Innovation Depends on a Robust Manufacturing Sector – Technology Review
Must-read article, America… (And Canada is actually even worse, because this economy manufactures very little, basing its wealth on the export of raw resources. Terrible.)
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To illustrate the importance of maintaining a U.S. innovation ecosystem even when an innovation’s value isn’t apparent immediately, Shih points out that rechargeable batteries didn’t seem very important to U.S. companies when the University of Texas licensed lithium-ion technology to Sony two decades ago; hardly anyone in the United States was making consumer electronics. But after Sony introduced the technology in its Walkman in 1991, other Asian consumer-electronics companies also developed rechargeable-battery technology. Later, as rechargeable batteries became an important component of laptop computers, the battery makers honed their skills with manufacturers, which in turn transferred expertise with small consumer electronics into building laptops in Asia. Today, with hybrid and electric cars on the rise, manufacturers in Japan, Korea, and China have a big head start on the technology behind those vehicles.
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It starts out lightheartedly, as a meditation on the power of showers (water pressure, preferably STRONG), and morphs into a list of very excellent points about what every city should be able to provide:
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It was under a deluge from the massive showerhead at the hotel one morning last week that I started thinking about a simple checklist that every mayor should ensure is delivered everyday for every resident and visitor. My 10-point checklist went something like this: [click through/ read on for more]
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Cultured People Feel Less Stress : Discovery News
Men feel soothed by experiencing culture, whereas women feel that way if they’re creating it? This is interesting…
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* Regardless of education or wealth, people who go to museums or concerts or make art tend to be happier.
* The link between culture and good feelings were different for men and women.
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Brain scans and the mental health of the megalopolitan | SmartPlanet
It seems like there’s a lot to revise / recheck in this study. One thing it does perhaps prove is that amenities in cities/urban environments are absolutely crucial. Meanwhile, note this caveat, from the article:
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While the work doesn’t prove that living in the city causes the changes in the brain, it could be used to help improve life for city dwellers.
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The art of architecture | Harvard Gazette
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Harvard has no glassy campus pond or placid central green, like many universities do. The Yard, which is the closest thing to a traditional campus green, is dotted with buildings. The tight-knit closeness of the University’s structures, the breadth of their styles, the pocket greenery, and the bustling, untamed public square at Harvard’s core make it an unusual campus, one where faculty and students have to interact regularly.
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and
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“The future intellectual direction of Harvard will be linked to its physical planning and architectural path,” Mostafavi said.“When there is more and more discussion around collaboration and transdisciplinary practices, the question is: What kind of space do you need for that work?” he added.
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In the Garden with the Guru by Bob Rodgers – The Literary Review of Canada
Interesting personal take on Marshall McLuhan. Also, this:
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Like all original thinkers from Blake to Einstein, McLuhan was much misunderstood. He never promoted TV over books as popular accounts gave out. He never expressed a preference for tribal culture over individualism. He never said the patterns of perception imposed by the ear are superior to those of the eye. One small aphorism sticks with me: “When the globe becomes a single electronic web with all its languages and culture recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant, however precious.” However precious! Those are the operative words, about as far as McLuhan went in taking sides. But they also bring his innermost sympathies to the fore.
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Who knew? Boston ranks 3rd nation-wide in “diversity density.”
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First, is there a wide range of ethnic and racial groups in your city — as opposed to a binary division between white and black, or native and immigrant? And second, is your city’s density high enough so that you really encounter people from different ethnic backgrounds on sidewalks and other shared space, as opposed to simply driving past their neighborhoods on your way to the mall?The diversity density index measures both at once. And if you use data from the most recent census, you see something surprising: Boston is the third-most diverse city in America, outside of New York and San Francisco.
Diversity density counts the number of people per square mile who do not claim membership in either of the county’s two largest racial/ethnic groups. The result gives you a rough approximation of the likelihood of running into people of a variety of different ethnic backgrounds during a brisk walk across town.
Suffolk County, most of whose residents are in Boston, has 12,338 people per square mile, making it the seventh-most crowded county in the United States. Take away its two largest ethnic groups (non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics), and there remain 3,957 people in other categories per square mile — the sixth highest concentration of all US counties and county equivalents. (Of the five leaders, four are boroughs in New York City.)
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SBS Dateline | China s Ghost Cities
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It’s said there are around 64 million empty apartments in China.
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Fascinating video report on China’s ghost cities, a potential real estate bubble, and questions around quantity versus quality, especially of GDP. -
How to Land Your Kid in Therapy – Magazine – The Atlantic
OMG…
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At the end of the season, the league finds a way to “honor each child” with a trophy. “They’re kind of euphemistic,” the coach said of the awards, “but they’re effective.” The Spirit Award went to “the troublemaker who always talks and doesn’t pay attention, so we spun it into his being very ‘spirited,’” he said.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
July 3, 2011 at 2:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Q&A: Umair Haque on How to Beat Wall Street Once and for All « @ggregator
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America is watching a great tragedy unfold: The collapse of the middle class. That society needs megabanks is, to put it kindly, a finely tailored piece of marketing. In fact, as I’ve written about a few months back, banks need society a lot more than society needs banks. How do we know? Well, consider the Irish Bankers’ Strikes of the 1970s, when fed-up bankers petulantly decided to go on strike (with the assumption that the economy would collapse, and society would beg to have them back). Instead, the economy kept growing, and a kind of peer-to-peer banking system arose spontaneously. Far from instability, the result was relative stability.The larger point is that the “instability” that is the heart of Wall Street’s scare tactics is in fact already upon us, savagely so. The global financial system is still being propped up with liquidity injections and implicit guarantees of every kind—and on the flipside, income, wealth, and job creation are stagnating while poverty is growing. That is economic instability—and the solution isn’t subsidizing Wall Street to the hilt, because that only sets the stage for a bigger, nastier, meltdown in the next five years or so. The solution is building fundamentally, radically better financial institutions.
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