I have always thought of HOK as a passport to opportunities and I have certainly been one of the most fortunate to somehow find my way into some really incredible places. My trip last week to the Meeting of the Minds conference in Boulder amazed me with the best of them.
YES….the conference was awesome. Each speaker more inspiring than the last…sharing their views with everything there is to know about transportation/technology/smart cities/sustainability/and then some. Here’s a link to a post covering the conference on the Sustainable Cities Collective blog and link to videos of the presentations.
But one of the best parts of the whole adventure was the work in preparation for the conference…and a …
Data.
Most of you had one of two things pop into your mind, the guy from Star Trek or Microsoft Excel.
While I’m not necessarily mocking either of those, neither are good examples of data that I’d want to party with. However, it’s these mind-numbing misinterpretations of what is potentially an exciting way to look at our society, the things we know and the things we create.
On the sustainability front, I’ve written about things like IBM’s ‘Smarter Planet’ campaign and how the notion of public policy and connected information can help us create the types of communities and societies that build better cities and infrastructure. I’ve also written about exciting things …
This is a little advertising that IBM does at the end of some of the sponsored TED talks, but it’s absolutely inspring on a number of different levels.
1. The Big Idea: I’ll start of with the quote in the beginning. “US traffic accounts for 45% of the worlds air pollution.” That in itself is staggering, but not surprising. The big idea behind IBM’s technology is that they have developed a way to charge (toll-booth free & convenient for the driver) a “congestion charge” for Stockholm, Sweden. This is to ensure that those who drive are paying for the convenience (and pollution) that they account for. It’s like sub-metering energy or water consumption. Once people realize that others aren’t …
If technology intimidates you, read no further. If you’ve embraced the idea that technology can and inevitably will drive processes at a global scale with higher degrees of precision, efficiency, and elegance than currently possible through collective human decision making alone, read on. IBM has launched its “Smart Planet” campaign just months after breaking the much anticipated Petaflop Barrier, the breaking of which is a huge milestone in computing. Translation? We now have before us the technological prowess to process information at speeds measured in quadrillions of mathematical calculations per second. The scale of this processing is realized at a magnitude capable …
