hmmn: musings from the far east(erwood)
This story out of Boston is making the rounds:
“At MIT, they can put words in our mouths”
From the article:
Where can I sign up?
After over two months of living in Japan, I now finally have a cellphone, or keitai as the Japanese call them. Anyone who has recently lived in or been to Japan will know that not having one of these appendages glued to your hand basically assures one pariah status. Granted, what I ended up getting after salivating over the higher-end phones and their various options like taking photos or playing games or looking up GPS maps or making coffee in the morning was a relatively bottom-of-the-line model by Sony Ericsson.
This particular model only does the basics, you know, send and receive email, look up certain web sites, create my own custom rings (I mean actually create a ring, from scratch, not just select one from various options), voice memo recorder, bilingual setting so I can read the menus in English, as well as make phone calls (oh yeah, that feature, remember that one?). All for about $3 after sales tax, and I think I overpaid!
For my carrier/plan I also aimed my sights a bit lower, which is to say I didn’t go with NTT DoCoMo, which currently has about 58% market share of Japan’s wireless market. Rather, I went with it’s old archrival KDDI’s au service, currently No. 2 in the keitai wars although soon to be surpassed by J-Phone (known for their bells-and-whistle phones). My reasons were more financial and practical and less anti-kingpin: NTT DoCoMo requires a huge deposit from non-Japanese residents, and their plans and per-call charges are more expensive than KDDI’s (or J-Phone’s for that matter).
So reads the tagline for this May 2002 story in the Washington Monthly by Richard Florida (a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh) about the relationship between a city’s economic growth and the amount of “creative” people living in that city, or it’s “creative class.”
Despite the somewhat flippant tagline, Florida presents quite a fascinating (and persuasive) thesis — taken from his just published book The Rise of the Creative Class — based on what he calls the “Creativity Index” which makes use, among other things, of something called the “Gay Index” which Florida calls “a reasonable proxy for an area’s openness to different kinds of people and ideas”. He was spurred in his research by the economic development (or lack of it) in Pittsburgh, which despite being a top-ten ranked research and development city, loses many of it’s creative people (and companies) to other cities.
Probably not surprising, but San Francisco ranks number one on Florida’s list of most creative cities, though I hear they’ll soon be losing that rank now that I’ve departed. 🙂 Actually, I was curious to see where other cities I’ve called home at one point or another rank on Florida’s list:
Honolulu: a “bottom-ten” city, ranked 23rd out of 32 on the medium-sized cities list.
Houston: 7th most creative (large cities list)
Tucson (my birthplace many moons ago): 3rd most creative (medium-sized cities)
Lexington, KY: 9th most creative (small-sized cities list)
See where your city ranks.