U.S. Cities Don't Make the Intelligence Cut

coondoggie writes "For the second year running, no U.S. city has made the list of the world's top Intelligent Communities of 2007, as selected by global think tank Intelligent Community Forum. The ICF selects the Intelligent Community list based on how advanced the communities are in deploying broadband, building a knowledge-based workforce, combining government and private-sector "digital inclusion," fostering innovation and marketing economic development."

Nothing to see here. move along.

[dfenstrate]

The Intelligent Community Forum is basically rating cities on how much they consume the services of the IT people who make up the forum. Think of it as marketing for the IT 'Guild.'

It has little to do with the actual overall quality of a community in anyway except the dollar amount of the IT salaries they pay out of tax money. Though, I suppose, slashdot would be the place for this sort of thing.

Cleveland?

[etnu]

Sorry, anyone who thinks that Cleveland is the most "intelligent" city in the U.S....probably lives in Cleveland. I'm sure there are some intelligent people there, but my experience (20 years of it) was that it was a mostly-dead rust belt city full of drunks and young people who just wanted to move to new york, la, or san francisco. The only other city on this list that I've been to is the ontario area, which, while decent, was far from one of the most "intelligent" cities. How many of these "intelligent" cities have fostered innovative new companies in the last century? How many play host to world class universities? More innovative products come out every year from cities like Tokyo and New York than all the other cities on the list combined. What a stupid article.

Re:TV rots your brain

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot more educational content on YouTube than you'll ever find on most American TV channels.

There are numerous foreign language courses on YouTube, for instance. There's a lot of foreign language content, as well, which is very valuable when trying to learn another language. In America, you'll rarely find anything other than English or Spanish being used in the vast, vast majority of TV programming.

There are also a number of instructional videos that teach one how to play various musical instruments. Again, that's something you just won't see on American TV.

If all you watch on YouTube is Family Guy clips and anime, no, you probably won't become any more intelligent. But if you use YouTube to access content that you'd never see on American TV, then you likely will become wiser, more talented, and better aware of the world around you.

Re:Incorrect

[Gromius]

Well the UK had two as well. Admittedly one in Scotland, one in England and these could be argued to be separate nations but still.

Re:Tallinn, Estonia

[repvik]

If you want talk "beating pants off technologically" you might want to take a look see about which countries make high performance micro processors.

Yeah, like Dresden,Germany (AMD plant), Taiwan (AMD Plant), Bangalore, India (AMD Engineering center). Or Intel's plant in Ireland.

Regarding cellphones though. The US really is behind other "developed" countries.

Re:Of course!

[LarsWestergren]

I'd like to see a study that shows which cities have the most number of universities and the number of successful startups and successful large companies in it.
How about which cities have the highest number of employed people with degrees...

I agree, that would be much more intersting, so I Googled for it. Didn't find one for cities, but I did find it for countries. Go wild [nationmaster.com].

Re:Incorrect

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Canada is a lot more than two nations. [wikipedia.org]

Estonia == Nokia?

[Iloinen Lohikrme]

Could you enlighten little more about the connection between Nokia and Estonia? It's true that many Nokias partners and contractors moved their manufacturing businesses to Estonia and even R&D units, but if I recall correctly, Nokia itself didn't build any manufacturing or R&D units to the country.

To this day, the only place where Nokia has had very deep impact on whole society has been Finland and in here the impact has been concentrated primarily to Helsinki, Tampere and Oulu.

Re:TV rots your brain

[Altus]

I cant speak for other countries but Japan has TV shows designed to teach English.

Not that I actually think that TV in Japan, or any other country, is really all that different from what we see here. TV, like everything else, is mostly crap.