#@revkin

#paceblog @ariannahuff This past week I was in San Francisco for a 4 day conference, called Dreamforce. Dreamforce is a conference the CRM company, Salesforce, puts on every Fall. If you would like to learn more about Salesforce you can click here :  http://www.salesforce.com/ J

  At Dreamforce, I had the privilege of seeing Arianna Huffington, CEO of the Huffington Post, speak in a session called “Reimagine. Everything.”   She was funny, real and connected with the audience. She spoke to four important points that we all need for ‘doing well and being well’. Here they are

  1)      Giving – She highlighted that we need to give ourselves a break by unplugging, which helps us recharge. There are three things she mentioned that she said essential to our performance at our jobs and how we live our lives. They are getting sleep, unplugging, and recharging. The two things she said that stood out to me from this point were “burnout is the disease of civilization” and “working 24/7 is the equivalent as coming to work drunk”.

2)      Wisdom – She emphasized that we all have wisdom, peace and strength within us. One of the quotes she used was from Bill Clinton. He said, “The most important mistakes I made, I made when I was tired.” Her point was that we all have wisdom that we can turn to; we just have to listen to it and take a break when we are tired.

3)      Well-being – As people who were not wired to stay awake 24/7, therefore we need a time to recharge. That time is when we sleep.  She reminded listeners that we need to pick a time to turn off our devices and not let them distract us. She also reminded us that sleep is the place where we recreate. This is where we come up with new ideas, inventions, and innovative ideas.

4)      Wonder – In order to wonder we need to stop multitasking. Wondering to a child comes naturally, however what happens when we get older and we multitask to get more done and become so focused that we do not have time to wonder? She mentioned that for the ‘first time 90% of our data has been made available in the last 2 years’. That is absolutely incredible! She then added, ‘how much of our collective wisdom has been made available in the last two years?’ She suggested that what we need to do now is ‘combine new technology with amazing data and our wisdom otherwise we will keep ignoring the warning signs’ that were created to keep us from burning out. The millennial generation is a great example of how technology affects us. She has two daughters in the millennial generation and she has made two observations: 1) the millennial generation is the most stressed and 2) they don’t know how to be with each other because of the constant use of technology. I find both of these observations to be true. Do you?

  Her four points highlight exactly what our society as a whole needs to thrive. Of the four things she listed which one do you need to improve on to thrive?

  To hear her talk click this link, “Reimagine. Everything.”. (Please note: She starts on the 4th page so all you have to do is click the end of the video bar 3 times and you will get to her part. The order of speakers before her goes as such: Al Gore then Neil Young.) 

Wednesday morning, I was greeted with a map of the country broken down by county, showing those whom voted for Mitt Romney and those who voted for Barack Obama. Unlike state-level maps tallying electoral college results, it makes a strong visual argument for the prevalence of republican voters across the country; what it lacks is any attempt at showing these counties in terms of what they actually mean for the election - their population, and their contribution to either party, since unlike states, counties do not exist in a winner-takes-all scenario.

A more balanced - if harder to digest - view of the outcome can be seen in the form of cartograms, which are maps distorted based upon underlying information. Mark Newman, at the University of Michigan, explains how this can be done and creates several maps which isolate different conditions that arise from the spatial distribution of the vote.

While the typical state-by-state or county-by-county maps are deceptive, they create one side effect: they highlight the differences between the way that people living in urban areas voted as compared to those in suburban areas - a difference that becomes more obvious when viewed through the distorted lens of the cartogram - but also less legible as a scenario of urban vs non-urban areas. Strikingly, the confluences of blue on the map highlight the nation's megalopoli; areas where several cities have grown together into continuous areas of urbanization.

It can be argued that "demographics" causes cities to generally side with the democratic party, it may be based upon a fundamental understanding of the realities of urban life, regardless of income or background. Living in dense conditions forces people to rely on each other constantly; furthermore urbanites also rely heavily on infrastructure and city-level government to provide services -  a view not shared by policies outlining fiscal austerity. At the same time, the choice of a suburban or rural lifestyle is often accompanied by, or a result of an individualistic, DIY outlook that is more accepting of lassiez-faire governance. 

The spatial conditions of where we live may be more influential than is often considered.