Isegoria

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money:

1. Being Set Up to Succeed
2. Having Excellent Management
3. Learning New Things
4. Exercising Creativity and Solving the Right Kind of Problems
5. Having a Voice
6. Being Recognized for Hard Work
7. Building Something that Matters
8. Building Software without an Act of Congress
9. Having Few Legacy Constraints

In How World Cities Change, Saskia Sassen argues that major cities may be losing population, but not because they’re drifting into irrelevance:

The shrinking of big-city populations has been both oversold and misinterpreted. Population is growing in some global cities, like Shanghai, London and Chicago. And in global cities where population is falling or stagnating, from New York to Manila, there is an inflow of highly educated 20- to 35-year-olds, along with an outflow of the very young and the old. What’s happening is a brutal triage: apartments that once held families now hold one single investment banker. And the space required by that single banker for offices, restaurants and shops can be two, three, four times more than that required by the family he or she replaces.

In The New Megalopolis, Richard Florida (The Flight of the Creative Class) argues that our focus on national development is wrong:

China isn’t the world’s most ferocious new economic competitor — the exploding east-coast corridor, from Beijing to Shanghai, is. India as a whole is not developing high-tech industries and attracting jobs, but the booming mega-region stretching from Bangalore to Hyderabad is. Across the world, in fact, nations don’t spur growth so much as dynamic regions — modern versions of the original “megalopolis,” a term coined by the geographer Jean Gottman to identify the sprawling Boston-New York-Washington economic power corridor.

He argues that there are 20 great “Megas” in the world, half in the United States:

These regions are home to just 10 percent of total world population, 660 million people, but produce half of all economic activity, two thirds of world-class scientific activity and three quarters of global innovations. The great urbanologist Jane Jacobs was the first to describe why megalopolises grow. When people cluster in one place, they all become more productive. And the place itself becomes much more productive, because collective creativity grows exponentially. Ideas flow more freely, are honed more sharply and can be put into practice more quickly. Later, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas dubbed these forces “human capital externalities,” and explained why they seem to override “the usual economic forces,” like prices: “What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for, if not to be around other people?”

There is, however, a tipping point. The forces of price and congestion begin pushing people away from the center. But make no mistake, this has nothing to do with the “decentralization of work,” as many have argued. The huge economic advantages of clustering still guide the process, which is why second cities emerge near big cities or in the corridors between them, not in the middle of nowhere.

The New Scientist presents The 10 roads to Fatsville:

1. Not enough sleep
2. Climate control
3. Less smoking
4. Prenatal effects
5. Fat equals fecund
6. A little older…
7. More drugs
8. Pollution
9. Mature mums
10. Like marrying like

How have things changed over the years? On the first point, Not enough sleep:

In 1960 people in the US slept an average of 8.5 hours per night. A 2002 poll by the National Sleep Foundation suggests that the average has fallen to under 7 hours. According to Spiegel, the decline in sleep is mirrored by the increase in obesity.

On the second point, Climate control:

Keeping warm and staying cool take energy unless we are in the “thermoneutral zone” — around 27 °C for a naked body — which is increasingly where we choose to live and work.

There’s no denying that ambient temperatures have changed in the past few decades. Between 1970 and 2000, the average British home warmed from a chilly 13 °C to 18 °C. In the US, the changes have been at the other end of the thermometer as the proportion of homes with air conditioning rose from 23 to 47 per cent between 1978 and 1997. In the southern states — where obesity rates tend to be highest — the number of houses with air con has shot up to 70 per cent from 37 per cent in 1978.