With all the recent interest in metropolitan regions as a unit of economic competitiveness (most prominently in the White House’s Regional Clusters of Innovation Initiative, but also its intellectual antecedents at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and the Science Progress project of the Center for American Progress), some readers might find interesting a database on metropolitan geographies that I have built from U.S. Census data. I am making it available free of charge here.
The database includes no demographic variables: it is purely a way to gain familiarity with how Census classifies the U.S. geography into metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. I built it because I realized I would need something like it in order to refresh my tbed program database (a project I will take on later this year), and I could find no sufficiently comprehensive and easy-to-use tool on the Census website. This is basically a sandbox of taxonomies to play in, to gain some quick insight into the way metropolitan regions are put together in the U.S.
More on New metropolitan geography database available
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This summer, I will be changing my status with the Technology Partnership Practice at Battelle Memorial Institute, where I have been a part-time employee for more than a dozen years. I have informed Battelle that I will resign that status on August 21st and focus instead on my independent consulting. I hope to be able still to do one or two larger projects for TPP each year, but as an independent contractor. Changing status from employee to affiliated consultant will allow me to focus more intently on my clients, including but not limited to the Business Incubator Association of New York State (other representative clients from recent years here). And it will become easier for me to manage and juggle my various assignments, without the very specific conflict-of-interest concerns that come with being an employee of a large and complex organization.
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This week I had the privilege of guest-lecturing on tbed issues at Prof. Frederick Lane’s graduate course on Urban Higher Education at CUNY’s Baruch College. It was a pleasure to introduce this group of adult masters students (nearly all currently employed in higher-education institutions in New York City) to the theory and practice of tbed. If any of Prof. Lane’s students are reading this, feel free to email me using the site contact form for any follow up you’d like. Thank you for having me.
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This week saw release of ITAC’s long-awaited report (for which I served as a member of the project advisory board) on New York City’s “hidden” technology sectors. If you’re not interested in the details, you can also download a handsome executive summary.
The report received coverage in The New York Times (registration required) and AM New York. As reflected in the emphasis and tone of some of this coverage, the report is not flawless, because there are tough data problems that confront any such analysis, but it certainly represents a very significant start at a new way to think about the diverse technology sectors that fly under the radar in New York City. I am pleased with how this report turned out, and may add some additional commentary on its reception at a later date.
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