Arizona Ranked Again > 59/100 For Innovation

A report in Bloomberg Business by Michelle Jamrisko and Wei Lu on 07 January
Here Are the Most Innovative States in America
The two reporters start off  by making this point about the Bloomberg Index: Bloomberg's ranking of the most innovative states in the U.S. illustrates how universities can juice local economies.
To provide some context, Arizona's overall ranking in higher education leaves a lot of room for improvement while the thinking patterns in conservative politics that dominate the state might not be the most fertile ground for innovation.
Shocking report on KJZZ today about the state of STEM education in Arizona - hope that readers listen to that . . .

Arizona ranks #19 overall with a score of 59 on the index while the states of Massachusetts and California come out on top with scores of 93.
[Yours truly lived in both of those states.]
The Bloomberg U.S. Innovation Index scored each of the 50 states on a 0-100 scale across six equally weighted metrics with these rate-rankings for Arizona:
- #17 Research & Design (R&D) intensity
- #42 Productivity 
- #08 High-tech density
- #11 Concentration of STEM employment
- #29 Science and engineering degree holders
- #13 Patent activity   
The data also show the limits of measuring healthy innovation. For example, the migration of talent across state lines can be difficult to measure and often captured only on delay, such as through U.S. Census bureau figures. [subject of an earlier post on this site]
On May 27, 2015 Ruth Simon published in the Wall Street Journal  an article headlined
Immigrants, Latinos Helped Drive Business Creation Last Year

Go to this link to see the 50-state rankings >>    Bloomberg State Innovation Index

Almost Missed This: The Internet of Things Google Developers Fest Arizona





On the way to run errands on the light rail yesterday by taking a diagonal shortcut through Mesa Arts Center, usually a vast hot spot for performance and visual arts,  stumbled on this [image to the left] on the stone walkways.

It stopped me fast in my tracks > turning into a revelation for the future.
WtFark is this?
Like most residents and visitors I've seen the dinosaur footprints on the sidewalks of Main Street [and a few dinosaurs in the windows at Milano Music] but this?
Some kind of homing beacon for aliens from outer space giving them a signal to attract their return landing back on Planet Earth like the Nazca Lines in South America?
No. Landing here in Mesa was a gathering of bright and brilliant minds ...

It happened yesterday from 9-5 inside the Piper Theater, attracting more than a 100 engaged in connecting everything to everything > The Internet of Things

The published Schedule 
Give the people what they want.

Playing Host : Mike Wolfson [image to right]

Starting off with:
Chris Mattieu (9:05am - 9:30am)
Greg Gorman (9:35am - 10:00am)
Stewart Christie (10:05am - 10:30am)
Co-Hoots (10:35a - 10:40a)
Luis Montes (10:50am - 11:15am)

Panel (11:20am - 11:55pm)
Guy McCarthy (Microchip) - 11:55a - 12:00p)

Dave Smith (1:05pm - 1:30pm)
Justin Ribeiro (1:35pm - 2:00pm)
Peter Heinrich (2:05pm - 2:30pm)
Sheldon McGee (GDGPhoenix) (2:30p - 2:35p)
Jen Tong (3:05pm - 3:45pm)
Panel (3:50pm - 4:25pm)
4:30p - 4:45p Wrap-up

 



Hot Topic : Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) 2016

Interesting  illustration for how the dynamics of one issue - the use of a renewable energy source -  moves from educating the public to becoming a public opinion issue that turns through legislative action into the adoption of both national and state policy where finance and tax credit move all that forward.
More important to keep it mind is the fact that every kilowatt KW of electricity we get from solar power is one less KW we buy from public utility companies.
The same dynamics process for examples where global and national topics impact local issues [yes, we are all connected] can be seen in both affordable housing and diversity/inclusion/equality for all protected classes. Attention and action by citizens and voters who inform and express their opinions to their elected representatives locally in the Mesa City Council, the Arizona Legislature and the U.S. Congress can engage to promote positive benefits.

While solar technologies are changing and evolving at the same time [think about how CFLs and LEDs changed residential and commercial electric-energy consumption for lighting], financial incentives have been approved for a  nitty-gritty component: installation of solar energy.

All to the good, right?
Yes it creates competition [see previous post on this site from July 23, 2015 where Mesa companies Solar City and Vivint are included] with job creation or job decline depending on whether it's in the old-growth fossil-fuel burning industry or in the new-growth industries for renewable energy.
The dynamics go on with state regulatory agencies protecting entrenched interests. Here in Arizona it's the Arizona Corporate Commission [ACC] recently getting shaken up by conflict-of-interest charges. Who's interest you might guess
quite quickly - and that's exactly why the public and new-growth industries join forces.

The solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is one of the most important federal policy mechanisms to support the mobilization for solar energy in the United States.
The Solar Energy Industries Association [SEIA] successfully advocated for a multi-year extension of the credit in 2008, which provided business certainty to project developers and investors. The ITC continues to drive growth in the industry and job creation across the country.
Recognizing the signifance of the ITC, SEIA and Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) developed an analysis that explored the enormous impact of the five-year extension - and what happens if we let it expire.
Extending the ITC amounts to an additional 69 gigawatts (GW) of solar deployment between 2016 and 2022. Without it, the solar energy industries could lose 80,000 jobs in 2017.

But Hey! take a look at an infographic from Ecova, a total energy and sustainability management company published on December 18, 2015.
See >> report from Ecova/Solar TIC
The beauty in looking at infographics is that they say a lot without so many words.
Pay attention, dear readers, this is important to "get the picture".
On December 18th, as part of the Omnibus Spending Bill, Congress extended the 30 percent solar incentive tax credit that was due to expire at the end of 2016. The incentive will now run until 2019, followed by a step down to end at 10 percent in 2022. Analysts at GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association have estimated that the tax credit could increase solar installations by 54 percent over the next five years.
The article continues covering issues brought up in previous post here on Jan 01 and Jan 07 2016 and Oct 19, 2015]     

"According to a study published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in October, approximately 32 percent of customers using a cash-purchase approach to solar equipment will achieve a breakeven on the capital investment, which currently sits at a median $2.17/W (not including any state or utility incentives). When examining the loan scenario, the figure jumps to 64 percent.

The largest driver in breakeven prices is local utility rates, although building use is also a significant factor. The building types with the highest breakeven price (and therefore the highest potential cost benefit, according to the study) are small offices, warehouses, and schools. Retail establishments, medium and large offices, quick service restaurants, outpatient medical facilities, and supermarkets all see moderate average breakeven prices, and hotels, hospitals, and full-service restaurants tend to see low breakeven prices.
Incentives and net-metering regulations also play a factor in the breakeven on solar equipment. Given the number of factors driving the cost benefit of such installations, evaluations should be performed on a site-by-site basis to determine the impact of switching to solar.
The extension of this credit for wind and solar companies, combined with falling costs of distributed energy resources (DERs) will continue to keep DERs a hot topic in 2016. Each customer’s energy goals are unique, and warrant their own conversation. . . "

John Giles Looking Back > One Year Ago An Old Truck + SOTC2015

From March 11, 2014 here's a brief 1:31 You Tube Video uploaded for 2014 election campaign for the seat of. Mayor.
How is Mesa like John's old truck . . . ??

.... and last year's State-of-the-City address on Feb 3, 2015. It rambles on  57:37,  but gets broken up by six videos some featuring the co-chairs of his election campaign.
Favorite adjective = great
Says at the end he has "limited ability to come up with good ideas" .... needs feedback

#3 Sun-Rich Arizona > Green Biz 2016 PHX 2016 Feb 23-25

The 8th Annual  GreenBiz defines the trends, challenges and opportunities in sustainable business now.

February 23, 2016 - 8:00am to February 25, 2016 - 12:00pm

JW Marriott Camelback Inn Resort & Spa

Scottsdale, AZ

United States

Event Contact: 

Liza Boulet

510-740-2362

liza@greenbiz.com
[See previous posts October 19, 2015 and January 01, 2016]

GreenBiz 16 is framed by the State of Green Business report, the ninth annual edition of GreenBiz’s acclaimed accounting of key sustainability metrics and trends. annual accounting of key sustainability metrics and trends. The report, combined with the high-wattage stage presentations, workshops and networking opportunities that have become hallmarks of GreenBiz events, create a powerful event that has become one of the top annual gatherings for sustainability professionals.

The forum will include conversations with C-level execs across a range of functions — CEOs, COOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMO, etc. Conversation will focus on how non-sustainability executives view such topics as Sustainable Supply Chains, Corporate Energy Strategy, Employee Engagement and Retention, Natural Capital Accounting, and Carbon and Water Risk Mitigation.
Find out more and register >> Green Biz 16 PHX

Success is all about the power of partnerships — internal, external, supply chain, NGO, public-private, and more. The tasks are simply too big to go it alone.

GreenBiz 2016 brings together GreenBiz Group, The Sustainability Consortium, and ASU's Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives. We leverage our vast networks, insights and domain expertise to bring you the brightest thinkers and most influential leaders. You'll get an unparalleled in-depth look at the key challenges and opportunities facing sustainable business today.

At COP21 in Paris, December 2015 over 100 nations participated and approved a resolution about Climate Change [Ooooh, there's that again]
Here are some city-focused highlights from COP21
100RC mayors commit $5 billion to resilience-building
On Dec. 2, the inaugural "Resilience Day" at COP21, 100 Resilient Cities — Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, which focuses on improving city resilience in cities across the globe, announced the first round of signees to its 10% Resilience Pledge.
Read more >> http://www.greenbiz.com/article/heres-whats-cities-cop21

 

 

 



 

 



Quik Jab@2016 > How Do You Spell H.E.A.T? . . No S For Sports???

It's gonna be a sweet 2016.
That's the prediction from Bill Jabjiniak, Director for the City of Mesa Office of Economic Development.
Sweet predictions are nice, but sometimes things happen that you can't foresee [like the bull market worldwide New Year's stock-plunge erasing billions in seconds] or what you project for capital investment in a given year doesn't deliver those outcomes in that year, or maybe never.
Another question: Whose lives are gonna be sweet in 2016?
Surely not for the hungry and homeless whose basic needs go unmet with many experiencing food insecurity.
[Readers are invited to read a previous post on this site.]
Feedback from attending the meeting is provided in this post along with access to a wealth of information readers can use from the The Center for Government.org
The EconDev Director's remarks were made this morning to members of the Economic Development Advisory Board at the regular 7:30 a.m. monthly meeting.
The EDAB acts as the advisory board to the Mesa City Council on matters pertaining to economic development, including goal setting, strategic planning, marketing and business recruitment, retention and expansion.
Meetings are on the first Tuesday of every month.  



EDAB Meeting 05 Jan 2016

The membership of the Economic Development Advisory Board includes: nine (9) voting members and up to six (6) ex-officio non-voting members.
Three of the ex-officio members shall be the Mayor, City Manager, and the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mesa Chamber of Commerce.
[the mayor and city manager, and some others, were not present at today's meeting]
Three may be City of Mesa representatives that are currently sitting on the Greater Phoenix Economic Council Board of Directors.
List of members, meeting agendas and meetings can be found here >> EDAB webpage



Bill Jabjiniak with some EDAB members leaning in 

Jabjiniak briefly went over Greater Phoenix Economic Council [GPEC] activities with more details coming in the first quarter.
More time was taken to discuss the continuing economic development benefits from capital investments in H.E.A.T.
- Healthcare
- Higher Education
- Aerospace/Aviation/Defense
- Tourism and Technology
Mesa's Office of Economic Development is guided by these vital industries of opportunity. [see earlier posts for 2016 trends on December 30, 2015 on this site]
A new brochure was handed to EDAB members that answered the question Why HEAT?
 Building on community strengths, quality infrastructure, talented workforce, projected growth, and global market trends, the City of Mesa is already growing and realizing benefits in each industry [sector] of the local economy".
This post is not a "quick jab" at cheerleading [no shaking pompoms] . . . people need to examine the gathering and sourcing of data and question the dependent variables; for example Higher education, with a significant impact on producing the talented workforce that all those sectors want and need to recruit for job-hiring simply cannot deliver the "talented workforce"  due to state budget cuts for education.



Janet Woolum with laptop

Also on the agenda this morning were two presentations:
- WhatWorksCities - Open Data
by Janet Woolum, Mesa's performance administrator who used to work at the AZ Office of Tourism and the Arizona Commerce Authority
- Website Analytics
by Kim Lofgreen, Marketing and Business Development Manager for the City of Mesa.
[There was a You Tube video posted on this blogsite on December 30,2015 uploaded by WhatWorksCities for information purposes]

WhatWorksCities - Open Data
Not off to a good start at the meeting . .  simple graphs that a savvy secondary-school student could do - like plotting median household income for Mesa and Maricopa County from 2005 to 2015 - showing lower growth than in 2008 - were used to show improved prosperity - Huh? Go figure.
In the study of statistics there is a significant difference between the median household income and the average per capita income. Likewise, as one advisory board pointed out, there may be a difference in the number of wage earners living in a household for Maricopa County compared with those numbers in Mesa - important data apparently not discovered.
There was no sense of urgency in the room at all when a visual graphic for 2009-2014 with data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the American Community Survey [public sources available online to anyone] showed that in just the last five years 
Residents of Mesa 
living below the poverty line increased by 50% . . . Huh? Improved prosperity??  Improving people's lives?

[Ms. Woolum entertained many questions and suggestions from advisory board members present about what types of data sources are used and combined in the development of Open Data to help the City of Mesa "elevate and accelerate the use of data and evidence to engage citizens, make government more effective (that is do what works) and improve people's lives".]

WhatWorksCities has been featured in many posts on this blog.
Readers are invited to take a look and use the links provided in the posts on this site.
Mesa was invited to join in August 2015 with eight other cities.
Readers of this blog might want to make sure that both they and  the nine leaders appointed to the WhatWorksCities leadership board here in Mesa get familiar with online resources accessed from The Center for Government http://centerforgov.org/

Your Guide to Open Data
Free guides created by GovEx staff to help your city leverage the use of data to increase transparency, improve decision-making, and deliver results.
Other guides include
Benchmarking
Discovering Data
Getting Meta with Metadata

Website Analytics
Kim Lofgreen's presentation to the Economic Development Board 01/05/2016 started off with definitions of analytic terms to track hits on the website for the City of Mesa's Economic Development lead page: http://mesaaz.gov/business/economic-development
Data was retrieved for Aug 13-Dec 31, 2015 or 153 days in total.
[Information in this post was extracted from a six-page hand-out provided to those in attendance at the EDAB meeting on Tuesday, January 05,2016]

Kim Lofgreen/mesaaz.gov

Space in this post is limited, so let's just take a look at the metrics  [the what] provided for the lead page with the link above in the five categories:
Business/environment
Business districts and maps
Newsroom
About us
Start-up

Some page-view indicators were also provided.

Here are the definitions for terms used:

• Pageviews - the total number of pages viewed
• Unique Pageviews - the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed as least once
• Average Time on Page - the average amount of time users spent viewing a specified page or screen, or set of pages or screens
• Bounce Rate - the percentage of single-page visits [that's visits in which the user left the page without interacting with the page]

The How Much [with numbers rounded-off]
It's important to note in measuring the effectiveness of the City of Mesa's Office for Economic Development website that more than half of users visiting the main or lead page Mesas.gov/economic-development/ - 60.58% to be exact - left the page in 1:37 and did not interact with the page.
Take a look at the lead page here >> http://mesaaz.gov/business/economic-development
[more than half of potential information-seekers were lost]
A reasonable question to ask: Is the design of the lead page effective or producing the desired outcomes?
Furthermore, for about 15,000 unique page views over the course of 150 days = 100 views per day. When you factor in the percentage who left and made a choice not to interact with the page, that leaves about 62 users per day.
Information about Start-Up /start-up/ [a highly-publicized program for helping new businesses] had the least unique page views at 607 with 66.6% [about 470] leaving the page after the longest time spent 2:46 - that adds up to only 137 users in 153 days.
Users were somewhat curious about the business environment and the business district maps [again more than left half and didn't interact with the page]. 
The /newsroom/ was the least accessed with about 1500 unique page views over 150 days, but again with a high bounce rate [57.7%] which means that only about 750 viewers stayed on the page for an average of 1:41 minutes. - an average of only five views per day

The Q4 Economic Reporter Newsletter for Oct-Dec 2015 got 526 unique page views for an average view time of 3:43 [the longest in any item], but again with a high bounce rate = 60.2% where users left the site without interacting with the page.

However, in that stat, the extension /news/ had the significantly lower bounce rate = 8.6%.and there were some page-hit success stories where Infographics were highlighted in both the presentation and table-talk for spikes in use count in four examples:
1. mesaaz.gov/economic/business-district-maps/fiesta-district showing 85 page views on Wed Nov 4, 2015
2. /key industries/medical-devices showing 40 page views from Nov 30-Dec 17
3. /start-up/mesa-sizeup showing 72 page views on Wed September 9, 2015
4. /available-real-estate/mesa-sitesearch showing 72 page views on Wed Sept 9, 2015

 

 

 

/

NuSTAR Finds Cosmic Clumpy Doughnut Around Black Hole > WTFark?

No, this is for real - in galaxies far, far away from MotherShip Earth.
It comes from one of my favorite sources Aerospace & Defense News

"We don't fully understand why some supermassive black holes are so heavily obscured, or why the surrounding material is clumpy," said co-author Poshak Gandhi of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. "This is a subject of hot research."

The team says that future research will address the question of what causes the unevenness in doughnuts. The answer could come in many flavors. It's possible that a black hole generates turbulence as it chomps on nearby material. Or, the energy given off by young stars could stir up turbulence, which would then percolate outward through the doughnut. Another possibility is that the clumps may come from material falling onto the doughnut. As galaxies form, material migrates toward the center, where the density and gravity is greatest. The material tends to fall in clumps, almost like a falling stream of water condensing into droplets as it hits the ground.

"We'd like to figure out if the unevenness of the material is being generated from outside the doughnut, or within it," said Gandhi.
"These coordinated observations with NuSTAR and XMM-Newton show yet again the exciting science possible when these satellites work together," said Daniel Stern, NuSTAR project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Find out more >> http://www.asdnews.com/news-65156