Smartest Cities---(here's your grain)

[comfortably numb]

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/25/smartest-cities-in-america/

[MadisonIndyFan]

Lived/worked in 6 of them

#8 - Madison, WI
#12 - Appleton, WI
#20 - Houghton, MI
#51 - Oshkosh-Neenah, WI
#54 - Fond du Lac, WI
#79 - Grand Rapids, MI

[Colin Grigson]

They got 4 and 5 wrong. It should be Ames before Iowa City.

Go Cyclones

[rodneyh]

Since Stanford is ranked in another of their studies as one of the Top 5 smartest colleges, I assume it's people like me(work in Palo Alto) and others at places like Google, HP, Facebook, Intel, etc. bring it down that surrounding cities can't even crack the Top 100 cities.

[don7031]

List of places where people shelter in their houses most of the year.

[MadisonIndyFan]

List of places where people shelter in their houses most of the year.

It does seem to have a lot of Midwestern cities...I'd like to believe that, but I don't think I do.

[Ren Butler]

You always have to worry about the methodology of these types of studies.

But because I generally like the results, I'm going to assume the methodology is sound.

[Mario4ever]

B1G

[FTHurley]

Interesting idea, and I like the idea of using an online test to gather the data. One problem is that they used a minimum number of users cutoff to determine whether they could include a city. They needed 500 users from an area, but getting 500 users in, say, Chicago, is vastly different from getting 500 users in, say, Ithaca.

Also, Ithaca's population of people who might use Lumosity I suspect correlates more strongly with people with both good internet access and more free time (college students) than might Chicago's (adults with jobs), even if Chicago has a metric ****-ton more people with advanced degrees and other impressive intellectual and academic accomplishments.

That said, my baby sister is an Ithaca College grad, so I'm good with this list.

[Davydd]

You always have to worry about the methodology of these types of studies.

But because I generally like the results, I'm going to assume the methodology is sound.

We know the methodology is slanted toward college towns and we know the sampling is approximately 1% (3 million) of our population. But what else do we know how the sampling is done, how many, who is chosen, etc.? Is there a proportionate sample between a 25,000 population college town and New York City's 8 million? Too many questions to take this as serious. But obviously a college town has a lot more smarter people proportionately. It better have.

[Ren Butler]

It doesn't matter. This is the Internet, and the results please me.