The city of Temple, Texas, is strategically located along the Interstate 35 corridor between Austin and the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. In addition, it is adjacent to Fort Hood, one of the largest active duty armored posts in the US. In 2011 the Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood MSA was ranked among top five best-performing metro areas in the nation, according to the Milken Institute, which ranks metropolitan areas by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth.

The Temple EDC wished to position the city to continue this trend through a better targeted business recruitment program. With this in mind, TIP was hired to define the top five industry categories best suited for Temple, taking into account the community’s and region’s existing assets. Additionally TIP was to provide extensive research on each target, as well as a marketing and implementation plan.

The selection of target sectors is traditionally bound to an assessment of only a few determinant factors, such as access to an available workforce, industrial sites, and incentives. Our target industry recommendations are not based solely on these issues, but also on conversations with the area’s business leaders to better understand potential opportunities and challenges that might not be readily identifiable through secondary data sources alone.

Laborshed Analysis: Employees by Zip Code
Source: TIP Strategies

To define the study area for the target industry analysis, we established the actual laborshed of the City of Temple by collecting employee zip code information from the city’s major employers. We obtained data from 11 employers on 17,958 employees or 10% of the Temple Metropolitan Statistical Area’s (MSA) non-military workforce. Employers represented various sectors including healthcare, distribution, back office, education, and manufacturing.

Using tools such as a laborshed analysis, economic base analysis, location quotients, and a shift-share analysis, a quantitative analysis was conducted to identify potential target industry sectors. The list was then filtered further using specific criteria, including location, growth, size, image, and infrastructure. The resulting list includes both existing industry clusters and aspirational targets. Each industry sector was profiled and specific niches are noted. These niches show the greatest potential for growth, pay higher than average earnings, and are sufficiently large to warrant an investment of TEDC’s resources for business recruitment. In addition, they play to Temple’s strengths and fit with Temple’s site availability.

The TEDC adopted the plan in early 2012. With the tools provided by TIP, the TEDC has augmented its marketing program, enhanced its industry research, and re-focused its business recruitment efforts.

Via: Trace Media

Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualization of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa. For more information contact Gavin Baily or Mark Graham.

Before opening the map please note that some searches require a large download. For articles written in English try filtering the search by location e.g. Africa, Northern America, United Kingdom. Use the Stop button to cancel a search in progress.
We recommend using the latest version of Chrome, FireFox, Opera, IE or Safari. There’s Flash support for IE 7 and IE 8, but IE 9 or above is preferable.



The images below show the global distribution of articles written in each language.
















To further explore the geography of the data, each Wikipedia article is associated with various attributes, such as word count, number of authors, and number of images etc. You can investigate these using the ‘map’ dropdown. Here are a few examples for Europe, Asia and the US.




How it was built

The project was developed using the excellent Open Layers. To display the large number of articles we wrote a subclass of the Open Layers Canvas renderer, and optimised for point plotting. As a fallback for browsers that don’t support canvas we included the FlashCanvas shim. http://flashcanvas.net/.

The Google basemap was produced using the Styled Map Wizard:
http://v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html

To glue everything together we used jQuery. A big thankyou [sic] to the authors of the following libraries and plugins.
Eric Hynds’ UI MultiSelect Widget:
http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/jquery-ui-multiselect-widget/

Mike Chambers’ Quadtree for mouse-picking articles:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/03/21/javascript-quadtree-implementation/

Ben Alman’s BBQ library for storing URL hash values:
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

Via: McKinsey Quarterly

Explore the cities and emerging urban clusters that will drive dramatic growth and demographic changes over the next generation.

Over the next 15 years, 600 cities will account for more than 60 percent of global GDP growth. Which of them will contribute the largest number of children or elderly to the world’s population? Which will see the fastest expansion of new entrants to the consuming middle classes? How will regional patterns of growth differ?

Explore these questions by browsing through the interactive global map below, which contains city-specific highlights from the McKinsey Global Institute’s database of more than 2,000 metropolitan areas around the world. (For assumptions underlying the data in this interactive, see sidebar, “Urban world uncertainties and assumptions.”) You’ll see why growth strategies focused at the country level may fall short in the future: with new hot spots emerging and household wealth surging in little-known urban centers, companies may have to adopt a much finer-grained approach to tap into the growth that lies ahead.

Global cities of the future
Explore the globe and view data on the dramatic urban growth expected by 2025.

via The Heritage Foundation
China’s investment overseas is increasingly important to the United States and the international community. The China Global Investment Tracker created by The Heritage Foundation is the only publicly available, comprehensive dataset of large Chinese investments and contracts worldwide beyond Treasury bonds. Details are available on well over 400 attempted transactions — failed and successful — over $100 million in all industries, including energy, mining, transportation and banking.

Download the data set here.



Chinese investment and business contracts now span the globe. There is a clear effort to diversify across countries and regions but the Western Hemisphere has become especially prominent.

China’s investment total could be higher. Over $160 billion in proposed spending has been rejected by foreign or Chinese regulators or has failed due to mistakes by Chinese firms. However, there are also clear signs that Chinese firms are learning to be better investors.

Chinese Outward Investment: More Opportunity Than Danger

Chinese investment is not taking the world by storm financially, nor will it do so in the near future. It does not pose a major threat to the U.S., either in terms of the purchase of American assets or the expansion of Chinese influence around the globe. At home, American policy concerning Chinese investment should be more transparent. Overseas, the best reply to expanding Chinese commercial influence is to expand American commercial influence—for instance, through free trade agreements. These steps will help create more economic opportunities in the U.S., enhance America’s global position, and pose no threat to national security.

Where China Invests, And Why It Matters

The PRC has hundreds of billions of dollars available for investment and a desire to lock up resources; the U.S. has several trillion already invested and a bigger, more multi-dimensional economy. Concerns about increased Chinese investment and business activity should be addressed by expanding American activity, from investment in Ivory Coast to trade with Taiwan.

China’s Investment Overseas in 2010

The dominant feature of Chinese outward investment in 2010 was a rush to South America, particularly Brazil. Overall investment grew only modestly. The energy and power sectors continued to be the most attractive for Chinese enterprises. Troubled or failed investments – a huge problem in 2009 – were much less prominent in 2010. An obvious implication for American policy is to expand trade and investment ties to South America and around the world.

via NPR Planet Money

I went looking for a bubble the other day. I’d heard that prices for American farmland were spiking – up thirty percent over the past year, and double what people were paying five or six years ago. It sounded like irrational exuberance.

I flew to Iowa, drove to the town of Colo, an hour north of Des Moines, and dropped in on a land auction. It was a great scene: A hushed crowd of farmers, an auctioneer with a voice made for opera, and a climactic duel between rival bidders, one of whom raised the price with a wink, the other with a slight nod.

The winking man won, if you can call it a win when you have to hand over $1.5 million for 158 acres of corn stalks. The seller, a sweet middle-aged woman, seemed genuinely conflicted about selling her inheritance. But she needed the money, she said. And she said it: “It just seemed like we had this bubble going on with agricultural properties.”

But the more I learned about the economics of corn farming and farmland, the less bubble-ish it seemed.

Consider what our local expert, the Iowa State economist Bruce Babcock, told me: Farmland in Iowa changes owners, on average, every thirty years. Buyers generally put down 30 percent of the purchase price, and 60 percent is common. This isn’t a no-money-down, buy-and-flip kind of market.

And at today’s corn prices, you can earn a tidy 4 percent return on your investment, just by growing corn. In that light, it all seems terribly rational. (Relevant side note: Babcock was so convinced about his calculations that he bought some farmland for himself a few years back.)

Of course, it all hangs on those corn prices. They’re way up, too. As it turns out, corn farmers are in the energy business. You can convert their corn into ethanol, and put it in your gas tank. This is happening on a massive scale: More corn this year will go to ethanol factories than will feed farm animals. And the higher gas prices go, the more profitable the ethanol business, and the higher the demand for corn.

According to National Geographic:
The map shows population density; the brightest points are the highest densities. Each country is colored according to its average annual gross national income per capita, using categories established by the World Bank (see key below). Some nations— like economic powerhouses China and India—have an especially wide range of incomes. But as the two most populous countries, both are lower middle class when income is averaged per capita.

The feature article, Age of Man, is worth perusing, as well. If you’re a visual learner, you’ll also enjoy The Face of Seven Billion, where you can explore how the global population breaks down in terms of language, nationality, literacy, religion, and so on.