Book Review: The Colony

Title

The Colony

The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai

Author

John Tayman

Publication Information

Simon & Schuster: 2006

318 pages

Reason for Reading

I was thinking about doing a paper on the quarantining of people living with HIV/AIDS for a class last fall (which ended up changing to something completely different). While I was doing some background research on the topic, I happened upon some information related to a leper colony (aka Hansen's Disease) in Hawaii that was enforced for over 100 years ending in 1969. The story intrigued me and I started reading this book over the semester break last Christmas. I didn't finish it when the semester started, so I re-read it this summer.

Synopsis

The book details the entire history of the colony on the island of Moloka'i, located on the island between Oahu and Maui. Throughout this time, it details the key people involved in the formation and maintenance of the colony, as well as notable people living in the colony itself. The most famous of these appears to be Father Damien, who essentially became known worldwide as the healthy white man who ventured to live alongside the lepers to do God's work, for which he was eventually honored as a saint. He follows through the end of the colony's official status as a place of exile and through the early 2000's when a few remaining exiles still maintained residence on the island.

Review

I very much enjoyed the book. Writing the history of something like this could prove difficult to write in a manner that doesn't occasionally get bogged down in details, but I never found that to be the case. The author made it quite easy to keep track of the figures he decided to include in the history so the book is a relatively fast read.

Quotes

"For 103 years, beginning in 1866, the Hawaiian and then American governments forcibly removed more than eight thousand people to a remote and inaccessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and into one of the largest leper colonies in the world. The governments did so in the earnest belief that leprosy was rampantly contagious, that isolation was the only effective means of controlling the disease, and that every person it banished actually suffered from leprosy and was thus a hopeless case. On all three counts, they were wrong." (1)

"Hawaiians of the era had several descriptive phrases for leprosy, but perhaps the most apt was 'the sickness that is a crime.' " (8)

"Although Leviticus contains no explicit moral diagnosis, scholars have determined that priests likely viewed any skin disorder as a sign that someone had offended God, and had been punished with a sinful mark. In the context of the Bible, this blurring of boundaries between medical and ethical diagnoses had one critical consequence: almost all skin conditions became stigmatized." (97)

What is the proper course of action for past transgressions?

Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in Guatemala

I don't have a lot of time to write this up very formally, but I thought this was a noteworthy article that was forwarded to everybody in SPH by another student.

My question is what is a government to do 70 years after the fact? Obama has apologized for this to the Guatemalan government, but if I remember correctly (I read this a few days ago), there was also a question of possible reparations of some sort. Personally, I don't really see what good it would do. The impression I got was that there were unlikely to be any descendants of these people. In that case, the suffering inflicted can not be undone or assuaged. The horror some may experience now is unlikely to be any higher than you or I might experience reading about this. And with a Guatemalan government complicit in the act at the time, how are the United States any more guilty than they?

What are your thoughts?

Book Review: Polio: An American Story

Title
Polio: An American Story
(Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History)

Author
David M. Oshinsky
George Littlefield Professor of American History, Department of History, University of Texas

Publication Date
2005

Publication Information
Oxford University Press; 288 pages

Memories, Events, and Society: Not at the same level

Our minds: not prepared for today’s dialogue. Does it hurt our society?

Recently, Greg Miller from “Smithsonian.com” sat down and discussed how our brains make memories with Dr. Karim Nader from McGill University (neuroscientist). Nader talks about how memories can actually be changed each time we recall them, making accurate memories less likely with each recollection. Anecdotally, he says he remembers on 9/11 viewing on the television that night footage of the second plane hitting the second world trade center building. He later found out, footage of the incident did not become available until 9/12. But the traumatic event was played over-and-over on television and in his mind during discussion with friends and relatives that his brain actually re-wired to include that 9/12 footage into his 9/11 memories.

Now let’s apply this concept to something else. On June 15, 2010 President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office on live TV. His speech lasted a total of 17 minutes. However, the night and days following his 17 minute speech CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC spent numerous hours discussing what the President did and didn’t not say, what he actually did say actually meant, and what he didn’t say says about his ideology in dealing with big business and how he handles national crisis.

Going back to Dr. Nader and what we now know about memories, it is quite possible that millions of people watching the aforementioned shows will remember Obama saying are not saying something he actually did not or did say. They will most likely remember what commentators think his words meant then the actual words the President used.

This is our mind: this is our media culture in the 21st century.

Source:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html?c=y&page=1

Book Review: Better

Title

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Author

Atul Gawande

Publication Date

2007

Reason For Reading

I've heard good things about the author from a number of sources. Most recently, the professor of my Health Management and Policy class mentioned in class that he was reading the book (or possibly one of the other two books by this author) for the second time, and strongly recommended it. One other thing he mentioned was that an article Gawande wrote for the New Yorker on health care costs was one that made a strong impression on President Obama and recommended members of Congress to read it (cited below). As such, it was also a reading we did for the class.

Obama Goes Nuclear!

Here's the rundown on old arguments (WSJ - provided):

• Nuclear isn't safe. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident—in which a faulty cooling valve led to a meltdown without injuring anyone—occurred when computer technology had barely penetrated the U.S. industry. In the 1970s, each reactor was an island unto itself. Industry officials barely communicated. The valve that failed at Three Mile Island had failed nine times previously, yet nobody said a thing about it.

Today, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, first adopted in 1957 and amended several times since, each of America's 104 reactors is now on the hook for $100 million in damages for an accident at another reactor ($10 billion coverage in all). You can bet they talk to each other. Accidental "scrams" and safety outages have been reduced to nearly zero. Our entire fleet is up and running 90% of the time. That's why, even though nuclear constitutes only 11% of generating capacity, it provides 20% of electricity.

• Nuclear is too expensive. Building a 1,500-megawatt reactor will cost around $5 billion, which seems expensive until you compare it to everything else. The equivalent capacity in wind power would easily cost $4 billion because you have to build 4,000 windmills at $1 million apiece plus hundreds of miles of transmission lines and an almost equal capacity of natural gas generators to back them up when the wind doesn't blow.

Building zero-emissions coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide and bury it underground will probably cost more, but nobody really knows because it's never been done. Only natural gas is cheaper to build, but that's because 95% of the cost is in the fuel. (With nuclear it's only 26%.) Natural gas prices fluctuate. Would anyone care to predict what the price of natural gas will be in 25 years?

• A hijacked jet liner crashing into a reactor would cause a nuclear holocaust. Go to YouTube and search "plane crashing into wall." You'll see a video of an F-4 fighter jet hitting a concrete containment wall at 500 miles per hour. The plane simply disappears. The wall barely budges. Nuclear opponents argue that a jumbo jet would have a greater impact, but the laws of physics say it would be about the same. A jet is a hollow metal tube. Even at the speed of a bullet (700 mph) it could not penetrate a concrete containment wall.

• We haven't figured out what to do with the waste. Basically, there is no such thing as nuclear waste. The reason we have the controversy over the Yucca Mountain storage facility is because we gave up fuel reprocessing in the 1970s. Reprocessing reduces the volume of spent fuel—already remarkably small—by 97%. The French reprocess and store all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 70% of their electricity beneath the floor of one room in their La Hague plant.

• We can't reprocess because that will lead to nuclear proliferation. The conceit of the 1970s was that if we isolated plutonium in an American reprocessing plant, some foreign terrorist would steal it to make a bomb. Half a dozen countries have since built nuclear bombs, none of them with stolen American plutonium. North Korea built its own reactor. Iran has been enriching uranium. France, Japan and Russia all reprocess and no one has stolen their plutonium. Reprocessing American fuel has nothing to do with nuclear proliferation.

• The nuclear revival is being forced on America by the powerful nuclear industry. There is no American "nuclear industry." Westinghouse is now owned by Toshiba. Areva is French. GE partners with Hitachi but is running in last place. Only three of the 33 proposed American reactors are GE designs. The biggest new international competitor is South Korea, which just won a $20 billion contract to build four reactors in the United Arab Emirates. China is building four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, even though its design has not yet been approved by our Nuclear Regulatory Commission. When the first new reactors are built here, 70% of the parts will come from abroad.

So, is nuclear a viable option in America's (hopefully) green future or will the same country that had to change NMR to MRI have to find another alternative fuel?

Science News: Autism & Vaccines, Soda & Cancer

Two big science stories to address:

1) Last week The Lancet (impact factor 28.4; that’s big) retracted a controversial 1998 article linking MMR vaccinations to the onset of autism after almost 80% of the original authors wrote letters to the journal requesting a retraction.

2) Today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention there was a study involving 60,500 Chinese and they discovered a link between drinking as little as two (2) cans of soda a week and 80% increase in pancreatic cancer.

Let’s address both of these.

1) http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56008/title/Journal_retracts_flawed_study_linking_MMR_vaccine_and_autism


2) http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/current pg#447

Hands Up Heads Down!

Or hands up, heads up, and most importantly butts up!

"...a handful of epidemiological research groups around the world, and big names such as Ulf Ekelund of the epidemiology unit of the UK's Medical Research Council and James A. Levine of the US's Mayo Clinic, are trying to shift the debate about obesity. As well as talking about exercise, they want to discuss sitting." (1)

These large studies tell us something intuitively obvious: a job which requires you to constantly be moving (or at least standing) is better for your health presupposing your baseline is permitting, i.e. no arthritis, no orthostatic hypotension, no joint disorders, etc.

How many hours do you stand during the day?

According to the same article where the quotation was found, Donald Rumsfeld is quoted to say he stands for 8-10 hours a day but enemy combatants are only required to stand for 4 hours at a time as a measure of their incarceration in our prisons.

Perhaps the fitness of a nation should be assessed by the "flabbiness" of its citizens asses?

1) Stand up to the insidious dangers of sitting down

By Simon Kuper, in the Financial Times. Accessed at ft.com

Published: January 23 2010 02:00 | Last updated: January 23 2010 02:00

Tuesday Morning Quarterback - Who is this guy, and why does he write for ESPN?

I occasionally read this column when the headline catches my attention, and numerous times the author has brought up good points, only to have them be quite short and easy for people to skip over.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/100105&sportCat=nfl

Today he discusses two issues that I think are worthy of discussion, under the following headings:

Do Coaches Need To Be Coached?

Newspapers -- To Survive, Ignite Corporate Controversies That Require Image Advertising

I think the former applies to the discussion we had previously on the violence of sport in America, specifically in regards to Jarrod's comment that football in its current form is likely due to change in the near future, and this may be a big part of it. Considering the discussion on concussions, I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more attention than it has. I think his section on this should've been enlarged to an entire column and put on the front page.

The latter is an issue I hadn't fully considered. He's mostly just saying that newspapers have benefitted from controversial issues over the last year (mostly health care reform). But how much of a role do they play in the formation of these controversies?

Finally, to get back to the title of the post, I just looked the author up on Wikipedia, and he's actually the editor of the New Republic, and writes frequently on space and environmental topics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_Easterbrook

Book Review: Asleep

Title
Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries

Author
Molly Caldwell Crosby

Date of Publication
March, 2010

Reason for reading
Micki got an advance copy from the book store she works part-time at because she thought I'd be interested in it, and it did look interesting.

This is your brain (egg), this is your brain on...(broken egg sizzling)…television?

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (1) reported that children and young adults (8-18 yrs) spend an average of 44.5 hours in front of a television screen, computer screen, media device (e.g., IPOD), or cell phone. Basically, this is their job plus some overtime. Is this the new addiction of the 21st century, or just a changing of the times where technologies for work and play merge?

Source:
1: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/Executive-Summary-Generation-M-Media-in-the-Lives-of-8-18-Year-olds.pdf

Endocrine Disruptors and Public Health, NY Times Article

A lot of stuff we've been saying all along.

"Likewise, asthma rates have tripled over the last 25 years, Dr. Landrigan said. Childhood leukemia is increasing by 1 percent per year. Obesity has surged. One factor may be lifestyle changes — like less physical exercise and more stress and fast food — but some chemicals may also play a role.

Take breast cancer. One puzzle has been that most women living in Asia have low rates of breast cancer, but ethnic Asian women born and raised in the United States don’t enjoy that benefit. At the symposium, Dr. Alisan Goldfarb, a surgeon specializing in breast cancer, pointed to a chart showing breast cancer rates by ethnicity.

“If an Asian woman moves to New York, her daughters will be in this column,” she said, pointing to “whites.” “It is something to do with the environment.”"

Kristof, Nicholas. Cancer From the Kitchen? A New York Times Article accessed on their website December 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=2

Research and Business Report for University of Minnesota

This is a fairly important piece tying several important ideas together. Recall that Minneapolis was not identified by Richard Florida as part of its own economic center (it's instead part of the Chi-Pitts megaregion). I will highlight several important points:

Thomas Lee Star Tribune:

1) Judging from the university’s recent track record of converting its vast reservoir of research into cash, the U faces an uphill climb. The school that’s known for inventing the pacemaker, the heart valve and one of the Web’s first Internet browsers is desperate for a hit.

At a time when the state’s economy is slowing and its medical device sector is maturing, the U’s long commercialization slump has attracted the urgent attention of lawmakers, venture capitalists and others concerned about where Minnesota’s next Medtronic or St. Jude will come from.

2) According to the U’s own business development people (see link to Powerpoint presentation at bottom http://www.cvm.umn.edu/img/assets/8965/Doug%20Johnson-Industry%20Academic%20Partnership.pdf), the 20-year success record of the U’s technology company spin-offs is only half the university average nationally — and less than one-fourth the success record of the nation’s premier schools. What’s more, in one recent year (2004), for example, the U of MN spun off only one company compared to 14 at the University of Michigan and 16 at the University of Illinois [Do you believe there is a correlation to this data and the fact that Michigan's business and law schools are ranked so highly?]. Why I am focusing here on spinoffs? Well, because, according the U’s own business development people, creating university spinoffs is “much more profitable than licensing (revenues)” to the school.



The University is a top 10 University (graduate) because of its link with the automobile industry in post-ww2 America. With America's main manufacturing base in 2009 being biotechnology and IT, if Minneapolis misses the opportunity it has with all of the surrounding companies, then it really deserves to be a middle-tier University forever.

Points to argue, America itself lacks the drive to be a manufacturing economy in any sector (this may very well be true) and so any effort on Minnesota's part is somewhat moot. Thoughts?


1) Thickens, Graeme. The Latest on U of M Technological Innovation and Commercialization.
An Article from minnov8 online magazine. Written Saturday October 18, 2009 and Accessed December 2, 2009. http://minnov8.com/2008/04/19/the-latest-on-u-of-m-technology-innovation-and-commercialization/

2) Stevens, Randall. See the Richard Florida Article.

10.78 G-Force Units

We have some wide receiver named Decker who was impacted (on a well-timed attack) by a Cal Safety.

See video here (00:03:39 in time length):
http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2009/UR_CONTENT_148395.html

"At one point it was as if Decker weighed 2300 lbs" (1)

We really shouldn't need MRI-imaging of these players' brains and spinal cords to know that serious damage incurs should we? Weigh this cost to the individual against the societal need for violence and destruction; the discussion becomes much more complicated.

1) Morrison, Deanne. "Gee' whiz, Dan Dahlberg University of Minnesota Physics Professor calculates the G-Forces in a Football Collision. UMNews.

DMCA and WIPO

Laws, international and then federal, which attack me personally!

WIPO: World Intellectual Property Organization
In 1967, 16 member nations of the United Nations met to discuss the protection of laws in place for intellectual property (when did Darpa first go online? The implication here being that the internet would test the law in ways it had never been tested regarding intellectual property)(1). Of course the United States does not really take this seriously for almost 30 years when they give us the enormously uncreatively titled Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA, in 1996 (signed by Clinton 1998):

"It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of on-line services for copyright infringement by their users" (2)

So, how do I assimilate this information? Time to dl everything I think I'll need for the next 10 years. And it's interesting that the United Nations knew what was happening in 1967. That seems very prescient.

1) World Intellectual Property Organization. A wikipedia article accessed November 29, 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Organization

2) Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A wikipedia article accessed on November 29, 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

3) On Piracy and the Future of the Media. A documentary from topdocumentaryfilms.com. Watched November 30, 2009. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/on-piracy/

No Fat Alumni!

Lincoln University (never heard of it) in Pennsylvania is requiring students with a BMI over 30 (and therefore clinically obese) to take an "exercise" course in order to graduate. (1) Let's see if this catches on, my guess is that it will not. Is it right to require this of students? Should it not be a choice (that is, to be fat)? This is going to be a major debate in healthcare in the next 20-30 years (Kessler's End of Overeating once again comes to mind).



1. Norris, Michele (host). Pa. University Targets Overweight Students, a segment on All Things Considered. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120784381&ft=1&f=2. Accessed November 25, 2009.

Pollution and City Dwelling

New study compares 'walkability' in Vancouver neighborhoods with local levels of air pollution
A study done for Vancouver Metro (in anticipation of the 2010 Olympics) examined urban life and pollution and health sequelae resulting therefrom (1).

""There is urban planning now that focuses on walkability and exercise-friendliness," Marshall says. But while that idea is on planners' minds, "the connection to air pollution isn't as much." (2)

This forces me to question what my own community's pollution index is. I have a friend who works for St. Paul City Planning; I'll ask him next time I see him.

1. "Healthy Neighborhoods: Walkability and Pollution" Environment and Health Perspectives Journal. Volume 117, Number 11, November 2009. Accessed November 11, 2009.

2. Walking and Clean Air. UMN news. http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2009/UR_CONTENT_146640.html. Accessed November 11, 2009.

Open Source Voting

Gregory Miller and John Sebes are making a case for something called 'open source voting'.

“Currently two vendors impact 80 percent of the vote” nationwide, Miller said, referring to Premier/Diebold and Election Systems & Software, which recently merged in a sale. But if all the states that have expressed interest in adopting the open source system follow through with implementing it, about 62 percent of the nation’s electorate would be voting on transparent, fully auditable machines he said." (1)

Apparently these companies make it very difficult for us to have standardization of practice (for reasons which are not obvious, we can extract and dissect in the discussion). Miller purports, "If they simply sold the machines to all the precincts, they would have three million sales and that would be the end of their business." So what do we see instead? Machines which frequently and according to Miller, malfunction, planned obsolence, long-term Draconian-termed contracts and continual "updates".

1)Zetter, Kim, "Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released" Accessed November 4, 2009, -http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/-published in Wired online magazine October 23, 2009

James Lovelock - he stole my idea!!

It's not really my idea, but I had come to this conclusion maybe 1-2 years ago on my own. He calls what I am talking about the Gaia Hypothesis (1). He uses empathy as his primary hypothesizing system, again something I've been doing now for a while and I wrote an essay on the matter which is in the process of publication. Empathy here has a different connotation than you might be thinking. It is almost synonymous with imagination. Empathy could mean that you are pretending to be an influenza virus in a respiratory droplet and are watching as the host sneezes you out and you land on a different host's shoulder. It could also mean, as is the case with the Gaia, that you are the Earth and operating like a cell or machine, have various functions of homeostasis (among which is humans but other things are included). So empathy here is imagination, not pretending to be someone else as it is normally utilized. This is interesting to think about. Empathy clearly has survival advantage, but it can be used in these other ways which give rise to entire branches of science. Essentially though, empathy is best suited for what it evolved to do, predict the actions of other individuals. How useful could it possibly be when applied to what appears to be completely different situations? And is empathy the seed of imagination/creativity? I'll see what some of my neurology and neuroscience books say, but from what I remember of them, this question is not addressed.



1) Lovelock, J.E. (1965). "A physical basis for life detection experiments". Nature 207 (7): 568–570. doi:10.1038/207568a0

2) http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/03/midmorning1/

Book Review: Who's Your City

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

Author
Richard Florida

Date of Publication
2007

Reason for reading
My roommate had Florida's 2002 book in his favorite books (on Facebook). I read the background of the author and then read the book at the bookstore and have now ordered it on amazon.

Genre and/or Themes
Environment and psychology, society (public vs private collaboration), systems and networks

Author Background
Richard Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto and does research social theory and economies. He has a PhD. from Columbia and worked at the George Mason University School of Public Policy and at Carnegie Mellon's I-school (information school). He seems like a decent person but it's hard to say - his temperament is even (from what I've read of how he responds to his criticism) but again my data here is too limited to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Synopsis
This is the best book I've ever read on networks (and the only one outside of my business classes). The last and greatest utility of man that has not been replaced by computers is innovation and creativity. Our economies are now reflecting this but not in a homogenous fashion. Certain parts of the country (and world) "have more spikes" according to Florida. The creative output is higher in places you may have already guessed: San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburg/Chicago beltway etc. Florida believes (and has large data to support) the thesis that creativity is the valued commodity and certain regions are better than others for those who want to exploit this.

Review
At the level of the idea, this is not entirely new. It synthesizes what we already had intuited and presents the information in a way that is more scientific but I'd argue quasi-scientific (which doesn't normally bother me but some of his assumptions appear to be false). The book is broken into four parts. Why Place Matters is the first section detailing Florida's "mega-regions". I would like to direct you to this article by Florida: http://www.bnet.com/2403-13070_23-193140.html which gives the data on the mega-regions. Are you wondering if Minneapolis is one of the regions? It does not make his top 10. A megaregion must meet three key criteria. First, it must be a contiguous, lighted area with more than one major city center. Second, it must have a population of 5 million or more. Finally, it must produce more than $100 billion in goods and services. By that definition, there are some 40 megaregions in the world.
Historical Context: David Ricardo and Adam Smith analogy - these mega regions of 2009 would equal Ricardo's "nation-state." Ricardo and Smith both seem to borrow this term for more classical thought. If we recall, Socrates describes nation-state in The Republic. I'd postulate every civilization has had its version of a nation-state. See the wikipedia article for more information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state) Also, these ideas have been in science fiction. Futuristic concepts of what cities actually can become (think Judge Dread sp).

I remember in college looking at this picture:
http://members.wolfram.com/billw/images/earth_lights.jpg

This appears to be the impetus for Florida and his research team. "The use of light footprints to define megaregions produces a precise and complex boundary to each region." He and colleauges then combine this and cross-analyze with other metrics such as traffic density and GDP by region. He goes onto to say that Thomas Friedman was wrong about the world becoming flat (flat here means that technology basically connects us all and gives everyone equal opportunities for financial success). Minneapolis falls into the Chi-Pitts megaregion. This is very interesting because about 2 weeks ago I remember listening to an MPR piece on creating a high-speed railway between Minneapolis and Chicago and then I found this just now: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/richard_florida/2009/05/mega-regions_and_high-speed_rail.php

The highspeed railway does not look to be built anytime soon (in short, too much opposition from existing mass transit authorities and employees eg bus, plane).

Section 2 deals with how the individual will respond to this (assuming part one is true). There will be greater opportunities to the person who can not just move to the economic megaregions but remains mobile in mindset. Those who are rooted to one area will find more economic hardship basically.

In Section 3 Florida explains the results by linking the dominant forms of employment in the areas with the personality traits: manufacturing regions require people who are agreeable (follow rules) and conscientious (work with dangerous machinery), openness comes from areas with high immigrant populations, and extroversion from areas with management headquarters and sales related jobs. Florida finds that his Gay and Bohemian Index, which connected gay and artistic communities to high growth and wealth generation areas, is actually a proxy for regions with large concentrations of the openness personality trait.

Florida is taking a lot of liberties in this part of the book but making the argument that culture of a city contributes to its economic success is hard to make with pure data alone. Part of it is going to have to be subjective and I'm willing to buy this idea. But, referring to psychological profiling, I'd simply say open-mindedness in culture begets open-mindedness is the economy of ideas (and ultimately financial power).

Section 4 is about how you personally respond to this information. I'll simply cut and paste from wikipedia (as their treatment is as good as mine or better since I don't know how to make tables in the blog-composer):

The final part of the book, Where We Live Now, suggests that the average life has three big moves: when leaving a parent's home, when starting a family, and when retiring (or when children move out). When youth leave their home (or when they leave college), those who can move away, choose to locate in areas that offer attractive job markets, cultural or recreational amenities, and rank high in quality of life factors. When they get married or have children, people are choosing areas that are perceived as safe and family-friendly. Florida suggests using a Trick-or-Treater Index, do parent feel safe allowing their children to go door-to-door on Halloween; or Catherine Austin Fitts's Popsicle Index, how far are parents willing to allow their children to walk to buy a treat. Once retired, or when kids leave home, the parents tend to gravitate towards similar areas as young people, but in quieter neighborhoods. They desire opportunities for hobbies or a second career and proximity to grandchildren. The final chapter lists five factors to consider before choosing a location to reside followed by a 10 step plan to help people choose. The five factors to consider are (1) short and long term career goals (2) importance of being physically close to family and friends (3) desirable lifestyle options (e.g. access to beaches, water bodies, mountains, etc.) (4) locating close to similar personality types, and (5) current life stage. The ten step plan is outlined below:

Florida's ten-step plan to help narrow the field and make a decision on where to live

	Description of step	Notes
1	Get your priorities straight	Write down preferences, including the grand and trivial.
2	Generate a short-list	The previous step should rule out many locations and identify suitable broad regions.1
3	Do your homework	Collect information on each potential location by doing research, such as reading local newspapers or asking questions of local residents.2 considering leadership or direction of officials, social values of people or organizations, and aesthetics of the place.
4	What do they offer?	Assess and rank the potential locations by local economic conditions, especially with respect to jobs, professional development, and networking opportunities.
5	Getting the basics right	Assess and rank the potential locations by educational facilities, safety, health care, housing, transportation and other similar services.
6	Does the place get it?	Assess the potential locations by the initiatives that political and community leaders have been taking
7	Values check	Assess the potential locations by the predominant social values displayed by residents and organization, especially in attitudes towards tolerance, trust, and self-expression.
8	Come on city, light my fire	Assess and rank the potential locations by recreational, cultural and aesthetic interests.
9	Tally it up	From these rankings, weigh the pros and cons of the short-listed places and decide which place fits best.
10	Go there	Before committing, visit the decided upon location first. Choose the location that meets expectations upon a visit.

Problems with the logic:

Richard throws into the Creative Class almost everybody and groups them in two categories: the Super Creative Core and the "creative professionals". These two groups include: scientists, professors, poets, novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, architects, non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, researchers, analysts, programmers, engineers, filmmakers, financial services, legal and health care professionals, business management and the list goes on.

I of coure do not think (actually I KNOW) that health care professionals are not in his creative class. Physician-scientists are, but just barely. And the argument for financial services needs to be stronger. Of course, whoever controls the capital controls the people (labor supply), but the average financial service person is doing nothing creative; he's just making money. The Federal Reserve and central banks however, have a lot of control (arguably the most). Politicians you note, are left out. This is very interesting and leads me to my addition to this book.

If you can recall Sim City, then this will make perfect sense, if not then it won't. Politicians actually are not like the nerve-center deciders that they should be. They seem more to play games where they protect themselves first and worry about resources/people second. Keep in mind, no formal training is required to be a mayor but he still gets to handle the resources. I am forced to ask the question of whether this kind of governance will work in the future. If the society is truly democratic, then if it's possible I believe adults will have to live three lives: the life of their specialization and job (the ant function), their family life (especially if they decide to have kids), and their societal job (sim city function). As has been discussed here already, we do not seem to have democracy. The assumption for this model changes to take into account the kind of democracy we do have and we find that while the rest of the society is evolving and adapting to technology, politics is not. I'd like a focus of our discussion to be whether this is dangerous and incompatible with the current society.

Quotes
I'd simply say to look at the images I've provided and the additional reading (figures and tables sections). This is better than any quote I could give you to aid your memory.

Additional Reading:

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/userfiles/prosperity/File/Rise.of.%20the.Mega-Regions.w.cover.pdf

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/earth_lights_lrg.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.maximizingprogress.org/2008_01_01_archive.html&usg=__DqUg-3lKlzNkjb2fPMmY9ugjgfg=&h=1200&w=2400&sz=535&hl=en&start=22&sig2=TNzrH1rLKUjx1hRzKxYSJg&um=1&tbnid=o6sBlhky9YpPhM:&tbnh=75&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dearth%2Blight%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26start%3D20%26um%3D1&ei=tk7TSt3qFqKyNNKPgZUD