This morning, Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled New York City's long-awaited Big Apps contest. Big Apps seeks to promote the Internet industry in the Big Apple (it's sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation) and make local government more transparent.

Ed Glaeser of Harvard University, who has written much over the last decade on the economics of cities and knowledge industries, has a good op-ed on the New York Times website today explaining why the city is likely to weather the recession well:

Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.

I could hardly say it more succinctly.

Vertical farms finally make the move from cybergreen fantasy to the pages of the New York Times. The logic is seductive: urban towers, filled not with more offices and apartments, but with food crops.

Last fall, I reported on Alberto Barabasi's research using mobile phones to track large-scale human mobility patterns after seeing him give a paper on the topic in Budapest. That paper has now been published in Nature, and there is a public summary in Nature News.