Economic HIstory ~ Longterm Global Dynamics...

The WEF together with Visual Capitalist share two charts visualizing long-term planet-wide economic history...

R.I.P. Jay W Forrester ~ Sociodynamics Pioneer...

Alas, RIP, Jay W Forrester. Through his panache, presence, and personal feedback (to me!) and through his inventing core memory & CNC machines, the Whirlwind real-time digital computer, Sage air defense network, Lincoln Labs, building up the MIT Sloan School, teaching Professors Ed Roberts, John Sterman, Donella Meadows, Jurgen Randers, etc, et al, founding the System Dynamics discipline, and providing essential inspiration to dozens of MIT alumcos -- i.e. his students were founders of Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), MITRE, 3Com, Pugh-Roberts, Patni Computer Systems (birth of Indian offshoring), Ventana, and many, many more -- plus inspirational role in creating SimCity, pioneering management flight simulators, e.g. creating the Beer Game, writing Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, World Dynamics and provoking LImits to Growth, C-ROADS simulators, etc, etc, Jay Forrester remains an awesome and iconoclastic inventor, a personal inspiration to me and thousands more, and one of MIT's most epic and innovative heroes. I'm so sad at losing him but so happy to have had him too...

CO2 Portrait ~ NASA Simulates Atmosphere...

I'm particularly interested in long-term, humanity-scale global dynamics. Remembering Jay Forrester's World Dynamics and economic modeling. Nice example here by NASA's Goddard Global Modeling and Assimilation Office...

Complexity Economics ~ Evolve, Iterate, Change

NYC Taxi ~ A Day In The Life of a Hackney

Kottke spots A day in the life of NYC taxis...

"This clever and well-done visualization shows where individual NYC taxis picked up and dropped off their fares over the course of a day."

Flood Simulations ~ Modeling Disaster Dynamics!

Steven Ward hosts the ingomar200 YouTube page where he posts great simulations of various historical flood and related disasters. These really help visualize historical and physical dynamics of major incidents. He's got many, but here's a few I particularly like: First, Pennsylvania's Johnstown Flood (1889)... France's Malpasset Dam Disaster (1959)... Alaska's Lituya Bay Tsunami (1959)... Historic breaching at Gibraltar and Med flood... Asteroid Eltanin hitting South Pacific... Finally, simulating Las Palmas again triggering megatsunami...

Living with Fire ~ USGS on SoCal Burn Dynamics

io9's Mika McKinnon spots USGS video Living with Fire...

"Last year, the United States Geological Survey produced an educational video on just why fires in Southern California are so different than elsewhere, and how they're using data to develop new strategies in fire prevention and fire science."

Also, FYI, Birago says check out this Drought Map...

Flight Plan ~ V Formations Bird Dynamics!

CSMonitor's Sudeshna Chowdhury shares Why do birds fly in V? highlighting research by Royal Veterinary College, University of London biologists Steven Portugal and James Usherwood on bird flight dynamics! Check out Nature video...

Innovation Hubs ~ MIT Urban Design Workshop

My MIT Media Lab CityScience colleagues Kent Larson and Ryan Chin (and team) are hosting a design workshop this Fall 2013 on Innovation Hubs looking at the greater Kendall Square area as a Living Lab for high-density, thriving urban neighborhood design.

"This workshop will explore new urban systems for high-density cities including systems for mobility, energy, food production, and live/work. The workshop will focus on the design of resilient, scalable, adaptable, and reconfigurable systems. This course will utilize CityScope, an urban simulation tool [...] to prototype the design of Compact Urban Cells [...] walkable neighborhoods with a diverse mix of live/work areas that utilize shared mobility systems, distributed renewable power generation, shared spaces, and integrated vertical urban farming. As a test case, the course will focus on the redesign of Kendall Square as a new sustainable model for developing hyper-dense urban environments in the U.S. and abroad. Students will initially study precedents for innovation hubs in other cities, and then they will build [CityScope urban models] to represent their design interventions and illustrate system-level affects."

Bold Songdo ~ BBC on Korea's Green Smart City

The BBC's Lucy Williamson reports in their Tomorrow's Cities series asking Just how smart is Songdo? the new city 40 km from Seoul...

"On the technological front, a brand new city offers the chance to build some futuristic hardware. Songdo has been designed with sensors to monitor temperature, energy use and traffic flow. These sensors can -- in theory -- alert you, personally, when your bus is due. Or let the local authority know about any problems. A lot of these innovations are designed with the environment in mind -- charging stations for electric cars, for example, or a water-recycling system that prevents clean drinking water being used to flush office toilets. The waste disposal system is also impressive -- or it would be if you could see it. Because there are no rubbish trucks trawling the streets or vast bins dotted around blocks of flats. Instead, all household waste is sucked directly from individual kitchens through a vast underground network of tunnels, to waste processing centres, where it's automatically sorted, deodorised and treated to be kinder to the environment."

I've been paying attention to the Songdo development for years now since hearing about it from the Gale International developers here in Boston. And it's exciting to see how many things they've gotten right, including the district waste scheme, close links with airport and some transit, and interwoven greenspace. But I fear they're missing some key dimensions of what make for vibrant innovation hubs, the subject of our MIT CityScience workshop this coming Fall 2013.

SF Transit Patterns ~ Schema's Timelapse Map

Limits to Growth ~ 40 Years of Doom Dynamics

40 years ago Dennis Meadows and colleagues built upon the World Dynamics model of MIT's Jay Forrester and published The Limit to Growth about computer model simulations of global dynamics to explore the macro-possibilities of humanity on earth and study the "Predicament of Mankind." Just a few weeks ago, the Volkswagen Foundation sponsored a workshop asking whether we are Already Beyond? -- 40 Years Limits to Growth. And the Smithsonian's Mark Strauss writes Looking Back on the Limits of Growth, asking...

"Forty years after the release of the groundbreaking study, were the concerns about overpopulation and the environment correct? Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s, The Limits to Growth."

Finally, Der Spiegel's Markus Becker interviews Meadows who says Humanity Is Still on the Way to Destroying Itself...

"...we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change. [...] The fact that the collapse hasn't occurred so far doesn't mean it won't take place in the future. There is no doubt that the world is changing, and we will have to go along with it. There are two ways to do that: One is, you see the necessity of change ahead of time and you make the change, and the second is that you don't and are finally forced to do it anyway. [...] the geological record clearly shows that the global temperature doesn't increase in a linear way. It jumps. If that happens, a collapse will occur. But it would be nothing new, of course. Societies rise and fall. They have been doing so for 300,000 years."

Climate & Conflict ~ MIT's Sterman on Soapbox...

Sloan Systems Professor John Sterman on Soapbox at MIT Museum!

Spillover Cities ~ Economist on Scale Dynamics

The Economist notes that America’s big cities are larger than Europe’s. That has important economic consequences...

"Differences in metropolitan populations may help explain gaps in productivity and incomes. Western Europe’s per-person GDP is 72% of America’s, on a purchasing-power-parity basis. A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s research arm, reckons that some three-quarters of this gap can be chalked up to Europe’s relatively diminutive cities. [...] Cities today have a productivity advantage for different reasons, to do with ideas rather than costs. When one firm in a city comes up with a new technique, product or design, nearby firms may quickly build on it or hire its creator. One firm’s innovation boosts its own productivity but also spills over to other businesses. Companies that prefer seclusion cut themselves off from these "knowledge spillovers."

Political Heatmap ~ US Red-vs-Blue 1920-2008!

Timothy Hurst spots Animated Time-Lapse Map of Red-Blue America 1920-2008 at Ecopolitology...

Limits to Growth ~ 40th Anniv @ Smithsonian...

Limits to Growth -- published in 1972, see here a 40 years retrospective discussion at the Smithsonian. First, Dennis Meadows... And Jørgen Randers... (And see here the rest of the series of speakers)

Death Spiral ~ Mace on How A Platform Dies...

Michael Mace on his Mobile Opportunity blog wrote about the Death Spiral, how a computing platform dies, anticipating a few years ago what has befallen RIM today...

"The early symptoms of decline in a computing platform were very subtle, and easy for a business executive to rationalize away. By the time the symptoms became obvious, it was usually too late to do anything about them. The symptoms to watch closely are small declines in two metrics: the rate of growth of sales, and gross profit per unit sold (gross margins)"

Read more and see it summed in a graphic...

Spot Pricing ~ SF's Dynamic Parking Meters...

Michael Cooper and Jo Craven McGinty write in the NYTimes of A Meter So Expensive, It Creates Parking Spots...

"San Francisco is trying to shorten the hunt with an ambitious experiment that aims to make sure that there is always at least one empty parking spot available on every block that has meters. The program, which uses new technology and the law of supply and demand, raises the price of parking on the city’s most crowded blocks and lowers it on its emptiest blocks."

Nice! Here's the initial coverage...

Financial Crises ~ Booms & Busts 1810-2010...

ChartPorn spotlights Financial Crises from 1810-2010!

"Top half of the chart maps financial crises in terms of GDP affected, while the bottom indicates number of sovereign defaults..."

Growth Dynamics ~ WSJ on Ghana & African Air...

Drew Hinshaw writes in the WSJournal, In an African Dynamo's Expansion, the Perils of Prosperity...

"In 2011, Ghana's economy is forecast to grow 13.5%, a clip that exceeds every other country in the world except Qatar, according to the International Monetary Fund. Big oil finds pumped growth beyond 2010's 7.7%. As growth stagnates in the U.S. and Europe, Ghana's robust multiparty democracy has turned its capital into a hub for companies chasing business -- on a continent that grew 5.5% this year, according to the IMF. [...] Ghana's growth has made the nation of 24 million Africa's newest middle-income country, joining Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. Nigeria will soon join them, economists forecast. [...] But Ghana's bottlenecks are curbing what economists say could be even faster growth, offering lessons for other African countries that may follow a similar path of development."

Hinshaw also writes West African Skies Beckon More Carriers...

"From Senegal to Sierra Leone, start-ups, decrepit local carriers and even international airlines are out to prove that jet travel can extend beyond deep-pocketed passengers to West Africa's flourishing middle-class and business travelers. [...] West Africa has some of the world's fastest-growing economies, including that of Nigeria, the continent's most populous nation. The International Monetary Fund projects that Ghana's economy will grow 13.5% this year. The International Civil Aviation Organization expects Africans to fly 8% more miles in 2012 and 8.3 % more in 2012, making the continent earth's fastest-growing for air travel behind Asia and the Middle East. And industry analysts say traffic here could expand even faster as competition heats up, pushing prices down. But the new airlines are flying into some of the world's most dysfunctional airspace."