my choices would have to be
1. minneapolis
2. new york or los angeles
3.silicon valley(san fran, oakland.....)
4. boston
5. seattle

*sniff sniff* I smell some hometown bias with a hint of boosterism. :lol:

Why don't people put reason to back these silly repetitive lists?

Ottawa?

Markham??

Dallas?

Austin??

Raliegh??

all of these more so than Boston & esp minneapolis

i was waiting for someone to say somthing about me putting minneapolis at 1 if any of you have ever gotton popular science magazine they rated city on there number of wifi hotspots and other tech thing and
1. minneapolis/st. paul
2. atlanta
3. washington
4.boston
5 san diego

What made Minneapolis our high-tech champ? It ranked first among U.S. cities in innovative transportation solutions, fourth in energy technology. The city fell above the 50th percentile in every category measured, a broad-based showing of tech savvy that set it apart from the competition. With everything averaged together, there is no city in America where a culture of high technology has a more pervasive presence.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/generaltechnology/fbb79aa138b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
Oh and dallas came in 27th

You're not going "win"... you automatically lose credibility when you subjectively rank your city as #1 in anything, and posting random online "lists" won’t convince anyone of anything for good reason. Most of them use flawed methodology, if any at all.

Well, while I do agree with you Toggie that any list is going to use a set of criteria and the list would obviously reflect that criteria. That is why Minneapolis is number one on this list, because if fit the criteria perfectly. Don't complain about flawed methodology either because to be honost I haven't seen a thread on this site that hasn't given a list that was biased of flawed (is flawless even something humans can achieve in this world? I personally don't think so).

There was an article with the link posted above justifying the selection. According to their list, we were only in the top 5 on two criteria...but were above the average mark on everything else which is something that apparantly the other cities didn't achieve. I don't know if I personally rank Minneapolis as number one but I would definately place it in the top five...and when your that high up on the rankings it becomes subjective anyway. The article makes some good justifications for it but it does leave some clear gaps. I've traveled a lot of different cities around the country...I haven't seen them all...but from what I've seen Minneapolis would rank up there, so don't cut it down to much Toggie.

Perhaps the biggest issue on this list is I am nearly 100% sure it only does the cities within the city limits (except this one did MOA in that main article for some reason)...meaning a city with huge sprawling city limits would clearly be at a rather large disadvantage to a city that has a small physical size like Minneapolis and St Paul...combined.

Here is the article from their magazine:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/generaltechnology/fb679aa138b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

ummm....chicago will become the first city in the world to offer wireless internet service to all of its' citizens in the very near future. the wireless internet sensors will be attached atop light poles at intersections city-wide. i'd like to see minneapolis do that!

Ottawa?

Markham??

Dallas?

Austin??

Raliegh??

all of these more so than Boston & esp minneapolis

Um...blatant no.

i'd like to see minneapolis do that!

So would I! That would be great. lol. I think they are trying to get WiFi throughout the entire city using a geo-synchronized satalite or something like that...no clue when it is supposed to be done or what is up with it though.

boston
seattle
san jose/san francisco
new york city to a lesser extent

these cities stick out to me.

Pretty funny that someone would include Minneapolis and not Raleigh.
The whole Raleigh/Durham area is pretty much the "Silicone Valley of the Southeast".
RTP (Research Triangle Park) is the largest research park in the world......LOTS of tech/bio-tech/bio-med companies are located there. RTP spans Durham (Durham) and Wake (Raleigh) Counties.
Plus, there are plenty of tech companies like the SASS Institute in Cary (Raleigh suburb in Wake County) and other bio-med companies around Durham.....


Durham is called the "City of medicine".

San Francisco is suppose to have free WiFi by the end of the year which will be set up by Google and Earthlink. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/04/06/MNGCGI4CA71.DTL

Ottawa?

Markham??

Dallas?

Austin??

Raliegh??

all of these more so than Boston & esp minneapolis

When I read this I laughed out loud. It's funny how people on this forum LOVE to comment on things they have absolutely no idea about.

I'd go with like San Fran (Bay Area), Boston, Seattle, San Diego, New York (in some ways) and Raleigh.

When I think Tech Savy I think places that not only have people in and around the city who use technology (wifi, etc.) but also places that develop and produce technology.

by the way, the plural of CITY is CITIES.

Hey if someone would of posted a thread like this saying minneapolis was first i wouldnt believe them either but it has concrete proof of it and its not just some random internet post its the biggest science related magazine in the united states or second if popular mechanics passed it. By the way chicago is 6th now and it will atleast rise 3 spots within the next couple of years so will san francisco.

We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with ... Minneapolis.

We restarted the computer, and it still said Minneapolis

Traffic is pretty heavy moving into the center of the city. The U.S. Department of Transportation gives Minneapolis top scores for its use of such “intelligent transportation solutions” as closed-loop traffic control, in which sensors placed below the pavement at intersections collect traffic-density data on given roadways and adjust the timing of traffic lights to compensate. This belies the fact that traffic congestion in Minneapolis is increasing at a rate surpassed by only eight other cities in the country, a side effect of suburban sprawl. To ease the gridlock, the city has spent $715 million to construct a light-rail line that connects the downtown with outposts including the airport and the Mall of America. The rail is time-coordinated with the bus system, which has another advance on New York: The bus stops are kept toasty with electric heaters.

My hotel is downtown, in the forest of glass-and-steel skyscrapers that makes up the dense center of Minneapolis. The streets are clean enough to eat off, and seem curiously devoid of pedestrians—a ghost-town ambience that can be attributed to the Minneapolis Skyway system running overhead

Indeed, some of the city’s most prominent advances are in life sciences and medicine. The formerly run-down Philips neighborhood, whose high crime rate had helped get the city dubbed “Murderapolis” during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, is being recast as a center of medical research and innovation. The neighborhood was cleaned up with a program of computerized crime-fighting. The location and type of every crime was statistically analyzed, with trouble spots identified and targeted for police attention. Today local residents are given training and employment opportunities in the new medical facilities.

Miami, los angeles, DC, chicago, atlanta, new york, seattle, boston,san diego,san francisco, tampa,orlando, philladelphia,dallas houston, basically the cities that have two qualities they have to be both the largest and also have the most national trade recognition. :applause:

DC, Boston, Seattle, and the Bay Area seem like leaders to me...

The big three, NY, LA, and Chicago are up there as well.

To me, the most tech savy city means a city whose CITIZENS use technology the most. Not the city's wifi program, or their energy program. It has to be citizens. For instance you would probably expect people in a rural city to use more conventional methods of doing things.

san diego is the best place to have a heart attack. they have the best medical tech.

I am thinking san jose, san francisco, and san diego are gonna rise to the top within 5 years thanks to google and other companies investing into there cities.

Umm, I'm thinking San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland/etc. are already #1 due to Silicon Valley - perhaps it is just me...

My list:

1. San Francisco Bay area due to Silicon Valley and the accumulation of computing related industries.
2. Seattle for similar reasons plus aerospace via Boeing.
3. Boston for the various tech related spin-offs from having the best conglomeration of research universities in the the world.

After this the race becomes tighter: I would mention Austin, NY, LA, DC, Minneapolis/St Paul, Chicago and San Diego (and what they are doing north of Edmonton with oilsands is pretty revolutionary). I have probably missed a few. But what do I know, I am a chef. As a homer I can say that Minneapolis/St Paul does well as a generalist tech city with international caliber concentrations in medical instruments, obscure tech devices, bio-fuels, food sciences and turning Ag imputs into high tech products (thanks to Cargill and the rest of the agrobiz complex); plus a lot of mid sized players in many other fields. My knowledge of the other second tier cities is not much beyond the hearsay level so I can't rank them.

Many of the tech fields are not the obvious ones that get press: materials, energy, applied botany, modern metallurgy, applied physics and chemistry, design shops for making things we take for granted more efficient, etc...

Even mundane pursuits like aquaculture can be high tech if done right. As an example I would offer the recent advances in the last decade in computer based lifecycle management and rope modeling for rope based mussel cultivation (mussel farms have traditionally grown their mussels on rope, better rope designed specifically for mussels and nutrition and movement provided at the ideal times leads to higher yields and healthier mussels with less grit which equals higher incomes and a better end product, these were a result of computer modeling programs written specifically for mussel cultivation). It has created higher value added mussel farms in coastal Maine and Prince Edward Island due to higher yeild and better quality. North America is now on average eating the cleanest and freshest mussels it has ever had as a result of this and modern "just in time" style delivery systems, Europe and Japan are in the same boat. Applied technology is everywhere if you know where to look.

When I read this I laughed out loud. It's funny how people on this forum LOVE to comment on things they have absolutely no idea about.

I'd go with like San Fran (Bay Area), Boston, Seattle, San Diego, New York (in some ways) and Raleigh.

When I think Tech Savy I think places that not only have people in and around the city who use technology (wifi, etc.) but also places that develop and produce technology.

Yup :yes:

ummm....chicago will become the first city in the world to offer wireless internet service to all of its' citizens in the very near future. the wireless internet sensors will be attached atop light poles at intersections city-wide. i'd like to see minneapolis do that!
um, here you go?
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/wirelessminneapolis/

I know Austin can be included on this list

DELL (world headquaters here)
Samsung
Freescale
IBM

Seattle: Microsoft, Boeing
San Francisco/ Silicon Valley: Google, Dot.com businesses, Apple
Los Angeles: Media technology
San Diego: Medical/ Stem cell research facilities

seems like the wild wild West takes the cake on this one.. :naughty:

I love it when someone falls for a magazine list.

I agree with the general trend here. It's more impressive to be a place of invention than to be a place where more people have broadband. And tech employment -- is that call centers and manufacturing, or is that writing code?

PS, I think Miami Beach is Silicone Valley, not Raleigh. Though I think they've changed to saline lately.

Also, Somnifor, let me congratulate you on an excellent post. Good insight and I learned something about MSP.

PS, I think Miami Beach is Silicone Valley, not Raleigh. Though I think they've changed to saline lately.



:weirdo:

I love it when someone falls for a magazine list.


I think an article from Popular Science is 100 times more credible than the average "opinion" on SSC. More thought and knowledge went into the Popular Science article.

It's more impressive to be a place of invention than to be a place where more people have broadband. And tech employment -- is that call centers and manufacturing, or is that writing code?


Do you think Popular Science counts call centers, customer service centers, etc. as "tech employment"?

Minneapolis didn't make the list because of customer service call centers. As far as innovation and invetion----3M is an innovation giant. 3M corporation alone beats entire cities in terms of invention and innovation.

There is no freakin' way that Minneapolis, nor any city for that matter, tops the SF region as a center for tech research, development, and savvy. The tech cities (or regions) of the US are, in this order:

SF Bay Area
Seattle
Boston

Outside of these three, there can be debate. Having a city-wide wireless network (OMG!) does not surmount being home to Adobe, Cisco, Oracle, Google, etc!

There is no freakin' way that Minneapolis, nor any city for that matter, tops the SF region as a center for tech research, development, and savvy.

Did you even read the article?

Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN

Matthew Power

As a kid growing up several hundred miles from the nearest metropolis, I used to draw fantastical visions of the great cities of the future. There would be moving sidewalks on every surface. (“Walking” was over.) Hover-taxis, hover-skateboards, hover-buses. (Hovering was a central element of my urban planning.) Also, sleek monorails conducted by robots, zipping noiselessly between glittering towers that vanished into cloudbanks and reappeared above them, miles in the sky. People would dress in jumpsuits like Mork, and there would be a vast dome over the city, which would have its own computer- controlled weather. (Domes were easy to draw.) The Jetsonian future was clear.

In the real world, of course, where urban centers are composed of layers of development and decay, constructing the city of the future is not so simple. What makes a city cutting-edge? And which American metropolis can rightly claim the title of top tech city? More than a year ago, a crack team of editors and researchers here at Popular Science launched an exhaustive effort to find out. We input reams of data from dozens of private and government sources, tabulated our results, and came up with ... Minneapolis.

We restarted the computer, and it still said Minneapolis. And so it was that I was told to pack my bags for a mission: I was to “test drive” the city, to immerse myself in this technopolis, to divine firsthand the ways in which our winner expresses its technological preeminence. Now, obviously there is something rather artificial about such an assignment. The technological accomplishments that define Minneapolis provide benefits designed primarily for the city’s residents, not tourists. I’d be in the city for less than a week. But such limitations only made my quest to understand this place that much more delectable: I would visit its most visionary structures, meet its most plugged-in citizens, experience the very cream of its technological offerings.

Living in New York, my associations with Minneapolis quite frankly amounted to an ignorant pop-cultural stew of Coen brothers movies, pro-wrestler politicians, Wobegon lakes, and artists now and again known as Prince. This, my editors assured me, provided me with the advantage of an unprejudiced mind. Still, I needed to ground myself in the city’s bona fides.

What made Minneapolis our high-tech champ? It ranked first among U.S. cities in innovative transportation solutions, fourth in energy technology. The city fell above the 50th percentile in every category measured, a broad-based showing of tech savvy that set it apart from the competition. With everything averaged together, there is no city in America where a culture of high technology has a more pervasive presence.

I knew I should keep my hopes in check, but as I set off for the airport, I couldn’t help wondering: Would Minneapolis be the city of the future I’d fantasized about since childhood? The first voice I hear upon arriving is computerized. The stop announcements on the airport monorail have a British accent, as though the pilotless shuttle has been commandeered by a Bond girl. (They’re big on computerized voices in Minneapolis. Later, walking by a parking garage, I am warned in robot monotone “Caution. Vehicle. Exiting.”) My taxi driver from the airport is a very friendly Somali with an advanced degree in computer programming. I pay for the ride with a credit card, a rarity in New York’s yellow cabs and one of many small ways in which I’ll find my city to be behind the times. The cabbie thinks my surprise at card-reading taxis is hilariously yokelish. If I had been nervous about giving out my card number, I could have asked to see his counterfeit-proof Minnesota driver’s license, featuring a 3-D hologram of a loon (the state bird) that appears to float above and below the card when it’s tilted. The novel design was invented by locally-based 3M.

Traffic is pretty heavy moving into the center of the city. The U.S. Department of Transportation gives Minneapolis top scores for its use of such “intelligent transportation solutions” as closed-loop traffic control, in which sensors placed below the pavement at intersections collect traffic-density data on given roadways and adjust the timing of traffic lights to compensate. This belies the fact that traffic congestion in Minneapolis is increasing at a rate surpassed by only eight other cities in the country, a side effect of suburban sprawl. To ease the gridlock, the city has spent $715 million to construct a light-rail line that connects the downtown with outposts including the airport and the Mall of America. The rail is time-coordinated with the bus system, which has another advance on New York: The bus stops are kept toasty with electric heaters.

My hotel is downtown, in the forest of glass-and-steel skyscrapers that makes up the dense center of Minneapolis. The streets are clean enough to eat off, and seem curiously devoid of pedestrians—a ghost-town ambience that can be attributed to the Minneapolis Skyway system running overhead. Back in 1962, city planners gave up trying to deal with the northern winters, where temperatures have bottomed out at 34 below, and began turning the entire center of the city into a giant human Habitrail. The Skyway is a series of sealed bridges above street level that winds for mile after disorienting mile through arcades of shops and plazas, opening on vast atriums with indoor waterfalls and trees to remind the tunnel-dwellers of the outside world. It’s not a dome over the entire city, but it strikes me as being admirably close.

I enter, and all sense of time and direction are quickly lost. It could be cold enough on the street to hammer a nail with a banana, but I wander for hours in my shirtsleeves, hounded by Muzak, grabbing stray Wi-Fi signals, and drinking lattes, as hermetically sealed as an astronaut. I have to return to the freezing street and a coffee shop to regain my perspective. Dunn Bros. has free Wi-Fi and a very nice fair-trade organic, and the proprietor takes time from his roasting to opine that for all its futuristic climate-controlled benefits, the Skyway is missing the vibrant life of a real city. And what does he make of his city’s top tech ranking? “I would have guessed Silicon Valley,” he says. “But I guess I’m not that surprised. Minneapolis is a progressive place, always looking at what’s next. It’s just not in our nature to brag about it.”Minneapolitans may be known for their humility, but they are seriously proud of their city. If you come to town to find out what’s so high-tech about the place, the mayor will pick you up in his gas-electric hybrid car and personally drive you around. (Well, he did it for me, anyway.) R.T. Rybak, the hyperkinetic, triathalon-running, cross-country-skiing, 49-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, drives his city-owned Toyota Prius, points out landmarks, and simultaneously gives me a historic overview. The car is no self-righteous prop. Even as traffic congestion has increased during Rybak’s tenure, Minneapolis has be- come one of the first cities in the nation to bring emissions down below the levels prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol. Vehicle emissions are still increasing, but greenhouse-gas emissions from other sources have been reduced 15 percent in the past decade, by making buildings, factories and streetlights more energy-efficient and by increasing recycling. Rybak is also encouraging more, and greener, mass transit. The city’s transit commission is testing hybrid buses that will cut emissions even further.

The mayor isn’t surprised that Minneapolis ranks so high in tech, just that someone finally noticed. “The city has undergone a series of rebirths,” he tells me as the car sits silently at a traffic light. Built next to the only waterfall on the Mississippi River, Minneapolis has been a center of industry and technological innovation from its inception. General Mills was a milling company; 3M was in mining. Today 3M is a giant, one of the most diverse technology and materials-science innovators around.

Rybak tells me that when the mills declined in the early 1900s, the city was forced to adapt to a service-based econ- omy, leaving it in much better shape than industrial centers like Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit, which had to reinvent themselves in the 1980s. Minneapolis adapted to postindustrialism early, becoming a brain trust of the region. A 2004 University of Wisconsin study found Minneapolis to be America’s most literate city, and I find out later that its list of contributions to various branches of technology is rich: 3M introduced magnetic tape, Scotch tape and the Post-it note. The airplane black box, the Nerf football and even the proprietary controlled-foam-extrusion process for creating “marbits”—the pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, blue diamonds and purple horseshoes found in Lucky Charms cereal—were developed here. Medtronic, now the world’s largest medical technology company, was started in a Minneapolis garage in 1949. The company’s founder, Earl Bakken, went on to invent the first transistorized cardiac pacemaker in 1957.

Indeed, some of the city’s most prominent advances are in life sciences and medicine. The formerly run-down Philips neighborhood, whose high crime rate had helped get the city dubbed “Murderapolis” during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, is being recast as a center of medical research and innovation. The neighborhood was cleaned up with a program of computerized crime-fighting. The location and type of every crime was statistically analyzed, with trouble spots identified and targeted for police attention. Today local residents are given training and employment opportunities in the new medical facilities. “The paradigm in the 1980s and ’90s was the Edge City,” Rybak says—“the faceless office parks built far out in the suburbs. That was overbuilt and unsustainable. We’re trying to pull it back, recognize the value in density, in a dynamic urban setting. Everything we need is right here.” As he sees it, returning to a compact core, with research labs, hospitals and universities in close proximity, provides fertile ground for high-tech innovation.

In a 1.5-mile corridor stretching from downtown, there are 19 medical institutions, 61 research and clinical labs, and 2,300 physicians. A government-funded small-business “incubator” promotes medical technology start-ups, uniting inventors and venture capital, while hospitals provide patients for clinical trials, and huge companies like Medtronic provide R&D. Minnesota has more than 500 med-tech companies, many of which are small and prize independent thinking.


I later visit a group of physical therapists at Abbott Northwestern Hospital who since 1995 have run a program called Advanced Rehabilitative Techno- logies (ART) that makes use of virtual reality in patient rehabilitation. Sensors attached to patients’ muscles detect the tiniest movements and feed the data into a computer. This allows the patient to use biofeedback, in which, say, a stroke victim improves strength and coordination by using muscle movement to play a game on a video monitor.

I play computer pinball with sensors attached to my forearms: When I flex, the paddles bat the ball around on the screen. In another exercise, I stand in front of a blue screen trying to manipulate myself as a little soccer goalie on a monitor. These therapeutic solutions keep patients entertained as they perform the often-monotonous exercises involved in their recovery. At the same time, the sensors allow doctors to collect reams of data on their subjects’ response times, changes in muscle strength, and overall progress. It is one of the only such programs in the country. The therapists are also pioneering what they call teleclinics: Internet videoconferencing rehab sessions conducted with patients as far away as Samoa. After showing me the 19th-century mills by the river, now being retrofitted as luxury condos and pricey offices for tech companies, Mayor Rybak drops me off at the Green Institute, a nonprofit that promotes environmental tech- nology and sustainable energy use—another area in which Minneapolis scored high points, with its eight EPA-rated EnergyStar buildings. The institute’s building is a textbook on green technologies. It has no furnace but is kept at a constant temperature by a nontoxic antifreeze (so green you could actually drink it) circulating through a series of geothermal wells dug into the bedrock below. Mirrors above skylights follow the sun to reflect it inside, and sensors lower all electric light correspondingly, hibernating when people leave the room. Reused steel forms the bulk of the support beams, and the building has an insulating living roof planted with Minnesota prairie species. The electrical system, run partly from an array of solar panels on the roof, kicks power back to the grid when it overproduces. Shelving consists of pressure-treated boards of soy and newspaper that look just like shiny black marble.

Michael Krause, the institute’s director, tells me that they’ve incorporated more than 200 green-technology elements into the construction. The idea is for the building to serve as an example and proving ground for green tech on a larger, more complex scale. Rybak says that the city hopes to build a new baseball stadium for the Twins, with a “biomass” heating system—an energy- efficient trash incinerator.

I take the slick new light rail back downtown (its automated ticket machine speaks Spanish, Hmong and Somali, in addition to English), but I’m flummoxed by the routes of the bus system. So I take a cab (the drivers all listen to National Public Radio) out to the University of Minnesota to meet with mathematician Andrew Odlyzko, head of the school’s Digital Technology Center. In what is emerging as a theme of the city’s innovative mindset, he holds forth on the value of interdisciplinary research and cooperation: between industry and the university and between engineering and computer science. The clustering of disciplines encourages interesting avenues of exploration. Odlyzko is researching the history of railroads’ psychological effects in the 19th century, teasing out the parallels with the spread of the Internet, our own century’s “disruptive technology.”



The university is home to quite a roster of innovative thinkers, which has earned it a reputation as an invention factory and a ranking as one of the top three public research universities in the country. Seymour Cray, father of the supercomputer, and several of the Nobel-winning creators of the transistor (arguably the most important invention of the 20th century) studied here. Today, in the same library where Cray crammed as an undergraduate, an astrophysicist uses the spare processing time of hundreds of networked computers in the student PC lab to construct two-terabyte 3-D animations of the internal combustion of stars. The Center for Distributed Robotics has developed a soda-can-size spy robot that can be shot from a grenade launcher, which could have practical applications in urban warfare. And the university recently won a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to design a smart video-monitoring system that would call attention to suspicious situations, such as abandoned packages left on railway platforms.

In another lab, I stumble around in a virtual-reality helmet, running into real walls as I navigate a digitized room. As my bruised shins attest, the era of the functional Holodeck has not yet arrived. A “Web usability lab” has a computer station at which the patterns of a user’s Web navigation are monitored through a one-way mirror; the data collected will be used to facilitate more efficient Web page designs. Odlyzko appreciates the synergy he’s witnessing (such as the recent biotech-focused research partnership between the university and the Mayo Clinic in nearby Rochester) but still feels that venture capital for tech start-ups is disproportionately allocated to Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston. Minneapolis, out in a sea of corn and soybeans, has not yet been given its proper recognition as a tech capital. the city’s high-tech persona is starting to take shape for me, but there is one last place I want to see before I leave. If Minneapolis and St. Paul are the Twin Cities, the Mall of America is their mutant conjoined triplet, a self-contained city on their periphery. It is the largest mall in the country, with 520 stores, 86 places to eat and 12,550 parking spaces. The mall’s 2:1 ratio of electronics stores to bookstores seems to be a fair indicator of Minneapolitans’ technophilia.

One of the truisms about good high-tech design is knowing when low-tech will suffice. There is no heating system in the 4.2-million-square-foot building; the entire place is heated by the lighting system and the body heat of tens of thousands of bustling shoppers. It is a biosphere of consumers. The 400 trees in the mall’s vast atrium are kept pest-free by tens of thousands of ladybugs. There is a 1.2-million-gallon aquarium and a whole amusement park under a roof big enough to dock the Hindenburg. (This may be the only place on Earth one could feasibly pick up Wi-Fi on a roller coaster.) The completed light rail slithers from the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis straight into the belly of the beast.

My first thought is that the Mall of America is like the Death Star—that is, if Storm Troopers shopped at places like the Piercing Pagoda, Wallet World and the Smoothie Authority. But then it hits me: It’s this mall that most truly replicates the domed City of the Future I had sketched as a kid. It’s got the insularity, the utterly synthesized environment—although I certainly wouldn’t have characterized it this way back when I was dreaming up these visions, it is the final triumph of techno-kitsch.

The mall, like my childhood drawing, I realize, is an artificial city.

But a truly great tech city—messy, organic, evolving—is defined by its people and by its ideas, not by its neat containment beneath futuristic domes. And so, after spending a couple hours in my childhood City of the Future, I walk back out through the vast atrium, board the light rail, and head back downtown, to the city that far more legitimately deserves that crown.

I think an article from Popular Science is 100 times more credible than the average "opinion" on SSC. More thought and knowledge went into the Popular Science article.

Do you think Popular Science counts call centers, customer service centers, etc. as "tech employment"?


Actually, there are real studies about what cities are tech leaders. I'd pay attention to these first. The studies might be done by industry groups, or consultants who've been hired by a chamber of commerce. These studies usually have serious flaws but they're generally way better than magazine articles.

I suggest you learn more about how magazines typically do "studies". Generally a non-expert reporter or two comes up with some half-assed criteria, then digs up third-hand information that often isn't parallel, then makes broad judgements based upon their poor information and lack of understanding. Newsflash: this sort of story is a tool to sell magazines. They only care about accuracy to the extent that it helps their future credibility.

Yes, call center workers and manufacturing employees are generally included in tech worker counts. Basically anyone working for a company that someone considers "tech". Popular Science would have used whatever third-hand source was convenient.

Notice I didn't comment on MSP. I don't know much about its industries. Though I did visit once and do like the place.

PS, the article doesn't say anything about methods. Just "reams" of third-hand information that, again, they probably didn't understand.

Actually, there are real studies about what cities are tech leaders. I'd pay attention to these first. The studies might be done by industry groups, or consultants who've been hired by a chamber of commerce. These studies usually have serious flaws but they're generally way better than magazine articles.

I suggest you learn more about how magazines typically do "studies". Generally a non-expert reporter or two comes up with some half-assed criteria, then digs up third-hand information that often isn't parallel, then makes broad judgements based upon their poor information and lack of understanding. Newsflash: this sort of story is a tool to sell magazines. They only care about accuracy to the extent that it helps their future credibility.

Yes, call center workers and manufacturing employees are generally included in tech worker counts. Basically anyone working for a company that someone considers "tech". Popular Science would have used whatever third-hand source was convenient.

Notice I didn't comment on MSP. I don't know much about its industries. Though I did visit once and do like the place.What is wrong with you. it would come out the same nomatter what. they entered the information into a computer. what would be so different if someone else did it. If you think seattle should be number one give me one good reason it should be ahead of minneapolis. no other city scored above the 50th percentile in every test.

jeeze guys, you're hurting minneapolis's image, not helping it...

Who said Seattle should be number 1? Or even in the top 5. I don't care.

Maybe you haven't learned this after 275 posts: people on SSC will call bullshit on stuff they don't agree with. This thread is a good example.

As for methods, does "entering information onto a computer" mean they've done their job? Or is it also important to ask the right questions, dig out the right data, and use the data properly?

You'll get to college someday and learn about this stuff. Until then, you'll just have to put up with comments like ours.

Actually, there are real studies about what cities are tech leaders. I'd pay attention to these first. The studies might be done by industry groups, or consultants who've been hired by a chamber of commerce.

Sure, let's see the studies. I'll pretty much pay attention to anything before I pay attention to "opinions" on SSC.

You didn't need to say anything about MSP, you were commenting about an acticle that picked MSP as the best tech city. The article must be garbage, because it comes from a magazine, and there's no way that Minneapolis is the best tech city, right?

Newsflash: this sort of story is a tool to sell magazines.

What kind of magazine story ISN'T a tool to sell magazines? Do you think the average subscriber to Popular Science is of below, average, or above average intelligence?

What I think is hilarious on this site, is how forumers are so quick to dismiss any article or list that isn't favorable to their city. I know that you wouldn't be nearly as critical of the article if Seattle was declared the best tech city.

As for methods, does "entering information onto a computer" mean they've done their job? Or is it also important to ask the right questions, dig out the right data, and use the data properly?

How do you know that they didn't do all of that? Because if they did, Minneapolis wouldn't have been #1?

How can I get into the "study" business, it seems as if one can convince anyone of anything with the "right" statistics and the "right" methodology.

Talk about a persecution complex. I'd be perfectly happy if MSP is #1, and I even think it might be, depending on how #1 is defined. This is about objectivity, not who wins.

You can find wildly different lists of "tech cities" from all sorts of sources, each with a different set of criteria and totally different results. Two of the more serious free ones are Brookings and Beacon Hill. Much of the most intense work isn't free, or isn't available at all.

I think Popular Science Magazine is read mostly by enthusiasts. It's a quality magazine, but to my knowledge it doesn't act like a technical journal. They care more about selling magazines and they go for entertainment value, where a technical journal is only about the subject and is theoretically unbiased.

If you want to believe an entertainment piece, go right ahead. But it would be good if you knew its context.

New Orleans is the first City in the US to have the entire city wireless for free..we have it now.

The cities that come to mind first.....
San Francisco-Silicon Valley
Austin
Raleigh-Durham
Seattle
Boston

Chicago--Skyscrapers, Telocommunication,etc
NY--Times Square, Skyscrapers, Stock Market
San Francisco-- Rich people with lots of cell phones, lap tops, skyscrapers, green living
Las Vegas--Lighting, Machines everywhere

And SILICON VALLEY--Cause all of the companies there like google and microsoft.
and Seattle--Because Gates lives there and the Space Needle.

Fresno
Topeka
Montpelier
Billings
Hattiesburg

Let the rest fight it out amongst themselves.

I suggest you learn more about how magazines typically do "studies". Generally a non-expert reporter or two comes up with some half-assed criteria, then digs up third-hand information that often isn't parallel, then makes broad judgements based upon their poor information and lack of understanding.

I'm still wondering if this is the case with the Popular Science artictle.

It looks to me like a bunch of generalizations and assumptions about the article. How about you? You did say "generally".

I've had subsriptions to car magazines for almost 20 years and none of them are technical journals, yet they're still credible in my eyes.

You remind me of the guys that write letters to those magazines and attack their journalistic credibility and accuse them of being on a car company's payroll because their car didn't win in a comparo. You're THAT guy.


If you want to believe an entertainment piece, go right ahead.

So there's nothing believeable about it at all? Just shrug it off as an "entertainment piece" and hope that it goes away.

Actually I've caught plenty of real errors in magazines and newspapers.

Put "Matt Hays" into the Seattle Times search engine. Mostly you get my letters to the editor (boy, there's a trip down memory lane). But there's also a column called "West by Northwest" where the writer quotes me refuting various facts he'd misused, including a major error that appeared in an almanac. That's an extremely rare case where a gadfly like me gets quoted correcting a columnist.

As a PR guy for a general contractor, I send press releases all the time, and participate in all sorts of magazine surveys about our firm, industry trends, etc. I also used to write for my neighborhood paper, the Pike Place Market News.

I'm a skeptic because I've spent almost 14 years doing research about development and economics as part of my job. That's not to say that I'm an expert in my topic areas (certainly not), and research isn't really my core focus (that would be writing proposals). But I've still had to write quality analyses for others to use about all sorts of topics, from comparing US downtowns by park acreage (during my Seattle Commons days) to guessing what Seattle's office, tech, biotech, medical, etc., markets are doing.

The least known skill in research is the ability to understand the limits of your sources, and understand that sources can be fallible.

Here's an example: Real estate brokers are always coming out with breathless lists of how many condos are going up in Seattle, and it's easy to follow land use permits on DPD. As a contractor for condos (such as Four Seasons now u-c) we're intensely interested in coming trends. But it would be foolish for me to look at what brokers and DPD say and stop there. If we're going to remain a successful contractor we need stronger insights about where the market is really going. Like what percentage of these units the market can support, and whether the rise in construction costs will outpace the rise in sales prices.

Even a good magazine survey should be questioned. The point system and criteria could be set up in a literally infinite variety of ways, and neither of us know what they did beyond the simplest explanation. Maybe they happened on the truth. But by BS meter is off the charts on this one.

PS, I've called BS plenty of times on surveys where Seattle has rated #1. Those famous "Best Places" books for example. Those are utter pieces of shit, making broad statements based on only tangentially-relevant information.

For example, if I remember, their restaurant category was based entirely on how many four-star restaurants you had, and how many total restaurants you had. That's the definition of half-assed. In truth, that's a category where people can have very different opinions based on taste. Maybe the most fair method would be to describe the number and typical proximity of a huge variety of cuisines, couple that with price, then maybe throw in the Zagat survey results. Of course that would be far too much work so chances are nobody has ever done it.

Speaking of letters to the editor: I notice that in 1990 I wrote agreeing with a proposal to turn the North Kingdome Parking Lot into housing. And a couple weeks ago, after 16 years, the proposal is finally back with the county selecting a developer. My how time flies. I think I'll look myself in other papers next.

Another of my favorites is the famous Minneapolis statement that Downtown had 30,000 residents in 2000, and that this was one of the biggest downtown populations in the country. Now, I'm a fan of MSP, but while the 30,000 figure was ok, the second part was pure BS. Of course people still believe it because they're not skeptical.

I downloaded census tract information to compare Seattle vs. Minneapolis on this. The 30,000 figure includes substantial land north of the river. If you only include south of the river within the freeway loop (plus part of a tract that goes a little farther south near Loring Park) the number was around 22,000. A similar acreage in Seattle had 44,000. And I don't consider us one of the best (way behind SF, Bos, Phil, Chi, NY), unless it's limited to our metro size range, where there frankly isn't real competition.

This is a tangent. But it's a case where even an hour or two of actual digging can completely refute a statement widely used in MSP media.

Actually I've caught plenty of real errors in magazines and newspapers.

Good for you. Why don't you do that with the Popular Science article instead of generalizing and assuming.

Another of my favorites is the famous Minneapolis statement that Downtown had 30,000 residents in 2000, and that this was one of the biggest downtown populations in the country. Now, I'm a fan of MSP, but while the 30,000 figure was ok, the second part was pure BS. Of course people still believe it because they're not skeptical.

I downloaded census tract information to compare Seattle vs. Minneapolis on this. The 30,000 figure includes substantial land north of the river. If you only include south of the river within the freeway loop (plus part of a tract that goes a little farther south near Loring Park) the number was around 22,000. A similar acreage in Seattle had 44,000. And I don't consider us one of the best (way behind SF, Bos, Phil, Chi, NY), unless it's limited to our metro size range, where there frankly isn't real competition.

This is a tangent. But it's a case where even an hour or two of actual digging can completely refute a statement widely used in MSP media.

LMAO!!! I KNEW you had a chip on your shoulder about Minneapolis and now I know why. The fact that you actually cared enough to figure out which zip codes were used to come up with the 30,000 figure says it all.

I'm curious now, how was the 30,000 figure calculated? Specifically, which areas north of the river should not be included?

Great. You're the sort of person who assumes that everyone else has bad intentions. That's not a helpful personality trait in life.

The downtown comparison was from a civilized, friendly thread a few years ago. I'll let you dig out the information. It was very convenient on the City of Minneapolis website. PS, look for census tracts, not zip codes.

Mhays is right, I was part of that discussion and it was very civil. I'm fairly sure that the 30,000 number included the whole highway loop, St. Anthony main, and either the riverside area or part of the U... I had the PDF that contained the census tract data that was used but I think I deleted it, if you really want to look it up I'm sure that you could dig it up on the Minneapolis website....
Edit: here is a good approximation
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/citywork/planning/census2000/1990-to-2000-Population-Change-by-Neighborhood.asp
DT west 4581
DT east 128
Loring Park 7501
Elliot Park 6476
North Loop 1515
= 20201

that is the primary highway loop and IMHO the best definition of downtown

+ Cedar Riverside 7545
=27746

Adds those butt ugly towers that everyone knows and loves

To get 30,000 you would have to go to the other side of the river...

BTW, check out the DT East number, that neighboorhood will likely see a 1000% or greater growth figure for 2010


BBTW we have gone WAY off topic, sorry :sleepy:

BBTW we have gone WAY off topic, sorry :sleepy:

It is way off topic. I was originally talking about the Popular Science article and mhays brings up the downtown Minneapolis population claims, as if they somehow pertain to the Popular Science article.

So far, his critique of the Popular Science article amounts to generalizations and assumptions. Nothing specific and no specific examples of reports similar to the Popular Science report that might be better.

The article can't be disected because they don't talk enough about methods. That's part of the reason it can't be considered authorative. How many times do we have to get into Research 101 here?

As for other examples, the two organizations I mentioned are known for doing actual studies on this topic. You can look them up yourself. I picked two that are free and available to anyone.

In any case, being responsibly skeptical doesn't require identifying better sources; it's more about understanding the source you do have, and understanding its context. Like I said, you'll learn this in college if you get there.

Even you must realize the relevance of the downtown stats. That was an example of a heavily-trumpeted number that the MSP press and major local organizations have misused because they didn't understand its context. I could pick an example from another city but that would be even further from your comprehension.

The article can't be disected because they don't talk enough about methods. That's part of the reason it can't be considered authorative. How many times do we have to get into Research 101 here?

They did, it's just not available online anymore.

As for other examples, the two organizations I mentioned are known for doing actual studies on this topic. You can look them up yourself.

I did check those sources out and I didn't see any studies similar to the Popular Science article.

Like I said, you'll learn this in college if you get there.

This is the second time you've brought up college, second attempt at being condescending. Congratulations, you have a college degree. Me too. They're a dime a dozen. Don't bother telling me what degree, because I don't care.

give this a read
http://www.neweconomyindex.org/metro/overview.html

methodology
http://www.neweconomyindex.org/metro/overview.html

obviously there are imperfections in it, and you may not agree with it's methodology at times, but it's another study along the same lines, with very different results.

BTW pay attention to the subsections along the sides, some are more relevant to the topic at hand than others.

Also note that I'm not necessarily saying that Minneapolis doesn't deserve recognition for it's "techiness" I just try to keep an open mind...

Silicon Valley

Silicon Hills

Seattle

Minneapolis

Chicago (maybe...)

I think the top are for the number of "tech" businesses:

San Francisco Bay Area (Adobe, Yahoo, Google, Sun, Cisco EA, tons of small semiconductor businesses),

Boston (Rt 128 corridor)

Seattle (Microsoft, Boeing, Real Networks, etc)

Washington, DC (Dulles Corridor and the I-270 biotech corridor)

Raleigh-Durham (RTP which is 7000 acres and has 136 companies, not to mention the large medicial research at the schools and the Centinnel Campus at NCSU which also houses new technology startups)

Austin (Dell, IBM, Cirrus Logic, AMD, Apple)

I think the top are for the number of "tech" businesses:

San Francisco Bay Area (Adobe, Yahoo, Google, Sun, Cisco EA, tons of small semiconductor businesses),

Boston (Rt 128 corridor)

Seattle (Microsoft, Boeing, Real Networks, etc)

Washington, DC (Dulles Corridor and the I-270 biotech corridor)

Raleigh-Durham (RTP which is 7000 acres and has 136 companies, not to mention the large medicial research at the schools and the Centinnel Campus at NCSU which also houses new technology startups)

Austin (Dell, IBM, Cirrus Logic, AMD, Apple)


Very accurate list. LA, which is gaining on the Bay Area in tech employment, is the only other metro I would add.