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U.S. Cities Don't Make the Intelligence Cut
coondoggie writes "For the second year running, no U.S. city has made the list of the world's top Intelligent Communities of 2007, as selected by global think tank Intelligent Community Forum. The ICF selects the Intelligent Community list based on how advanced the communities are in deploying broadband, building a knowledge-based workforce, combining government and private-sector "digital inclusion," fostering innovation and marketing economic development."
According to the Intelligent Community Forum's website, Cleveland, Ohio made the Top 7 list in 2006. Even so, I still wouldn't want to live there :p
http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/displaycommon. cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=62
Did I miss something? I was watching American Idol.
This is not my sandwich.
As based on Broadband deployment?
Instead of basing it on say, the intelligence of the community.
But, it was part of the Pacific Telecommunications Council, so I'm sure they have an agenda somewhere.
My twitter
Canada has two finalists. PRetty good eh?
The ICF met and announced this list as part of the 29th annual Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) conference
This is a political ploy by Telecoms to push governments into subsidizing broadband. It is trolling, just like "You are not intelligent if you don't use vi/java/rails/xml/etc." We've been -1trolled.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh, curses! Our synergystic engineerification of innovationist intelligent-making just can't keep up with the likes of Dundee, Scotland!
The Intelligent Community Forum is basically rating cities on how much they consume the services of the IT people who make up the forum. Think of it as marketing for the IT 'Guild.'
It has little to do with the actual overall quality of a community in anyway except the dollar amount of the IT salaries they pay out of tax money. Though, I suppose, slashdot would be the place for this sort of thing.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) is a nonprofit think tank that focuses on job creation and economic development in the broadband economy."
This is not an objective measure of how "intelligent" a community is, it's an objective measure of what broadband policies will make the global technocratic elite supporters of the institute the most money. And the "Digital Inclusiveness" blurb means "How can we get more money from taxpayers to line our pockets?"
But I'm sure they appreciate the free advertising. In fact, I would say that was worth $25,000 of free advertizing for them, which means that now Slashdot will have to register as a paid lobbyist. Oh wait, that bill was defeated.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
So IOW, if you don't fit their ideology and/or political agendae, you're not among the intelligent cities on Earth?
Not a very intelligent way to measure intelligence, is it?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How typical: you pick what criteria you think are important, define them as "intelligence", and then determine that everybody else is less intelligent than you are.
When it happens at a conference, it's just back-slapping. Scale it up and its racism and then genocide.
Whatever, guys. As long as you stop short of the genocide I really don't care what you think.
... but watching youtube makes you intelligent. Yup, broadband as an intelligence measure beats all those dumb ink blot tests.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I wasn't really surprised to see Tallinn, Estonia on the list. I went to Tallinn back in '97. Now, personally, I don't care for the friggin' cold places like that (Estonia is within swimming distance of Finland, if you happen to be a seal). Back in '97, and keep in mind, this was only 6 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Estonia was kicking our butts in cell phone technology. What is wrong with the U.S. that this little former Soviet republic in such a short time just started beating our pants off technologically. Granted, they got a lot of help from Finland (their languages are very similar and there's some history between the two). Good for them for improving their lot in life significantly. Too bad people in the U.S. aren't very concerned about improving their own lot in life. If they were, maybe they'd elect a president who was concerned with their lot in life as well.
That's nothing that a few nukes can't solve.
-Dave
It's sad to see the US fall so far behind in the category of meaningless buzzwords. I remember when we were the dynamic nexus of vocabulatory synergistics.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
before broadband was invented?
Causally related, but the topic was introduced by a troll, so I prefer to reintroduce it more seriously... The topic is the problems with public education in the States as a contributing factor to the decline of America.
Public education works fine in many countries--the ones that take the future seriously enough. Mostly that means funding the public education system with a better economic model than property taxes and bond-based borrowing. Educating your citizens is a great investment and those educated citizens become great assets for any civilization above hunting and gathering. Well, actually even the hunters and gatherers can benefit from knowledge of what to hunt and what not to gather, but they're too busy trying to stay alive to worry about public schools.
My own experiences are with the American and Japanese public education systems. Just to deal with the easy topic first, the Japanese education system is quite good, and the bulk of it is public. The main distortions are in the private senior high schools and the cram schools. However, before you start crying about the relatively minor imperfections (compared to the present state of American public education), you better remember the Japanese educational system was to a great degree patterned on American models, both in Meiji times and again after the war. (And yes, I know Japan didn't have a winner this year, either, but it's the data point I have. However, that mostly disproves the OT's (Original Troll's) point blaming public education.)
For the American system, my experience is much more complicated. At the low levels I was in extremely good public schools through high school--but in a district that was one of the richest in the country at the time. I think we were No.2 for the entire nation on a per/student basis. Just an accident that the entire large area had been zoned residential, and those residential property taxes were being collected, but it was mostly vacant lots. Over the years the houses got built, the students arrived, the per/student money dropped to an average level, and the public schools dropped too. It's not the case that money always makes a difference, but it certainly is a major influence, and many of my important school experiences would not have happened except that my schools had the money at that time. That point is reinforced by my experience at one of the richest public universities, which was an awful school. My other degree was from a smaller private university that I regard as vastly superior to the enormous state school. Money isn't enough to counteract a staunchly conservative educational philosophy dedicated to forcing the students into the smallest possible mental boxes.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
They don't pee there, anymore! They just stop peeing.
Where's the list of the world's dumbest cities? I'd like to move to one of them and use my moderate intelligence to take over.
Yes, because it's currently using your upper lip for toilet paper.
The moment you hear terms like "digital inclusion" - and Ottawa is listed as a "great city" by any measure (and Ottawa is my hometown and current residence, but Ottawa is a fetid shithole that most people escape from when they turn 18) - then you know the whole thing is a bullshit waste of money.
In all fairness, though, Waterloo deserves any kudos it gets, even from a source as questionable as this one. Waterloo is a great city.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
There's a lot more educational content on YouTube than you'll ever find on most American TV channels.
As a percentage, I would not be so sure - consider broadcast channels alone, you have PBS and basically, everything else.
Now think that for every YouTube video teaching latin there are probably about 10k videos of people taking hits to the groin.
Looking at what is popular vs. what is availiable on YouTube yields a very different conclusion than the one you come to. For those that wish it, YouTube is a great educational resource. But like any tool infused by the Power Of The Internet, it is also capible of being the ultimate BoobTube. It's basically TV amplified and magnified, and I'm not sure really all that much better or worse since it's even more a product of the viewers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which community can load and update MySpace pages the fastest.
Pass!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think you're ignoring the very large role that parents play in any student's academic performance. I went to school in one of the poorest school districts in the US and you still had plenty of kids going on to ivy league and comparable universities. By the same token my s.o. grew up in one of the richest school districts in the US and she knew plenty of people who dropped out of high school or didn't make it through college and even now plenty of her little sister's friends are completely under-achieving kids who have almost zero college/job prospects because they just don't give a damn.
Does going to a good/wealthy school help? Well yeah, of course, but the influence that parents can have far outshadows any other influence in a child's life (even if the parent exercises that influence by not doing a thing to educate their kids). I'd argue that the biggest difference between American and Japanese educational systems is the role that parents play in pushing their children to do well and even excell in what they do. It doesn't matter whether it's a public school or a private one, Japanese or American, rich or poor, if children's parents aren't involved and if they don't get their kids used to really working at getting a good education, everything else will go by the wayside.
Until we start making parents accountable for how their kids do in school no amount of finger pointing or creative financing is going to make a difference. That's one of the big problems I had with the whole "No Child Left Behind" system. It focuses solely on teachers/schools and how their students do on standardized tests. If a teacher can't make enough students pass they can loose their jobs, but nothing happens to a parent if they can't make their own children meet certain academic standards.
Personally, I wonder what would happen if instead of focusing on teachers, we focused on parents and made them at least partially accountable for their children. Did their child flunk an entire grade without the parent bringing the kid's problems to a tutor/teacher's attention during the course of the entire school year? Then they lose their tax deduction for that kid for that year. Is their underage kid convicted of some crime? Then they have to do some number of hours of community service in addition to whatever punishment their kid gets.
It's really sad how many people in this country make such a big deal about the importance of producing children without putting an equal emphasis on what parents do once they have the kids. Likewise, it's disturbing how much effort some parents put into indoctrinating their kids into a religion, social group, etc... without putting as much effort into educating them about basic reading/writing/arithmatic type stuff.
Estonia was more or less rebuilt from scratch by Nokia, Talinn is probably the most technically advanced city in Europe.
Here's a novel idea: the same content, and sometimes even better is available at your local library. Yet I don't see the number and quality of libraries mentioned in their measure of intelligence. People have been using their brains before YouTube too, you know.
;) Lots of, ahem, "educational" videos on _that_ kinda topic.
Language? I learned English from tapes and books, and then from a teacher. I got taught French by my grandma using Pif comics. You don't need a video to learn a new language, you just need to hear and read it. Even if (for whatever psychiatric reason) you're absolutely _only_ able to do it over the Internet, you don't absolutely need broadband for that: to learn to read you only need a freakin' ASCII file, and to hear it you need an MP3. Trust me, you can squeeze those even through an analog modem if you really want to, especially since you don't need to stream them in real time: you can download them in advance just as well.
Learn to play an instrument? How about getting one of the about a million books on the topic? Again, chances are your local library carries several. I know a ton of people who've learned to play the guitar without broadband.
Etc.
Plus, as the unused libraries prove, there's a heck of a difference between something being available and people actually using it. Just because a community has broadband, it doesn't mean automatically everyone starts using it to learn stuff. Except if by "learn" you mean, "my word, I didn't know a double anal penetration was even possible."
Now I'm not against broadband or anything, but measuring a community's intelligence by the available megabits per second is at best PR trolling (seeing as the "independent think tank" is actually just a lobby group to push for more subsidized broadband), and at worst genuine techo-utopian stupidity.
Even if we're to spend tax money to improve intelligence (a good idea, by all means), I'm still waiting for any study to show that broadband is the best return on investment. How about investing half that amount in improving the schools, for example? A good teacher can help more than just upgrading someone's internet connection. How about, political correctness and feel-good education be damned, someone actually make a class out of the nerdiest kids who actually want to learn? And I mean really learn stuff, not get some watered-down bullshit and "brain gym" pseudo-education.
Are kids that much more likely to learn foreign languages well on the Internet than from a teacher, for example? Really? Because so far I've seen people even forgetting whatever proper English they knew after a couple of years on MMOs. The English I could learn on, say, City of Heroes, is of the caliber of, "soz m8, g2g, got skewl 2moz". (Translation for those who aren't fluent in l33t: "sorry mate, got to go, got school tomorrow." Yeah, I know, it made me go cross-eyed trying to decode it too.) Genuine quote off one of the UK servers. No kidding. I swear to God, someone actually typed that abhomination.
There's a whole generation by now who's learned to write badly not even in the name of typing speed, but out of some idiotic notion that writing "skewl" instead of "school" is somehow cool, hip, elite, or whatever. And it's contagious. People who _are_ capable of writing proper English and typing fast enough, end up getting that idea too. I was shocked to discover that a middle-aged mid-level manager I know had started to type like that on a MMO. That's broadband intelligence for you.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.