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The intriguing term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s then king, Jigme Singve Wangchuck. He was launching a modernization campaign for the tiny Himalayan kingdom, but wanted to embrace modernity without sacrificing his country’s traditional values. Since then, the Bhutan-based think tank Centre for Bhutan Studies has developed a sophisticated method for measuring a population’s general level of well-being. The method is considered in government planning and as a sort of environmental impact statement whenever the kingdom considers a major new initiative.
It may be time to follow Bhutan’s lead and broaden the ways we define economic success.
In fact, Sergio Borger and other scientists at IBM Research – Brazil are thinking along these lines. They’re trying to come up with a way of accurately measuring the quality of life in a city.
It’s conventional wisdom that educating people to have advanced skills is vital for improving economic competitiveness, but Bridget van Kralingen, the general manager for IBM North America, goes one step further: “I’d argue that if you create skills, you create jobs. Skills create jobs,” she said during a recent conference on U.S. competitiveness at Roosevelt House in New York City, which we live-blogged here and Tweeted at #uscompetes.
I’d add that if you create a large pool of people with analytics skills, you’re going to create a lot of high-value jobs. That’s one of the reasons that IBM is helping more than 200 universities worldwide develop programs and curricula aimed at preparing business, computer science and engineering students for careers in analytics. In the forefront of the movement is Northwestern University, which has introduced two new masters degree programs in analytics—one for traditional graduate students and another for adult professionals who are acquiring new skills.
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Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- business analytics
- Education
- Government Services
- new intelligence
- optimization
- Smart Grids
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Food
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Industries
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- sustainability
Rio De Janeiro is a bustling metropolis in a booming country–and, increasingly, an example of how government and business leaders can cooperate to make cities work better. Join the live blog today for a second day of coverage of speeches, panels and hallway discussions.
Update:
Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.
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Steve Hamm in
IBM, MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School today are sponsoring a symposium at the the two universities. The morning topic: How advances in information technology can help improve productivity, and improve incomes and create jobs for the 99%. It’s being followed this afternoon by a mock Jeopardy! match between Watson, IBM’s very smart computer, and teams from MIT and HBS.
Update:
Teams of three students from MIT/Sloan and HBS take on IBM’s Watson. (This is only the second contest matching Watson against collegians. In the previous contest, Watson beat teams from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt came in second, much to the chagrin of rival CMU!)
Harvard wins the first question, with “What is Belize?” Answering: countries in central America, ending with “e”
But then Watson takes over, running the category.
The machine picks “Who’s Your Daddy Company?” as the next category, eliciting a huge hook of laughter from the audience.
They finished the Jeopardy! round, with Watson, $8600; Harvard, $5200 ; and MIT, $-200 .
(I got disconnected from HBS’s Wi-Fi at a crucial moment, destroying the coverage of the second round. Grrrrr)
Final Jeopardy!
Clue: Finding the spot for this memorial caused its creator to say “Americans will march across that skyline.”
The question: Mt. Rushmore.
Harvard and Watson answer correctly. MIT does not.
Final score: Watson, $53,601; Harvard, $42,399; MIT, $100.
!!!!! Continue Reading »
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Lia P Davis in
Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.
What a thriller! After 11 innings last night, the St. Louis Cardinals forced a winner-takes-all Game 7 with tonight sure to be a great finale to close out this October classic.
The historic Game 6 also forced the Twitterverse to crown two new tweet and sentiment leaders in IBM and USC Annenberg’s latest analysis from the USC Social Sentiment Index. Due to their late inning heroics, the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton netted the highest volume of tweets and an 88% positive sentiment while the biggest hero of the night, St. Louis Cardinals’ David Freese led his team in tweets and an 86% positive sentiment. Extra innings afforded diehard fans the opportunity to share their sentiment and push these two players over the top.
So what does Game 6’s analysis tell us? Social media fans are highly vocal, generating the largest volume of tweets during the final moments of the game. These real-time fan insights could have tremendous impact on how and when marketers engage these fans.
Get ready for an awesome Game 7 and a final World Series analysis where we’ll not only crown the Social Media MVP of the series but take a closer look all the cool trends we found with fans’ sentiment toward both teams’ managers, highest spike in a player’s tweets and much more. Stay tuned!
- Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
- Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
- Read more about social media analysis from Games 3 & 4.
- Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.
- Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index
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Lia P Davis in
Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Next week Professor Taplin will be participating in the IBM Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum (IOD11).
Two more World Series games played and millions of tweets later, IBM and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab students uncovered new findings in fans’ social sentiment in our ongoing World Series analysis.
Despite lower TV ratings for Game 3, we saw the volume of tweets increase from Game 2 as baseball’s diehard fans continue to turn to the Twitterverse and other social media platforms to pontificate about the game play and players and coaches on the field.
Using the same metrics from our initial World Series analysis, the number of “sentiment” tweets – that is, tweets both positive and negative, in our most recent sampling showed:
– In Game 3: St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols and the Texas Rangers’ Nelson Cruz were the most tweeted among players and coaches.
– In Game 4, the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols kept his crown and the Rangers’ Derek Holland led his team for total number of tweets.
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Great game play not only can result in a W for the team, but also a W for individual social media accolades. In this most recent analysis, St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols, amassed unbelievable numbers following his historic baseball performance, receiving the most tweets on his team for both Game 3 and Game 4 and the most positive sentiment at 81% and 87% respectively. The same could be said for the Rangers’ Derek Holland in Game 4, who received the most tweets and an 83% positive sentiment. Rangers’ Michael Young netted most positive sentiment on his team for Game 3 with 83%. For those keeping score at home, the positive sentiment is the result of ‘T’ scores – the ratio of positive to negative sentiment indicated in tweets.
Our second analysis accurately correlates players’ large volumes of tweets to fans’ positive feedback, reiterating how important social media platforms are to capturing consumer sentiment and uncovering actionable insights. More importantly, it affords us an opportunity to view consistencies and inconsistencies with sentiment—what players continue to stay hot amongst fans, who is falling off the bandwagon, via real-time data to make or change decisions, be it promotions or other marketing efforts. It also goes to show those relying solely on mediums such as TV to uncover new fan insights will be at a disadvantage to their peers who are turning to social media to analyze sentiment to get a real-time temperature check on public attitudes as well as customer segments like diehard baseball fans that can result in making more insightful decisions.
Stay tuned for our final analysis at the conclusion of the World Series. Enjoy the rest of the Series!
- Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.
- Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
- Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
- Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index
Today’s university freshmen were still in their terrible twos when the World Wide Web was just beginning to transform communications, retailing, entertainment and whole industries. Now some of the more cerebral members of the Internet generation are preparing to catch another wave: exploring the once-nerdy subject of analytics, a field of study that is just now making the leap across campus from the computer science lab to the business school.
Analytics is going mainstream at universities around the globe. It’s being fueled by a growing demand from businesses and governments for employees skilled in the art of making sense out of a deluge of data that’s available from myriad sources–everything from remote sensors to Tweets and blog posts. “It’s imperative that leaders take advantage of all the data that’s in front of them,” says W. “RP” Raghupathi, a professor of information and communications systems at Fordham University’s Schools of Business. “Data analytics has become a very integral part of business decision making.”
Today, Fordham is announcing two new masters degree programs, Master of Science in Business Analytics and Master of Science in Marketing Intelligence–establishing itself as a pioneer in bringing analytics skills training to business students.
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Steve Hamm in
In early 2009, bushfires fanned by winds gusting to 83 miles per hour raced across the landscape north of Melbourne, Australia, killing 173 people and destroying 3,500 structures. It was estimated that the amount of energy released during the firestorm was equivalent to the energy that would be released by 1,500 World War II-era atomic bombs.
The bushfires, together with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, quakes in Haiti and New Zealand, the New Orleans flood and the volcanic eruption in Iceland, remind us of the terribly destructive power of nature. The fires were the catalyst that launched IBMers in Australia into focusing on the role that information technology can play in helping to respond to and mitigate natural disasters. Climate change amplifies natural phenomena, and the increased concentration of people in urban areas makes society ever more vulnerable. “These major disasters intersect with population density and the interconnectedness of economies and business,” says Glenn Wightwick, director of IBM R&D Australia. “Society has to become more resilient.”
Societal resilience has become one of the pillars of the research agenda for IBM R&D Australia, the newest of IBM’s global research labs, which will be officially inaugurated on Friday. It’s also the theme of The IBM Research colloquium that the lab is hosting tomorrow for more than 100 guests in Melbourne. That confab is part of an IBM Centennial program designed to convene thought leaders – including leading researchers and scientists, academics, leaders of industries, public policy makers and key IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the world.
