Here is a newer version of a video that has been doing its rounds for a couple of years.
All the trivia aside, this video is about investing in an education system that is quickly becoming obsolete.
|
|
|||
|
Courtesy New York Public Library @ Flickr Commons Yes. Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Circa 1936. Pick any little town or village you’ve visited in the past and try to imagine what it will be in 50 years. What are the right attributes that would make it burst with a live of its own and start playing a role in the global landscape? Because I spend a lot of my day working around all things travel, that knowledge somehow defines a general theme for many of my posts. Even on my twitter account (@globalculture) I often find it easier to engage in casual conversation whenever the topic is travel. People lighten up when talking about travel. So when @jenandtheart made a comment about how the Global Culture blog was rising above the usual lightness with which most people talk about travel and culture, he really got me thinking. Long time ago I diagnosed myself with the “meaningful conversation disorder” by which I usually feel inadequate unless a conversation can transcend the mundane. And it seems this blog suffers that same fate. If I have been talking about travel a little bit too much and it seemed out of place amid the more profound earlier debate, here is a spin that should bring the tone of the blog back to its usual depth: If you have been planning on reducing your travel budget because the current economy makes you cautious, start packing. You may be travelling sooner than you’d expect. First some context: in smaller houses, better [...] Courtesy milachich @ Flickr Montenegro continues to experience important growth in its tourism industry. Once a small fishing village on a ridge by the sea shore which experienced an unbelievable transformation, it became during the seventies and eighties one of the Montenegro’s most famous tourist centers for the high paying clientèle’s.Sophia Loren, one of the most frequent visitors, bewitched by its beauty like everyone else, had once wanted to build a villa on a nearby deserted cliff. Then Sylvester Stallone and numerous other famous actors, artists, kings and princes from all over the world used to visit this magic place. Sveti Stefan is the place with the best pedigree in Montenegro, and fortunately is still well-preserved and one of the most attractive Montenegrin tourist destinations. Given the current economic trends in the travel industry, it is expected prices will drop in many fronts. From the analysis of the recent Competitiveness 2009 report we can even derive that some regions will have to try much harder to compensate for factors such as dependency from long-haul passengers. In an effort to understand some of the key factors in the current hotel industry, I created a data set with the top 5% most expensive hotels and mapped their locations to determine which regions had the highest density of “exclusive” hotels. As it was to be expected the usual suspects are at the top of the list: London, Tokyo, New York City, Paris, Rome. The rest of the list has a good mix of modern, beach and historic cities: Venice, Miami, Los Angeles, Milan, Moscow, Florence, Cape Town, Osaka, Morocco, Maui, Cancun, Washington, Bali, Madrid. London has over 120 exclusive hotels while Madrid counted 20. Beyond that these exclusive hotels are scattered around the world. These images provide a general view of where in the world they are: While calculating these “exclusivity hubs” I came across some other interesting facts: [...] As part of The Universe in ‘09, SEED Magazine includes a number of self-explanatory visualizations. One that got my attention is called “Connecting Distant Dots” which represents a number of global processes and the way they reinforce or inhibit each other. Right at the center of the chart: Population Growth. Interestingly enough, “Rethinking Urban Growth” is one of the few processes that acts as positive influencer in a world that seems doomed to end in food riots, although I find it hard to believe that this represents the full picture. At the very least there is one very important process missing from this picture: immigration. Although only for the US, here is the Immigration Explorer, an interactive graphic of how different foreign-born groups have settled in the US over the last century. Only a few days since posting digital breadcrumb have been necessary to come across an interesting collection of projects that have been running for the last couple of years with the objective of visualizing/analysing various data sets that one way or another reveal activity in urban centres: Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content: a paper published in IEEE’s Pervasive Computing exploring methods to uncover tourist movement using mobile networks data and geotagged photos. I have to say that this paper is particularly interesting given my current focus on tourism through PlanetEye |
 Global Culture Blog by Juan Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. |
||
|
Copyright © 2013 Global Culture - All Rights Reserved |
|||