Category: Science & Technology
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Why Do People Visit Spain, Not Virginia, to See Smart Cities in Action?
by James A. Bacon Spain’s economy is a wreck, or so we surmise from the dismal drum beat of news about the European Union. The country is in recession, unemployment is nearly 27% and central government staggers from crisis to crisis. Yet, somehow, Spanish cities manage to stay on the forefront of harnessing technology to…
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Can Henrico Hitch Its Economic Wagon to Washington?
Speaking of economic development (see previous post), give Henrico County credit for thinking differently. The Henrico County Economic Development Authority is marketing the county as an alternative, low-cost location for companies in the Washington region. I’m not sure the EDA has formulated a winning sales pitch yet, but as long as it keeps tinkering with…
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CCAM — the Right Kind of Economic Development
William Fulton, mayor of Ventura, Calif., and a columnist for Governing magazine, has singled out the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM) for praise — for all the right reasons. Virginians should pay heed: While CCAM is highly regarded within narrow circles in the Old Dominion, it doesn’t get the attention it deserves, nor has…
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Better Government through Better Metrics
by James A. Bacon Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones wants to tackle the city’s entrenched poverty, and he wants to do it by investing smartly in community revitalization efforts. The big question is, what works? Supporting job training might seem a logical way for the city to lift people out of poverty. But what good is …
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Map of the Day: Venture Capital Per Capita
Despite the presence of a vibrant high-tech community in Northern Virginia, the Old Dominion is a relative backwater in the venture capital world. But there is one exception, albeit a small one — Charlottesville. According to data published by economic geographer Richard Florida in the Atlantic Cities blog, when measured on a venture deals per…
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Time to Consider New Downtown Parking Models in VA
In May Richmond City Council voted to increase the hourly rate for street parking downtown from $.50 to $.75 per hour with the goals of netting an additional $250,000 yearly in revenue and helping downtown businesses by increasing the turnover in parking spaces. By way of market research, according to the Times-Dispatch, city officials had…
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Coal, Power Lines and Historic Jamestown
By Peter Galuszka Captain John Smith would be shaking in his boots. Now the National Trust for Historic Preservation agrees. Dominion Virginia Power’s plan to erect a $155 million, 550-kilovolt power line across the James River just east of the Colonial Jamestown settlement would “compromise scenic integrity of historic cultural areas surrounding the river.” The…
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The Good and Bad of Exporting LNG
By Peter Galuszka Riding a chunky, balloon-tire bicycle may seem awkward enough, but imagine pedaling in a six-feet-wide concrete tunnel for one mile on the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It’s amazing what we Bacon’s Rebellion bloggers do to keep you readers informed, but it’s all in a day’s work — just like…
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Gearing up for the Smart Car/Road Revolution
by James A. Bacon The automobile industry is undergoing the greatest technological revolution since… well, probably since the invention of the automobile. Cars are getting “smarter,” as in embedded with more powerful sensors and artificial intelligence, and they are getting more connected — with other cars and with roads, which are getting smarter as well.…
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Let’s Jump on the Peer-to-Peer Bandwagon
Vested interests in cities around the country are mobilizing to thwart a new generation of peer-to-peer technologies threatening to disrupt the lodging and transportation industries. I have documented the difficulties of Uber, the e-hailing service (tap on your smart phone app and an Uber limo comes to pick you up), in Washington, D.C., where it…
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“You Want Maggots With That, Hon?”
By Peter Galuszka Free trade capitalists may cheer the proposed $4.7 billion takeover of Virginia icon Smithfield Foods by a Chinese firm, but there is plenty to give pause and the blowback is creating some strange bedfellows. The major issues are whether one should want Chinese-style management in charge of American corporations given their record…
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Crunch, Rumble, Shake. Georgia Tech Goes MOOC.
The tectonic plates of higher education continue to shift and slide. The latest rumble you heard emanated from Atlanta, where the Georgia Institute of Technology recently announced that it would offer an online master’s degree in computer science at less than one-third the cost per credit hour. Georgia Tech is partnering with Udacity, a company…
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Joining the Waze Craze
by James A. Bacon I had never heard of Waze until I read this morning that the Israeli mobile-map company was coveted by the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook and potentially worth more than $1 billion. But as soon as I visited the Waze website, I realized it was my dream come true —…
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The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Ken Cuccinelli just can’t keep away from the bizarre, but perhaps that’s what makes him what he is. He stages a convention instead of a primary to neuter Bill Bolling. And since a convention is smaller, it draws more GOP hard-righters than June bugs on a humid night and they succeed in…
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What the Clams Know: Warming Waters
By Peter Galuszka Are warming seas forcing fish to migrate to cooler waters? That’s the thrust of an intriguing report in Nature magazine as covered in this morning’s Post. The impacts on the seafood industry are already playing out. New England fishermen after cod and haddock report having to move farther north to catch them.…