Metro Voting ~ Patterns of American Electorate...

In Mapping How America's Metro Areas Voted, Richard Florida writes...

"The geography of the 2016 election is spiky."

Urban vs Rural ~ US Economy vs Electorate...

Interesting to compare economic weight vs US voting pattern...

"The 2016 election was a virtual tie, with Hillary Clinton narrowly winning the popular vote, while Donald Trump won just enough states for a majority in the Electoral College. But if elections were based on economic output instead of population, the 2016 election would have been a blowout for Clinton. That’s the takeaway from this graphic produced by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Brookings researchers looked at county-level election returns and compared it with data on economic output for those same counties. It found that the counties Clinton won accounted for 64 percent of the nation’s economic output, while Trump’s counties produced only 36 percent. The reason is simple: Clinton won almost every significant urban county in the US."

American Electomics ~ Trumpeteering Infographic

The Economist breaks down the 2016 US election demographics...

Gender Inequality ~ Global Gov't Leader Map...

The Economist's Daily Chart spotlights how Gender inequality goes right to the top...

"Around the world, women rarely get the top job. The World Economic Forum, a think-tank, has tallied data on women in power in 144 countries for the past 50 years. During that time period, just under two-fifths of the countries surveyed had a female head of state or government at some point for at least a year (excluding monarchs). In half of those countries, the total time served by female leaders falls short of five years, a common length of a single full term in office."

Fall 2016 @ MIT ~ Ventures, Places, Futures!

I'm co-teaching a very cool folio of MIT class offerings this Fall 2016 and hope you'll either consider joining us or spreading the word about particularly relevant offerings to great students and colleagues who you think might appreciate them! These cluster into three big categories: Transformational Ventures, Creative Places, and Emergent Futures. Details below & online...  

• Development Ventures ~ Thu 10a-12n E14-633 ~ 15.375/EC.731/MAS.665 ~ http://developmentventures.org ~ Towards the entrepreneurial deployment of emerging market innovations solving problems faced by at least a Billion people worldwide in developing countries and underserved communities. First class: Thu 9/8  
• Revolutionary Ventures ~ Thu 2-4p E15-341 ~ 9.455/15.128/20.454/MAS.883 ~ http://revolutionaryventures.org ~ Exploring personal entrepreneurial strategies and envisioning and building transformative ideas and organizations to initiate and/or accelerate bold engineering revolutions. Email reven@media.mit.edu ASAP if interested. First class: Thu 9/8  
• Future Commerce (H1) ~ Tue 1-2:30p E14-633 ~ MAS.s71/15.s73 ~ http://mitfuturecommerce.org ~ New Media meets Markets & Finance. First class: Tue 9/13 (Half Semester offering)  
• Future Health (H2) ~ Tue 1-2:30p E14-633 ~ MAS.s72/15.s74 ~ http://mitfuturehealth.org ~ New Media meets Medicine & Wellness. First class: Tue 11/1 (Second Half of semester)  
• Understanding MIT ~ Tue 4-6p 9-450A ~ 11.s941 ~ http://understandingmit.org ~ Special seminar on the challenges of designing and building research universities and crafting conditions for a supportive, vibrant, and entrepreneurial learning community. First class: Tue 9/13  
• Model Cities ~ Wed 2-5p E15-359 ~ MAS.552/4.557 ~ http://mitmodelcities.org ~ Simulating & Visualizing Entrepreneurial, Innovative, & Creative Urban Hotspots. First class: Wed 9/7  
• SciFab 2050 ~ Tue 7-9p E15-359 ~ MAS.s60 ~ http://scifab2050.org/ ~ An informal seminar using Science Fiction, extrapolation, simulation, and imagination to envision what our world might be like in 2050. Email jpbonsen@alum.mit.edu if interested. First session: Tue 9/13

Muzzled Mouthes ~ Free Speech Under Siege...

The Economist spotlights The muzzle grows tighter on the scourge of anti-liberty cultural, religious, and legal muzzling of free speech. Vile governments, religious wingnuts of all flavors, authoritarian or conservative movements -- all evil and spreading...

MIT $100K LAUNCH 2016 ~ Great Finalists 2nite!

The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition LAUNCH Contest Finals are tonight Wed 5/11/2016 with 8 student-team Finalists seeking $100,000 Goldberg Grand Prize!

MIT Media Ventures ~ Thurs 10a-12n Spring '16

Our MIT Media Ventures ~ Media Lab Entrepreneurship & Digital Innovations class surveys a broad landscape of emerging media technologies interwoven with live- and historic-cases of inter- and entrepreneurship-based on new media ideas, culminating in a term project. The core goal of this Action Lab offering is for students to gain increased understanding of how emergent media and digital innovations translate into commercial reality and transform society.

We survey case examples of both successful and failed businesses and generally grapple with the difficulties of deploying and diffusing products and as a means of exploring a range of business models and opportunities enabled by emerging Media Lab and related innovations. This year we will be especially emphasizing urban innovations, personal data rights, public health, financial service innovations, mobile transactions, and social media generally with special focus on social networks, quantified self and society, and "Big Data" analytics. Join us at first class Thursday morning 10a-12n February 4th, 2016 in Media Lab E14-633.

Creative Places ~ On Urban Hot Spots Spring '16

I'm co-teaching Creative Places class this Spring 2016 together with MIT Media Lab colleague Kent Larson and team, starting Wednesday, 3 February at 2pm, as part of our MIT Cities Initiative. We're particularly keen on understanding and enabling innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative vitality in cities. We seek better indices (or rankings or scores) and analyses especially of important but often intangible aspects of the city. Ultimately we aspire to deep understanding of how urban attractiveness can be best achieved through design, zoning, development, and more.  Join us at first class Wed afternoon 2pm February 4th, 2016 in Media Lab E14-633.