OT: Smartest Cities
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/25/smartest-cities-in-america/
Ann Arbor made the list as the 6th.
Naturally everything should be taken with a grain of salt because this was the result of Lumosity which is a self selected sample of people that play those brain games. Still these are fun to use to compare various college towns. I say college towns as the list skews that way for obvious reasons.
The PDF report can be found here.
SEC! SEC! SEC!
Cool, but all these 'Top X' lists are becoming useless... anyone with a computer is putting them together using whatever criteria they want and people then think it is useful/valid... So few of these "top" rankings are actually well researched or thought out.
Columbus is consistently rated as one of the country's most intelligent cities
question the criteria...
This list doesn't go south of the Mason Dixon line until #11, and then rarely thereafter.
It's obviously a weird list because there are smart cities everywhere, but the fact that noted "smart" towns like A2, Ithaca, Madison, etc. pop up give it some credence. And given how big the region is, I'm impressed Boston/Cambridge/Newton scored so high. Having lived there before and having family there now, not a surprise, but that's an order of magnitude bigger of a sample size compared to lots of the places on the list.
The fact that no city in the Bay Area made the list just means no one plays Lumosity here. Any reasonable list would have Palo Alto, San Francisco, Mountain View, Berkeley, and probably Menlo Park on it.
Auburn Hills.
Houhgton MI makes me laugh...
The age group breakdown is rather interesting - 5th in Under 35, 14th in 35-55 and 16th in the 55 and up group, but the median score only falls a few points across those groups. We were also 5th in "Flexibility", 28th in "Memory" and 12th in "Problem Solving". Third overall in "Speed" is not a bad showing either.
Looking at the skew towards college towns, I wonder how closely it would correlate to educational attainment data from the census. A convenient example - as I recall from the last census, about 95% of adults in Ann Arbor who are 25 and over have at least a high school diploma, about 70% have at least a bachelor's and about 40% have a masters or better.
I wouldn't look too much into this study. Yahoo posted a completely different list of "The Smartest Cities in America" today also.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-smartest-cities-in-america-195444032.html?page=all
...because when I hear references to smart cities these days I assume they are talking about a city's communication and social infrastructure, not the actual intelligence of the people living in the city. Here is a list that's closer to what I had in mind: Freshome's 10 most impressive smart cities on earth.