Today closed the Metròpolis Barcelona - El Projecte Comú exhibition on Barcelona’s strategic metropolitan plan featuring 63 projects to extend and develop the city for the horizon 2010. Bruno Giussani has a nice post on it: Walking on Barcelona, and thinking about city design
Relation to my thesis: Location is key when applying for grad school (i.e. Apply to programs in places you would be happy)
Macrofocus has released the InfoScope v. 3.0.7 that comes with 2006 “Prices and Earnings around the Globe” dataset. The InfoScope is an interactive visualization system that supports analysis and exploration of a large number of indicators in complex datasets. The Prices and Earnings around the Globe dataset contains information about the purchasing power in almost 60 cities around the world. Each city is characterized by more than 100 different attributes such as the price for food, salary of engineers or the working time required to buy a hamburger.
Relation to my thesis: The InfoScope uses multiple coordinated views to analyze geo-referenced datasets. An article explains this approach:
Brodbeck, D. and Girardin, L. 2003. Design Study: Using Multiple Coordinated Views to Analyze Geo-referenced High-dimensional Datasets. In Proceedings of the Conference on Coordinated and Multiple Views in Exploratory Visualization (July 15 - 15, 2003). CMV. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 104.
It uses several interesting visualization techniques I could think of applying:
Fisheye view
A fisheye view of the world focused on Europe. Highlighted objects in the periphery remain visible.
Similarity map
Similarity maps help to gain an overview of the global relationships between objects: cities are placed on a map so that similar cities are located close to each other and dissimilar ones far apart.
Parallel coordinates view
The parallel coordinates view shows one axis for each attribute or criterion that characterizes the cities. Connecting the actual values for one specific city on all the axes leads to a polygonal line that forms a visual representation of the characteristics of this city.
The San Francisco Bay Area thrives on tides. It profits from low tides to reinvent itself as innovation hub. However, with the emergence of competing creative region, business and government officials face challenges that could be overlooked in the past. Baby boomers are retiring, workers are getting squeezed out by the high cost of living and foreign professionals are moving back home. High cost of living and the obstacles raised by U.S. immigration policies and factors are the obvious factors to reduce the regional quality of life. Interestingly now, measures to attract new creative brainiacs is to capitalize more on the home-grown workforce. That is investing in lower education and training programs to reduce education and social gaps. Boldly put: “if teachers and firefighters can’t live in the region, then you’re not offering a very attractive region to the engineers who are thinking of moving here”. The SJ Mercury News has an article on it: Bay Area brain drain, lack of affordable housing, education gaps, stunting economic grows.
Based on Flickr’s All time most popular tags
Dans «Moi, Chinois de Boston vivant à Paris», Le Temps mentionne l’apparition d’une nouvelle catégorie de migrants: les transnationaux, qui passent régulièrement d’un horizon à l’autre sans choisir et sans en quitter vraiment aucun . De plus en plus d’hommes et de femmes réalisent des parcours constituant d’allers et retour et de multiples étapes. Portés par la démocratisation du transport aérien et le développement des télécommunications, et de la libre circulation ils passent d’un horizon à un autre sans plus en choisir et sans plus en quitter vraiment aucun.
Les transnationaux sont un signe de l’émmergence de la creative class [fr] (qui par choix ou contraite vivent dans 2 villes bien connectées en même temps (Barcelone-Genève, Zürich-Paris, Genève-Lyon, …).
Dans L’émergence des créatifs redessine la Suisse, Xavier Comtess reprend les idées de Rise of the Creative Class de Richard Florida pour les contextualiser à la Suisse. C’est peut-être un peu trop porter sur la creative economy en laissant un peu de côté les composants non-économomiques de la creative class comme le style de vie et les motivations de cette nouvelle classe. Actuellement la fracture en Suisse qui n’est pas au niveau des langues ou des cultures, mais dans les différences grandissantes du High-Tech Land et du Heidi Land.
Il mentionne les villes européens capables d’attiré les créatifs sans oublier Barcelone:
En devenant des acteurs mondiaux des technologies des télécommunications (Helsinki), de l’innovation (Dublin), de la nanotechnologie (Grenoble), de l’aéronautique (Toulouse), de la culture et des échanges (Barcelone), de la nautique et du tourisme (Valence), ces métropoles ont su attirer la matière la plus rare aujourd’hui: les créatifs.
“Work is where you hang your coat Sun leads way in telework — working not just from home but anywhere” talks about “telecommuting”, the next generation of “telework” because nowadays we are not not just working from home but working from anywhere. In a few words, the technological barries for telecommuting now in the verge of being broken, telecommuting is still facing social barries. Managers worry that unsupervised employees might goof off. Workers worry that losing face time might hurt their chances for advancement. However, telecommuting cuts the costs for the employer and improves the productivity of some types of employees. “All of us who participated can attest to the fact that you end up working more because of sitting there without day-to-day interruptions”. Telecommuting is still based on very informal rules, as a lot of telecommuting arrangements are initially done under the table and many companies have no program to manage their guerrilla distributed workers.
According to easyJet’s In-Flight, Barcelona is the answer to a new generation of young and creative people and bohemians ex-pats: Barcelona New Bohemians.
According to Nature Jobs, Spain aims at premier league. After decades of brain drain like in many other european countries, science and research have finally climbed up ithe political agenda the last couple of years. In Renaissance in Spain it is mentioned that the trend is most notable in Catalonia, where a science-friendly regional government wants to turn Barcelona into a Mediterranean science showcase. However with a system still very hard to penetrate the two biggest obstacles in building up its scientific workforce: accommodating scientists from abroad, and offering fellows the hope of future employment. It seems to be very much a latin problem.
Exchange rate fluctuations have had a significant impact on the Mercer 2005 cost of living rankings. Countries utilizing the euro have experienced a rise in relative cost while locations using US dollars and currencies pegged to the US dollar have dropped.
Japan has the world’s two most expensive cities after Osaka pushed London into third place. Geneva is 6th, Zurich is 7th, Sydney 20th, Barcelona 43rd, and San Francisco 50th. Mas en El Pais: Barcelona y Madrid se clasifican entre las 50 ciudades más caras del mundo.
The survey methodology targets expatriates habits and is based on City-to-City Index Comparison, Spendable Income Tables, Home Country Housing Norms, Expatriate Accommodation Cost Tables, Education Cost Tables, Business Travel Expense Tables, and Actual Price List More…