Travels in the Riel World

Here is another small example of the value of educational exchange programs. Several teachers from Indonesia had the opportunity to spend some time at a school in the United States and, according to this story, they came away from the experience with a much different view of the U.S. than they had expected.

Three Indonesian educators entered a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Catholic school two weeks ago expecting what they’d seen in American movies: surly teens, self-indulgent adults and violence. They’ll return home on Sunday knowing a common U.S. expression: Don’t believe everything you see on TV.

“I will tell my students that what you see on TV and film is not reality,” said Veri Muhlis Arifuzzaman, 33, who teaches at a small boarding school in a rural village in West Java, Indonesia. “I feel safe here. The people are warm and have good hearts and can receive us as Muslims.” …

Arifuzzaman, Hanifah and Nuning Nur Laila, 29, of East Java, made their first trip to the United States through an exchange program by the East-West Center’s AsiaPacific Ed program. The goal is for Asian and American educators to learn from each other and abandon stereotypes.

It’s no surprise that the French have a complicated relationship with the United States. One that is certainly reciprocated, as the Americans and the French seem to both love and detest what is most unique about the other’s country. This love-hate dynamic is uniquely examined through the prism of politics in a recent essayby Steven Erlanger in the International Herald Tribune.

An excerpt:

The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.

They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”

But this year has been difficult for the French. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama - black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world - has sent many French into a swoon.

But the combination of two recent surprises - Governor Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown - has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.

These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President George W. Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom.

Even worse, from the French perspective, Americans are reckless optimists, incurably blind to the tragedy of life, to the weary convolutions of history and thus to the need for lengthy August vacations and financial regulations.

A few months ago, I had a post about the personality traits of cities. Now along comes a study on the personality traits of states, so perhaps there is something to this whole concept. The Wall Street Journal has the story.

Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.

But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Even after controlling for variables such as race, income and education levels, a state’s dominant personality turns out to be strongly linked to certain outcomes. Amiable states, like Minnesota, tend to be lower in crime. Dutiful states — an eclectic bunch that includes New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah — produce a disproportionate share of mathematicians. States that rank high in openness to new ideas are quite creative, as measured by per-capita patent production. But they’re also high-crime and a bit aloof. Apparently, Californians don’t much like socializing, the research suggests.

As for high-anxiety states, that group includes not just Type A New York and New Jersey, but also states stressed by poverty, such as West Virginia and Mississippi. As a group, these neurotic states tend to have higher rates of heart disease and lower life expectancy.

Lead researcher Peter Jason Rentfrow, lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, said he was startled to find such correlations. “That just blew me away,” he said.

Psychologists unaffiliated with the study say it’s intriguing but limited. There’s no way to unravel the chicken-and-egg question: Do states tend to nurture specific personalities because of their histories, cultures, even climates? Or do Americans, seeking kindred spirits, migrate to the states where they feel at home?

When one thinks of ancient civilizations in the Americas, it tends to be of those societies that left behind spectacular ruins. The Incas of Peru, the Mayans of Mexico and Central America, or even the Pueblo people of the U.S. Southwest who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Not many minds conjure up images of advanced Indian civilizations in the Midwestern United States.

In fact, though, archaeologists continue to produce evidence that large societies not only inhabited this region, but also built large edifices in the form of mounds that are only now being understood and appreciated. Check out this article for an in-depth tour of some of these sites.

The earthworks left behind by the long vanished civilizations of the Midwest are harder to spot than the pueblos and kivas of Arizona and New Mexico. For a long time many of them were hidden in plain sight or dismissed as little more than heaps of soil. But the more today’s archaeologists learn about the Midwestern mounds, the more intriguing is the picture that emerges from 1,000 or more years ago: a city with thousands of people just a few miles from present-day St. Louis, a 1,348-foot earthen serpent that points to the summer solstice, artifacts made of materials that could only have arrived over lengthy trade routes.

The mound builders lived over a wide area. But on a road trip of a few days in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, you can get a sampling of their work — and, along the way, find some modern-day diversions. Start from St. Louis, which early European settlers called Mound City because of the Indian constructions that were soon flattened to build the modern city.

How well do you know your U.S. geography? Here is a unique geography quiz that doesn’t ask you to identify locations, but rather gives you outlines of each state and then asks you to place them onto a map. Then it shows you where the state is actually located and tallies your average error in miles. Maddening but fun.

Wandering is ingrained in the American soul. There is a transience inherent in the U.S. which is somewhat exhilarating and sad at the same time, as it reflects both the rootlessness of millions of people but also the unique capacity of Americans to do or be almost anything they desire.

The NY Times recently published an intriguing article about this cultural trait. It looks at the topic through the prism of Barack Obama’s diverse family background, but the story describes an important element of the American character in ways that go far beyond politics.

The migrations never stop. Even today, 2 in 10 households in the nation move every 15 months to two years — a restlessness unique among the people of a developed nation.

“Unrootedness is, and always has been, part and parcel of being American,” Arnold Rampersad, a professor at Stanford University and biographer of Ralph Ellison and Hughes, said in an e-mail message. “It is the flip side of perhaps the defining aspect of Americanness, the capacity of its citizens to reinvent themselves.” …

None of which is to argue, precisely, that Americans are at peace with the rootless…“You might say Americans are conflicted within themselves,” said Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University. “There is a long and often sentimental tradition of celebrating the small town” — Andy Griffith’s Mayberry — “as the right kind of place to grow up and become morally solid.” At the same time, Mr. Delbanco notes, there is “a no less strong tradition of regarding the small town as airless and imprisoning.”

There is much more in the entire article. Check it out.

Here is another entry for an expanding collection of posts about the character and culture of various cities.  Charles Johnson is a writer and professor who has lived in Seattle since the 1970s, and he described his vision and experience of this city in an essay for Smithsonian Magazine. An excerpt:

Former UW president William Gerberding once referred to the Northwest as “this little civilized corner of the world,” and I think he was right. The “spirit of place” (to borrow a phrase from D. H. Lawrence) is civility, or at least the desire to appear civil in public, which is saying a great deal. The people—and especially artists—in this region tend to be highly independent and tolerant.

My former student and native Northwesterner David Guterson, author of the best-selling novel Snow Falling on Cedars, recently told me that the people who first journeyed this far west—so far that if they kept going they’d fall into the Pacific Ocean—came mainly to escape other people. Their descendants are respectful of the individual and of different cultural backgrounds and at the same time protect their privacy. They acknowledge tradition but don’t feel bound by it. As physically far removed as they are from cultural centers in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles (the distance from those places is both physical and psychic), they are not inclined to pay much attention to fashions or the opinions of others and instead pursue their own singular visions…Jonathan Raban, an immigrant from England, captures the ambience of this book-hungry city perfectly:

“It was something in the disposition of the landscape, the shifting lights and colours of the city. Something. It was hard to nail it, but this something was a mysterious gift that Seattle made to every immigrant who cared to see it. Wherever you came from, Seattle was queerly like home….It was an extraordinarily soft and pliant city. If you went to New York, or to Los Angeles, or even to Guntersville [Alabama], you had to fit yourself to a place whose demands were hard and explicit. You had to learn the school rules. Yet people who came to Seattle could somehow recast it in the image of home, arranging the city around themselves like so many pillows on a bed. One day you’d wake up to find things so snug and familiar that you could easily believe that you’d been born here.”

In other words, this is an ideal environment for nurturing innovation, individualism and the creative spirit.

I’ve had some posts in recent months about the character and personality of cities. It never really occurred to me, however, that these character traits could make a city resistant to a recycling program. But that seems to be the conclusion of this story about the startlingly low recycling rate in Houston, Texas.

While most large American cities have started ambitious recycling programs that have sharply reduced the amount of trash bound for landfills, Houston has not. The city’s shimmering skyline may wear the label of the world’s energy capital, but deep in Houston’s Dumpsters lies a less glamorous superlative: It is the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities.

Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively.

Houston officials - even those who favor recycling - place a large part of the blame for this issue on the city’s sense of independence and aversion to government regulations.

“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. “Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated.” …

“I’m a Texan, and it pains me that we still have the Old Western mentality,” said Tex Corley, the chief executive of Strategic Materials, the nation’s largest glass recycler, which is based in Houston.

Well, there you go. Some cities promote walking and mass transit, while others shun recycling as just another unnecessary government mandate.

It’s all too easy sometimes to focus on all of the interesting travel destinations abroad and to miss some of the equally interesting locations in our own country. That point was driven home by two recent travel features in different newspapers.

First, the Boston Globe raved about West Coast beaches in this article. Or, specifically, about Laguna Beach outside of Los Angeles.

Sapphire sky, car windows open, radio blasting top-10 hits from the ’60s. Turning off the freeway from Los Angeles - where the road stretches endless and flat - the hills of Laguna Canyon rise up so green and vibrant I have to take off my sunglasses to see whether the color is real. It is.

Eventually, wildflowers and boulders give way to civilization as houses appear atop sandstone ridges. The air grows cooler and before I can sing another chorus of “California Dreamin’ ” there it is, the great Pacific, wide and muscular and dazzling in the midday sun.

I’m certainly not the first traveler to be seduced by Laguna Beach’s charms. Since the late 1800s this 7-mile stretch of sandy coastline resting below rolling cliffs about 50 miles south of Los Angeles has attracted tourists and travelers, including many artists who made the town their home.

Today, besides the landscape’s raw beauty, and the town’s well-preserved architecture and independent shops, Laguna Beach hosts an arts community that imparts a funky, if upscale, authenticity that’s getting harder to find in a homogenized world.

Then, the Los Angeles Times explored a different region of the country in this story about the wonders of train rides through Alaska.

The Alaska Railroad slices up the middle of the state like a bolt of blue and yellow lightning, into the belly of a place that is camera-ready and bountiful beyond belief.

The rail line begins in the little seaport of Seward, chug-a-lugs up to Anchorage, past Denali National Park and Preserve and finally to Fairbanks, an almost 500-mile jaunt of day trips throughout Alaska’s short, short summer.

Why the train? Because, unless you’re a moose or have moose tendencies, parts of the 49th state are accessible only by rail.

Why the train? Well, does your rental car come with a bartender? Or a fresh-faced young tour guide? The train is also an affordable throwback — comfy, almost clubby, with way more wiggle room than a 737 and none of the flight crew psychosis.

Friday is the 4th of July and U.S. Independence Day. For many Americans, that means a party and a backyard barbecue. In Texas, though, which has its own unique culture within the U.S., the word barbecue takes on a particularly special meaning. Bonny Wolf explains it in a feature for NPR’s Kitchen Window.

It’s the Fourth of July and time for a barbecue. Like many Americans, I thought “barbecue” meant throwing a few hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. Then I moved to Texas.

The word “barbecue” has a whole different meaning there. For one thing, it is a noun, not a verb. “Let’s go out for some barbecue,” therefore, makes perfect sense.

In Texas, barbecue is not just a food — it is an icon, an ideal, a way of life. If you’re not a Texan, the assumption is that you just don’t get it.

The process is pretty simple: Get a huge slab of meat covered in fat, get the coals ready, slap the meat on the grate, cover and cook for a couple of days…

In a state that’s bigger than France and that has a strong independent streak, though, it’s hard to reach agreement on recipes and styles. Does oak or mesquite work best? Should the meat be cooked for 10 hours or two days? These are still raging controversies in the Lone Star state.

Check out the entire story for more in-depth reading about Texas-style barbecue, including a few recipes.

The United States is renowned for having a culture that rewards risk-taking and innovation. This is so ingrained into the culture that it’s easy to forget it’s actually a somewhat unique trait that is not always so easily replicated elsewhere. Here’s a reminder of that, buried in a NY Times profile of scientist-businessman John Kao.

Before long he had written dozens of the kinds of case studies that are the basis of the school’s teaching and had organized a course on entrepreneurship, creativity and organizations.

Many of his cases were about failures — individuals under pressure, partnerships unraveling, learning through trial and error and so on. Today, Dr. Kao says failure’s relative lack of stigma is “a unique aspect of U.S. culture” that does not exist even in countries like Singapore or Finland, both clients and both, he said, “relatively hip.”

“There’s a saying in Silicon Valley,” he said. “If you haven’t gone bankrupt a couple of times you are not trying hard enough. It’s part of our national advantage.”

I’ve always been intrigued by the character of different cities. Every urban environment, it seems, has a different vibe, a unique feel. The coffeehouses of Seattle, the universities of Boston, the Latin beat of Miami. Each place has such unique traits that it’s not possible to mistake one for another, and individuals who love one city may actually feel somewhat off kilter in a different environment.

Therefore, I read with interest this recent essay that I stumbled across by Paul Graham, titled “Cities and Ambition,” in which he discusses the characters and ambitions of various cities. An excerpt:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone…

The big thing in LA seems to be fame. There’s an A List of people who are most in demand right now, and what’s most admired is to be on it, or friends with those who are. Beneath that the message is much like New York’s, though perhaps with more emphasis on physical attractiveness.

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There’s an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected.

O.K., so cities have different characters. Does it matter, though, where you live? Well, it depends. According to Graham, it could matter a lot.

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment…But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time…

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do…

Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won’t know for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear it. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It’s an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn’t like the people there…You’ll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

What do you think?

I’ve posted previously on the topic of medical tourism, that growing health care field where people travel to a country such as India or Thailand for medical treatments because the care is both excellent and inexpensive. But while it’s a great deal for Westerners or others who get quality care for less than it would cost them at home, the reality is that the same level of care is not always available for locals, as this article in the International Herald Tribune notes.

“To get the best care,” Robin Steeles said gamely, “you gotta pay for it.”

Steeles, 60, a car dealer from Daphne, Alabama, had flown halfway around the world last month to save his heart, at a price he could pay. He had a mitral valve repaired at a state-of-the-art private hospital here, called Wockhardt, and for 10 days, he was recuperating in a carpeted, wood-paneled room, with a view of a leafy green courtyard.

A dietician helped select his meals. A dermatologist came as soon as he complained of an itch. His “Royal Suite” had cable TV, a computer and a minirefrigerator, where an attendant had that afternoon stashed some ice cream, for when he felt hungry later. Three days after surgery, he was sitting in a chair, smiling, chattering, thrilled to be alive.

On his bed lay the morning’s paper. Dominating its front page was the story of other men, many of them day laborers who laid bricks and mixed cement for Bangalore’s construction boom, who had fallen gravely ill after drinking illegally brewed liquor. All told, more than 150 died that week, here and in neighboring Tamil Nadu State.

Not for them the care of India’s best private hospitals. They had been wheeled in by wives and brothers to the overstretched government-run Bowring Hospital, on the other side of town. Bowring had no intensive care unit, no ventilators, no dialysis machine. Dinner was a stack of white bread, on which a healthy cockroach crawled while a patient, named Yelappa, slept…

Where you stand on the Indian social ladder shapes to a large degree what kind of health you’re in, and what kind of health care you receive.

The irony, which the writer points out, is that while Mr. Steeles was able to get excellent treatment in India, he went there only because he fell through the cracks of the U.S. health care system. In their own ways, the systems of both countries were failing to meet the needs of all their citizens.

…as far apart as they were, their tales followed a somewhat parallel plot. The American health care system could no more care for Steeles than the Indian system could for Amin.

Steeles came here because he is uninsured and could not afford heart surgery in the United States, he said, without liquidating most of his assets. After five months of research and e-mail messages to doctors worldwide, he chose a heart surgeon here in Bangalore.

“I’m over here for a fraction of what I would have paid in the United States,” he said. “In my personal situation, I’m just delighted I took the road that I did.”

Steeles’ Royal Suite, incidentally, is available to anyone, Indian or foreigner, who can pay for it. After his stay here, he would move to a room at a private club for 16 days of further recovery, before flying home. All told, he said it cost him about $20,000, a tenth of what he would have paid at a private American hospital.

U.S. News and World Report has a story this week that explores how the multicultural nature and “aloha spirit” of Hawaii helped shape the beliefs of Barack Obama as a young man. It’s a glimpse into the culture of one of the most famous but perhaps least understood states in the U.S. An excerpt from the article:

In Hawaii, they call it Barack Obama’s ohana or family—a reference to his philosophy that America at its best should be a big, harmonious community like his idealized version of the Aloha State, where he was born and spent his boyhood and adolescence.

Of course, Hawaii has its own history of conflict and prejudice, but that’s not the part of the islands’ culture that Obama chooses to emphasize. Instead, it is the parallel tradition of respect for diversity, tolerance, and inclusion that he prizes as a model for what he hopes to bring to the country if he wins the presidency this fall. In fact, his Hawaiian background is, in many ways, a key to understanding who the Democratic front-runner really is and what an Obama presidency would mean.

There are other important parts of Obama’s past that also provide insight into his values and his modus operandi, but Obama says the “aloha spirit” remains his personal and political inspiration.

“I do think that the multicultural nature of Hawaii helped teach me how to appreciate different cultures and navigate different cultures, out of necessity,” Obama says. “That carries over now to the work that I do because obviously that’s part of my job, not just as a candidate but also as a senator. The second thing that I’m certain of is that what people often note as my even temperament I think draws from Hawaii. People in Hawaii generally don’t spend a lot of time, you know, yelling and screamin’ at each other. I think that there just is a cultural bias toward courtesy and trying to work through problems in a way that makes everybody feel like they’re being listened to. And I think that reflects itself in my personality as well as my political style.”

It’s natural to assume that the process of assimilating immigrants into a new society is a difficult one that is only achieved over the long term, if at all. A new study, however, which was conducted by a Duke economist, puts a few dents in that notion. According to this story, today’s U.S. immigrants are assimilating faster than their predecessors in previous decades and centuries - despite starting from a more disadvantaged position.

It’s the American Melting Pot, version 2.0.

A wide-ranging and provocative new study of immigrants’ integration into U.S. society has concluded that newcomers today are assimilating more quickly than their predecessors did 100 years ago — with Cubans, Vietnamese and Filipinos among those leading the way…

The study found that today’s newcomers are at this point less integrated than their counterparts 100 years ago. That’s likely because those immigrants a century ago were largely European, with one of the largest groups coming from England, and thus started out with cultural and economic levels closer to that of native-born Americans. By contrast, today’s newcomers, who are mostly from Asia and Latin America, start off further behind, Vigdor said.

But today’s immigrants are making faster progress. As a result, even as immigration has skyrocketed, assimilation has remained stable, Vigdor concluded. “This is something unprecedented in the United States,” he said.

All the news was not positive, however. The study determined that Mexicans, who are the most numerous of new immigrants, also have the most difficulty assimilating, perhaps because of the continuing immigration debate and the related legal issues.

Mexicans — by far the most numerous nationality — lag significantly behind other big immigrant groups, possibly because a lack of legal status keeps many Mexican immigrants from advancing.

“The bottom line is, there are some encouraging things and some things to be concerned about, but the nation’s capacity to integrate new immigrants is strong,” said the study’s author.

Do you enjoy living someplace that is walkable? It’s important if you like to walk to restaurants and shops, if you harbor a desire to walk to work, or even if you just enjoy walking for fitness.

The act of walking may also be helpful in much bigger ways. Paul Krugman has a column in today’s New York Times about the environmental and economic benefits of walking and of taking public transit, given fast-rising gas prices. He reported on the topic from Berlin, and had this to say:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require … changing how and where many of us live.  To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Now, of course, some U.S. cities are actually friendly to pedestrians. But which ones? Lucky for us, Prevention magazine has already done a study on this and ranked the best cities in the country (and in each state) based on which were the most walkable. 

In all, Prevention ranked 500 cities. Of these, the top five were Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These just edged out San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu and a few other urban areas for the top spots. Other major cities that scored well include Philadelphia (15), Seattle (23), Denver (24), Portland, Oregon (27) and Austin, Texas (29).

We often talk about the cultures of different regions of the world. We talk less often about the cultures of different regions of one country, though they certainly exist. But what about the psychological characteristics of geographical regions? Is it actually possible that people in New England, for example, have not only different traditions and foods than do people from the Sun Belt, but also a different psychological outlook on life?

Richard Florida thinks so. In a fascinating recent article for the Boston Globe, Florida talked about how certain personality traits actually cluster in particular cities or regions. An excerpt:

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

What’s more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation…

Interestingly, America’s psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.

The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first - was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? - the overlay is clear…

While opposites sometimes really do attract, and it is possible to make unusual matches work, our research indicates that people are typically happier in places with higher concentrations of personality types like their own.

Check out the entire story. There is a lot of food for thought in there.

There was a nice op-ed column in the Arizona Daily Star a few days ago by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, pointing out the need for the military to have training in and an understanding of other cultures. It’s nice to know that at least some members of Congress have this awareness. Here are some key excerpts from her opinion piece:

…in this post-9/11 world our military faces new and unconventional enemies. This different kind of warfare requires skills not normally taught in basic training: cultural awareness and language proficiency…

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca is the Army’s only chartered cultural training center for non-special operations personnel. The center is geared toward training Army soldiers to develop cultural expertise and “cross-cultural competence,” not just awareness. It conducts intensive training for soldiers in languages such as Arabic and Farsi.

Unfortunately, only about 3,500 regular Army soldiers, among more than a half-million active duty personnel, are able to participate in Fort Huachuca’s cultural-training program each year…

This is why I am drafting legislation to increase the number of service men and women with these critical skills. My bill would provide financial incentives for cadets in officer training programs, and reservists taking advantage of GI Bill benefits, to study foreign languages and culture as a part of their academic programs.

Success in the conflicts of the 21st century requires well-educated, well-trained and adaptable warriors — men and women who are as comfortable speaking foreign languages and understanding diverse societies as they are in t