Longing to Wander Through Space

Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo. Read more:

One of the most stunning videos I've seen, one which makes me ever more anxious to get out, to explore and discover. There is only one impediment to out exploring other worlds, and that is desire. There are many less productive things that stimulate the economy, from ultra expensive food to multi million dollar paintings. What allows these industries to thrive is desire.

If the desire existed we could spend hundreds of billions of dollars to collect explorer journals and photographs of our Solar system, rocks from other planets as jewelry. The problem is people desire other things....

But this is turning as more and more super rich found companies such as Space X, Virgin Galatctic, and Planetary Resources.

Further falling prices, and ever greater wealth will allow us to eventually push out further. In the mean time, perhaps the most important thing to do is to keep increasing our desire for a wonder filled future.

Holy Shnookerdookies! We landed on a Comet!

With harpoons shooting out of it, and it's feet drilling to the ice, ESA's Philae space robot grabbed hold of the icy comet it was landing on for dear life. This marks the first time in history that we've ever landed on anything so tiny, and it marks an astounding success after a 10 year journey across our Solar System, and many years prior to that of planning and building the space probe that would make history.

This is an amazing feat, that could bring us closer to Planetary Resources dream of mining space. Philae's actual mission, however, is just as impressive. It will, give us an "unprecedented scientific analysis of the comet, a remnant of the Solar System’s 4.6 billion-year history."

We are sort of drifting in this little Solar System of ours, so it's important to know where it came from and where its going.

But since this is in large part an economics blog, let me talk a little about another important aspects of this.

Soft Power:
Science is one of the most important pieces to the soft power puzzle and in many cases' it's the most important. Don't believe me... Let me repeat what Just happened: The European Union developed new super advanced technologies which allowed us to land on a comet, and which will transform our understanding of our own existence... Which was mentioned over 160,000 times in the news.

Remember also that scientists are an important piece of a countries success, and the ESA now has news that's being read by tons of scientists and engineers around the world, engineers who have to decide where they want to work.


And now we're back to the science.

After a tense wait during the seven-hour descent to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the signal confirming the successful touchdown arrived on Earth at 16:03 GMT (17:03 CET).

The confirmation was relayed via the Rosetta orbiter to Earth and picked up simultaneously by ESA’s ground station in Malargüe, Argentina and NASA’s station in Madrid, Spain. The signal was immediately confirmed at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, ESOC, in Darmstadt, and DLR’s Lander Control Centre in Cologne, both in Germany.

The first data from the lander’s instruments were transmitted to the Philae Science, Operations and Navigation Centre at France’s CNES space agency in Toulouse.

“Our ambitious Rosetta mission has secured a place in the history books: not only is it the first to rendezvous with and orbit a comet, but it is now also the first to deliver a lander to a comet’s surface,” noted Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General....

Read More on the ESA's site

An "Avenue of the Arts" Raises Money With Crowdfunding

Using Crowdfunding platform PatronCity "The Avenue of the Arts" in Grand Rapids, Michigan has hit their $10,000 dollar goal, which means that their fund raising efforts will be matched by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.



This money will allow them to get a street level space which they plan to use as;

Headquarters for the Avenue for the Arts
Office for learning lab
Interns who facilitate all Avenue events
Gallery space showcasing local artists
Education/infospot where Avenue newcomers can get more information
A community meeting space

I've said for a while that economic development organizations need to start taking better advantage of Crowdfunding, not just to help their own growth, but to help those of the businesses they serve. One of the most difficult things about crowdfunding is finding people who are interested in a project quickly enough to raise money. Economic and Community Development organizations can help with this, especially by searching for those interested in a project before it even launches.

The thing which many organizations have trouble with, however, is the rewards people get for sponsoring something, the swag. This was something the "Avenue for the Arts" excelled at, they had a lot of great stuff, to give to the people who supported them if they were successful.

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DIY Science Labs - The future of economic development

I've said it many times before citizen scientists, also known as "Makers," "Biohackers" Rock!

And now a group of biohackers from California are working on getting yeast to make vegan cheese.

These scientists work out of an open community laboratory in which anyone can come in and start doing research, and or learning.

(You can see a list of these labs here.)

Although often ignored by people in economic development I believe that citizen science labs are one of the most important things a community can support to expand the economy. That's because they open up innovation to anyone in the community, the way commercial kitchens open up the food industry to people with very little money. Imagine having 4H students who are actually able to play with biology in order to to understand it better, or a space where someone has access to the tools they need to build the newest 3D printer.

Makers have invented a lot of cool things in recent years. A 13 year old named Shaubham Banerjee from California invented a cheaper braille printer. However, this amazing feat cost $35,000 dollars, something most of us don't have access to. Citizen Science has the potential to make many aspects of scientific research cheaper as they share equipment and ideas. In addition many of these spaces have invented and built their own equipment which allows everyone from scientists to schools to do research and experiments at a fraction of the previous cost.

This is Bioart from Genspace. To make it the citizen scientists alters
the genetics of microbes so that they from these images and glow.

Perhaps the most important thing DIY (do it yourself) labs do is enhance the education of the people within a community. Consider, for example, the Hive Biolab in Seattle. Which has classes for children and adults on everything from Neuroscience to anatomy in a fun setting, with inspiring teachers.

Save Your City With Branding

Branding is about creating positive emotions, about directing the way people think about something so that they are more likely to help you meet your goals. This is especially important for cities, because, from increasing shopping to improving people's life satisfaction, many of the goals a city has involve improving emotions.

Before you begin to try to brand you city it's important to understand that brands are what people think about a place so every place already has a brand, either good or bad.  Brands happen organically, neither Paris nor Detroit planned their brand, but must deal with the image people now have of them. In order to be effective, you need to steer your existing brand by encouraging and building on its positive aspects while trying to mitigate any negative aspects your city or region might have by:

1-Deciding who you want to reach out to, and the purposes of your brand. No single brand can reach all people, which may mean that you have to run a portfolio of different brands related to your city. Even so, you have to determine whom you are trying to reach with each of these brands, so that you can understand how to reach them effectively.

Disney is likely the best company running a portfolio of brands connected to a place. With everything from princesses and weddings, to Jedi, superheroes, and innovative rides they have a lot of brands related to their theme parks. Part of what allows them to have so many brands is that they are all based on a single set of concepts – happiness, through fun, memories and dreams.

2-Research how people already view the region you're trying to brand, and what they're most likely to respond positively to, then come up with a desirable brand based on this.

3-Create and execute a plan to move people's opinions closer to your desired brand. Remember, branding isn't just about advertising, it can be about attracting certain types of businesses, hosting certain types of events, etc. For example, Kansas City wants to be thought of as an innovative place so they now host one of the largest Maker Faires in the world, where citizen scientists can come and show off everything from homemade robots to newly created plants.


Case Study

When I was in charge of growing the economy for Philadelphia's largest commercial corridor (Girard Avenue) I had a serious problem. People thought of the community as crime ridden, dirty, and weird.
Rather than fight this image, however, I played off of it with the "Surprise Its Girard" campaign.


Aimed at focusing on the positive individual businesses in the region, I ran a buy local campaign and a team made up of different organizations put together events targeted towards people who loved interesting urban environments.

The result, we build some of the largest events in Philadelphia, including "The Fishtown Shad Fest" which was voted the best festival in Philadelphia. We also saw thousands of additional shoppers coming to Girard.

A Short Guide to Creating a Brand

Overarching Benefits
The best brands are centered on easy to understand emotional benefits. In general I've found three of the most effective emotional benefits on which some of the most successful brands center are:

Brands which bring easy happiness

Coke, McCafe, and Disney have all managed to effectively positioned their products this way, while Hawaii has effectively positioned itself this way as a location. Happiness brands are focused on helping people experience perfect moments, to escape the ordinariness of their daily lives, allowing them to get away. After all, people who are searching for happiness and struggling with life often want something simple. In essence happiness brands offer people a cookie and a hug to make them feel better.


Brands which seek to help people make life better

Wal-Mart managed to become the largest company by making people feel that the store makes their life better by allowing them to save money and by being a family company; while Whole Foods positioned itself as making life better by helping people stay healthy and supporting the community, as well as the environment.


Empowering people

Empowering people is about creating something that will help people achieve their goals, for example, Nike empowers people to do better at sports. The people these brands reach out to, aren't the ones looking to be handed victory, they just want a little help making it for themselves, which is why Nike often shows people doing a lot of hard work in their ads. This is similar in many ways to Silicon Valley's primary brand, which is more than just creative, it's empowering. Like Nike's slogan “Just Do It” Silicon Valley challenges people to succeed, to strive to be creative, and like a great sporting event the energy is intoxicating.


Multiple brands
Any city can have multiple associations tied to it. New York has the empowerment brand, “If you can make it there you can make it anywhere.” Yet, it's also a place of energy and quick happiness, of high fashion that “never sleeps” because there is always something to do. Paris too can be empowering to artists, chefs, and dreamers. At the same time it also creates happiness through a sense of romance and beauty. Rio has an energy too, an energy and excitement of fun, of parties, of dances, and now as it grows, of hopeful empowerment. As you can see it's okay to have more than one theme if they fit together in a way that resonates and is simple.


Function
There are some brands which are functional, though they still use their function to show some emotion if they want to be effective. Michelin Tires did this by showing babies riding around in stormy weather on tires, tying the fact that your family’s life is connected to your tires. In the context of locations, functional communities might be a community with the great schools; after all, great schools are opportunities for children to have a better life, which will make parents happy. Thus the function of the location may be school but school isn't a benefit per say, it’s the better life which comes from better schools that's the benefit.


Sub-benefits
Sub-benefits support and expand on the primary benefit, yet this is also where differences really shine forth. For example, both a small town with good schools and Silicon Valley could take the approach of empowering people; yet how they do this, the emotions behind this are different. One is a warm, calm place of barbeques while the other is a high energy place of constant inspiration.

Personality
The best brands are almost viewed like people, they have emotions, and they have personality. As previously mentioned, Paris is romantic, while Philadelphia is verbose and honest, and Seattle is relaxed. Each of these preconceived personalities can be positive if put in the right light and given the right spin.

Support
Support is the way you prove your brand is what you say it is, the way you direct people's feelings about it. For Silicon Valley, this is easy as it has more successful tech companies than anywhere else. For others, this can be more difficult, more subtle. In Philadelphia, gritty neighborhoods such as the one I worked for, were able to show that they were eclectic by showing off great restaurants and top rated art galleries.

Values
What a brand does, how it acts, tells people what they should feel about it. The laws cities pass and the things they build say a lot more about a city than any scripted speech they give. Thus when government officials talk about entrepreneurship, but continue to allow their city to be rated among the worst places to start a business, people know where their priorities are, no matter what they say.


Branding to create happier people
To some extent, happiness is a state of mind. This is why research has shown that pictures of cute animals increase concentration during test taking and pictures of nature reduce stress – at least to a limited extent. Branding can be used as a means of helping improve the way people feel. This is because branding is much more than just advertising; in fact, companies like Starbucks built a valuable brand without traditional advertising. What you have to understand is that a brand is largely based on what's happening in your city. This means you must not only pitch your desired brand you must work to make it a reality. Keep in mind, however, to be unique you have to do something unique, or frame what you've done in a unique way, as Apple has become so good at doing. Thus a museum doesn't make a city artistic as museums have been done by nearly every major city.  Further, it's important to keep in mind that all cities have positive and negative aspects. The trick in marketing, both traditional and nontraditional, is to take people's positive feelings and expand on them, so they feel so deeply they can't resist your city’s lure.

Think for example, about Philadelphia, it has a reputation as a grungy gritty place. Yet oddly enough it's now the 7th happiest place for young professionals. In 2009 it was rated as the 20th, while in 2012 it was 14th (Smith, 2011 and 2013) (CareerBliss). This is a massive improvement in people's feelings. This may have happened, in part, because of a number of non-profits including Innovation Philadelphia (as well as my organization at the time (the Girard Coalition), universities, and companies have been engaged in many small branding campaigns. Putting together dozens of events targeted at young professionals, giving free concerts, networking parties, an increasing number of gallery openings, good restaurants and more. All these things may have helped to decrease loneliness which is one of the biggest sources of depression and sadness in the modern world. So Philadelphia's population is finally increasing, which is interesting because jobs haven't really been increasing nearly as much and wages have barely ticked up. This doesn't necessarily translate to real economic growth in the future, but if happiness is what Philadelphia is trying to achieve it’s succeeding in some areas, both naturally and through the concerted effort of many organizations there.

The Economics of the Formula for Happiness

This equation accurately predicted the happiness of over 18,000 people (during research). That's huge and potentially very important for economic development. As I've argued before, the purpose of economic development, indeed of any public program is to try to increase happiness. You can see the University College London's explanation for the formula  here.

In short this formula means that momentary happiness is based not just on how things are going, but whether they are going better than expected. Further, happiness is largely momentary, because things which made someone happy tend to fade fairly quickly once the moment has passed. 

Of course this formula is still only based on the ebb and flow of momentary happiness, it doesn't predict overall life satisfaction. There are many other traits involved in this, many of which are very subjective and cultural. THis, however, is an economic blog so I'm going to discuss the impact of the economy a.k.a the economy on happiness.

As the "Brookings Institute" reports Cross-National surveys indicate that wealthier countries tend to be happier than poorer countries to a limited extent. However, the primary indicator of happiness was an individuals income compared to other people within one's own country, that is, people tended to be happier based on how much money they were earning compared to the other people in their country. Remember that the above formula indicates that happiness is largely based on expectations.

This effect, however, isn't entirely comparative, as within developed economies such as the United States and Europe, the over all level income inequality tended to have very little impact on happiness, Income inequalities negative impact on happiness is primarily related to developing countries. I would postulate that this is in part because needs aren't being met among the poor in developing countries. Though a large part of this comes from the fact that in developed countries there is a perceived ability for people to move up the economic ladder. 

The most important thing to note from an economic development perspective, however, is that annual income, however, did have a direct impact over all on reported levels of happiness. You can read more about that research here.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is that economic improvement is correlated to greater life satisfaction, you can read the Pew Research study on this here.

This lends credence to LinChiat Chang and Robert M. Arkin's research which found that people turn to materialism to deal with uncertainty. While many would deride this behavior I would point out that cultural traits like this are important survival methods and we should be focused on how to harness them to make people happier, not on how to change people's culture.

In fact, culture must be considered in all attempts at improving people's lives, as the differences between countries and happiness levels are likely largely cultural. So while higher incomes increase happiness within a culture, other aspects of a persons culture have a much larger impact on their happiness. One of these, which is important to economic development is Uncertainty Avoidance. 

It's likely that in many cases uncertainty is one of the key causers of unhappiness, I.E. even if you have a great job, if you're uncertain whether you're going to be laid off or not, you'll potentially be more unhappy than someone with a worse job but knows they are secure.  

Uncertainty Avoidance is one of the big traits Cross-Cultural Psychologists use to determine the difference between two cultures, By way of comparison, Japan and have a high level of Uncertainty Avoidance. You can see a complete list of countries by level of UA here.

So what does all this mean?

It means that economies need to be structured in such a way as to allow people to be actually achieve something, to fulfill their dreams when ever possible, while helping reduce uncertainty (the likelihood that they'll loose their job, home, etc). Finally economic growth is incredibly important to a persons happiness within every country which has been studied.

Events and our economy

The above pictures are by Yuurisan’s. Check out their amazing blog for more great photos http://yuurisans.wordpress.com/

Selfies posted to social media have quickly become an important part of our social structure. This means that even with web retailers and big box stores certain types of events are likely to grow and anyone who’s been going to Renaissance Fairs, Comicons, or plain old street festivals lately knows that the number of people joining them at these events has indeed been rapidly increasing. Salt Lack City’s Comicon topped over 100,000 attendees,

Further the number of these events has also been growing, in large part because, many events have hit a wall because they don’t have room for all the people who are clamoring to attend.

Comicons aren’t the only events growing in importance. Things like Professional Gaming Leagues have begun exploding, with people paying $50 a ticket to watch teams compete in video games such as Starcraft.

So while people can watch Football and Basketball, or play video games from the comfort of their own homes they are willing to shell out a lot of money to go watch it live.

Its true that only a few jobs will be created directly by these events, there are however some additional changes which could help support the growth of jobs related to these events.

3D Printing - Traditionally indie comic book artists, among others, have had a limited ability to earn money off of subsidiary products. 3D printing is likely to change that. It's also likely to make it easier for certain crafts people to replicate their work which can increase the amount of money people can make on everything from candlesticks to jewelry, the sorts of things that sell the best at festivals.

Crowdfunding - People can use festivals to promote their crowdfunding campaign or crowdfunding to earn money for their festivals.

So from the Kansas City Maker Faire to the San Diego Comicon, it seems likely that companies and individuals will need to find ways to better capitalize on events or put together their own.

This in turn creates a lot of jobs for vendors and event planners, as well as marketing opportunities for many different types of companies.

United States is more competitive in manufacturing.

A new Boston Consulting Group study shows that the US is getting more affordable for manufacturing. (Read the study here)

This has been coming for a while, and is the result of improved productivity in the United States, and increased wages in other countries. What this means is that it should be fairly easy to make the United States even more of a manufacturing power house then it already is. To do this we need to

1-Increase worker productivity by improving people's ability to get educated in advanced manufacturing, and continuing to push new technologies that improve worker productivity.

2-Reduce regulatory costs on businesses by streamlining these so they don't have to spend as much time and money to meet them.

3-Realize that as long as we are one of the only countries which taxes businesses on money they earn over seas, they won't bring this money back to the United States to invest in new factories and research labs. Right now companies have nearly 2 trillion dollars overseas (Read Bloomberg's article on this). If they invested just 1/5 of that in this country it could potentially create over 1 million jobs directly. Further as each new manufacturing job creates more than 2 new service jobs millions more jobs are possible. 

4-Reassure companies that our laws will be stable and that its safe to invest in factories in the U.S.

IBM and the survival of Moore's law

Moore's law is really more of a projection that the the number of transistors computer circuits will double about every two years. So far this has held up fairly well, which has allowed for massive growth in computers, robotics, and even industries such as marketing and finance which rely heavily on computers now.

There have been many predictions that Moore's law will be ending soon, as the size of transistors shrinks to the smallest point they can on silicon. If this happens Silicon Valley could become like Detroit as the technology that has been driving their growth stops improving.

It's not just Silicon Valley, however, perhaps most of the economic growth we've seen is tied to computers in some way or another. Without their continued improvement the economy will slow worldwide.

This is why IBM's announcement that they are dedicating three billion dollars on researching and manufacturing new computer chips that are better than silicon is so important. A few of the technologies which they are looking at include;

Quantum Computing

The most basic piece of information that a typical computer understands is a bit. Much like a light that can be switched on or off, a bit can have only one of two values: “1” or “0.” Described as superposition, this special property of qubits enables quantum computers to weed through millions of solutions all at once, while desktop PCs would have to consider them one at a time.

IBM is a world leader in superconducting qubit-based quantum computing science and is a pioneer in the field of experimental and theoretical quantum information, fields that are still in the category of fundamental science - but one that, in the long term, may allow the solution of problems that are today either impossible or impractical to solve using conventional machines. The team recently demonstrated the first experimental realization of parity check with three superconducting qubits, an essential building block for one type of quantum computer.

Neurosynaptic Computing

Bringing together nanoscience, neuroscience, and supercomputing, IBM and university partners have developed an end-to-end ecosystem including a novel non-von Neumann architecture, a new programming language, as well as applications. This novel technology allows for computing systems that emulate the brain’s computing efficiency, size and power usage. IBM’s long-term goal is to build a neurosynaptic system with ten billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses, all while consuming only one kilowatt of power and occupying less than two liters of volume.

Silicon Photonics

IBM has been a pioneer in the area of CMOS integrated silicon photonics for over 12 years, a technology that integrates functions for optical communications on a silicon chip, and the IBM team has recently designed and fabricated the world’s first monolithic silicon photonics based transceiver with wavelength division multiplexing.  Such transceivers will use light to transmit data between different components in a computing system at high data rates, low cost, and in an energetically efficient manner.

Silicon nanophotonics takes advantage of pulses of light for communication rather than traditional copper wiring and provides a super highway for large volumes of data to move at rapid speeds between computer chips in servers, large datacenters, and supercomputers, thus alleviating the limitations of congested data traffic and high-cost traditional interconnects. 

Businesses are entering a new era of computing that requires systems to process and analyze, in real-time, huge volumes of information known as Big Data. Silicon nanophotonics technology provides answers to Big Data challenges by seamlessly connecting various parts of large systems, whether few centimeters or few kilometers apart from each other, and move terabytes of data via pulses of light through optical fibers. 

III-V technologies

IBM researchers have demonstrated the world’s highest transconductance on a self-aligned III-V channel metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors (FETs) device structure that is compatible with CMOS scaling. These materials and structural innovation are expected to pave path for technology scaling at 7nm and beyond.  With more than an order of magnitude higher electron mobility than silicon, integrating III-V materials into CMOS enables higher performance at lower power density, allowing for an extension to power/performance scaling to meet the demands of cloud computing and big data systems.

Carbon Nanotubes

IBM Researchers are working in the area of carbon nanotube (CNT) electronics and exploring whether CNTs can replace silicon beyond the 7 nm node.  As part of its activities for developing carbon nanotube based CMOS VLSI circuits, IBM recently demonstrated — for the first time in the world — 2-way CMOS NAND gates using 50 nm gate length carbon nanotube transistors.

IBM also has demonstrated the capability for purifying carbon nanotubes to 99.99 percent, the highest (verified) purities demonstrated to date, and transistors at 10 nm channel length that show no degradation due to scaling—this is unmatched by any other material system to date.

Carbon nanotubes are single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. The carbon nanotubes form the core of a transistor device that will work in a fashion similar to the current silicon transistor, but will be better performing. They could be used to replace the transistors in chips that power data-crunching servers, high performing computers and ultra fast smart phones. 

Carbon nanotube transistors can operate as excellent switches at molecular dimensions of less than ten nanometers – the equivalent to 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair and less than half the size of the leading silicon technology. Comprehensive modeling of the electronic circuits suggests that about a five to ten times improvement in performance compared to silicon circuits is possible. 

Graphene

Graphene is pure carbon in the form of a one atomic layer thick sheet.  It is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and it is also remarkably strong and flexible.  Electrons can move in graphene about ten times faster than in commonly used semiconductor materials such as silicon and silicon germanium. Its characteristics offer the possibility to build faster switching transistors than are possible with conventional semiconductors, particularly for applications in the handheld wireless communications business where it will be a more efficient switch than those currently used. 

Recently in 2013, IBM demonstrated the world’s first graphene based integrated circuit receiver front end for wireless communications. The circuit consisted of a 2-stage amplifier and a down converter operating at 4.3 GHz.