<p>I’m with you, jrcsmom. Don’t come to Indiana expecting a lively intellectual scene. The only reason dh and I raised a family here was the closeness of family and frugal living. Most of my kids can’t wait to live somewhere with more respect for intellectual curiosity, arts and culture. The majority of hoosiers appreciate sports but those that appreciate the arts and intellectual pursuits are in the minority.</p>
<p>This is awesome… C-Ville in number 1!? It’s gonna be great being surrounded by so many “brainy” people when I go to college at UVa! :)</p>
<p>@absweetmarie </p>
<p>If we’re in agreement that in proper statistical analysis you can not extrapolate the results of a study with a non-random sample to a larger population, then I guess I don’t understand why these results are even remotely interesting.</p>
<p>If there were an athletic event, say a running race, and it involved participants from every state and the winner was from X - that doesn’t indicate that the best runners are in X, it doesn’t even indicate that there are any other people in X that can run apart from the person that won. It just shows that that single participant was indeed a good runner.</p>
<p>If there were a trivia contest open to participation to people across the country and based on everyone that chose to participate, the winner was from Y, it doesn’t indicate that the smartest people are from Y, it doesn’t indicate that the people from Y know the most trivia, it doesn’t indicate that anyone in Y knows anything except for that one person that chose to participate in the contest and happened to win. All it shows is that one person is really good at trivia games.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t see what’s interesting about that…</p>
<p>BCEagle91,</p>
<p>I can imagine the people at Lumosity don’t have the time to look up hundreds of cities and decide what zip codes (I can imagine that’s one of the key fields in the database) belong to what cities etc. So my guess is they just used data from places like U.S. Census Bureau for their mapping. That way, all they have to do is to just overlay the data set with scores vs zip codes on top of the data set with zip codes vs metro areas and the mapping would be generated in minutes. </p>
<p>This is just one of those things one do on the fly; it’s not some serious scientific study. It’s meant to be quick and dirty.</p>
<p>jrcsmom </p>
<p>The interesting thing is that the general public love stuff like that. When it comes to most rankings, the standard for bias is pretty low. Otherwise, no ranking will get published. 
As long as it’s not too obvious, it will get published and then receive attention.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There’s a lot of smart people in Durham, since Duke is there. There’s also a lot of smart people in Chapel Hill, since that’s where UNC is.</p>
<p>Metro Atlanta should be on this… Cobb is ranked as the 12th most educated county in the nation!</p>
<p>Colorado is ranked fourth in college degrees percentage (adults). That surprised me.</p>
<p>Here in Boulder, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone with a PHD. </p>
<p>I noticed that Denver/Boulder are not on the list of brainiest cities. I guess the folks in Denver/Boulder are smart enough to put aside Lumos Lab’s computer games and get outside to do something real. 'Course that would also be why we routinely wind up on the fittest cities lists.</p>
<p>Huh, I live in Cedar Rapids; could have fooled me…</p>
<p>So you’re looking for a “brainy” place to go to college, eh? I hear this backwater called Cambridge has some nice community colleges, if you don’t get into UT-Austin. </p>
<p>I see what happened here: Lumos calculated this list based on the players of online games (!) and where the company thinks they play them. Based on this, we are going to infer the quality of higher education communities in those cities. I see no problem with this method; carry on knowing your study has been peer-reviewed!</p>
<p>Edit: Okay, so half of Cedar Rapids’ population consists of engineers. Everyone else dresses like Larry the Cable guy in public, and I haven’t even started on Waterloo (remember, kids: the emphasis isn’t on the first “ah” sound, it’s on the “loo”, which is coincidentally how Cedar Rapids smells most of the time).</p>
<ol>
<li>Boulder, Colo.</li>
<li>Ann Arbor, Mich.</li>
<li>Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.V.</li>
<li>Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.</li>
<li>San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif.</li>
<li>Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Conn.</li>
<li>San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif.</li>
<li>Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, Mass.-N.H.</li>
<li>Madison, Wis.</li>
<li>Raleigh-Cary, N.C.</li>
</ol>
<p>[The</a> 10 Most Educated U.S. Cities - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/08/30/the-10-most-educated-us-cities-boulder-ann-arbor-and-washington-dc-top-the-list]The”>http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/08/30/the-10-most-educated-us-cities-boulder-ann-arbor-and-washington-dc-top-the-list)</p>
<p>That makes a lot more sense rhg3rd.</p>
<p>Okay, Boston and Cambridge I understand. But Quincy, MA? And they throw in NH too?</p>
<h1>3 includes all of West Virginia… mmmmmkayyyy</h1>
<p>I did a search to find the source of the original data that’s feeding the many stories on this study that have been picked up around the Web. Mystery solved. To my chagrin (and embarrassment, as I gave these people the benefit of the doubt), all of these stories are more or less pulling from a news release issued by Lumosity: [Lumosity</a> Unveils America?s Top 25 Smartest Cities](<a href=“http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/6/prweb9572733.htm]Lumosity”>http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/6/prweb9572733.htm)</p>
<p>Apologies to jrcsmom; the Lumosity people have, in fact, promulgated the idea that these data show the “smartest cities” even though, of course, they know the data don’t show that. Ugh. In some ways, I guess, this is good PR because it spawned a bunch of online stories. IMO, as someone who works alongside of PR professionals, it’s bad PR because it’s, well, dishonest. </p>
<p>I was really irritated to find that these grandiose conclusions were, in fact, being trotted out by Lumosity itself rather than having been twisted by the e-news sources. So I sent an email to their PR flak pointing out how their claims aren’t supported by the data (because I am that big of a geek):</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I still think the data are mildly interesting for what they do show: the metro areas with the highest percentage of top-performing Lumosity game players, even as I acknowledge that being good at Lumosity games may or may not amount to a hill of beans. I signed up for a free three-day trial though I dare say I have better things to do than play them (even if they do help my problem-solving and pattern-recognition abilities) this weekend.</p>
<p>Anchorage, Alaska as “brainy?” HAHAHAHAHA what a joke. I only lived there for 18 years and found that in general people there were incredibly uninspiring intellectually. The schools/universities suck there too. And Lansing, Michigan definitely isn’t a brainy place either, unless you lump the nearby towns of East Lansing (MSU) and Okemos with it. Flawed survey to say the least. The U.S. News and World Report is at least relatively accurate based off my personal impression, having been to most of those places</p>
<p>Don’t downgrade the credibility of this by saying Lumosity is just filled with games, and thus shouldn’t be able to define well the cognitive abilities of a population in certain areas. I play Lumosity, and have the highest BPI in the world, and I can promise you the games are neither easy nor fallible into the usual gaming categories of the more popular games we see now-a-days, i.e. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft. The latter games would obviously not suffice to provide what Lumosity is trying to provide, whereas the Lumosity games are solely for the increasing of cognitive abilities, and I can admit that I personally have benefited from them enormously (many others have admitted so, and the research shows it). Moreover, since the amount of people that play Lumosity is so great and diverse, that in itself gives Lumosity a credible standing, regardless of the staff or researchers running the place; you can’t say no to actual empirical evidence like this.</p>
<p>Anchorage? At number 3? As a local, I can say that while we are a fairly smart population, we aren’t top 10. No way.</p>
<p>@emidank</p>
<p>Once again the issue is not with the creditibility of Lumosity’s ‘games’ or whether those games define cognitive abilities, but the fact that those who choose to play the games may or may not be characteristic of the rest of the populations in those cities.</p>
<p>The players who chose to play the games in these selected cities may well be the people with the highest cognitive abilities in those cities, but there is still no validity to this study becuase the results do not indicate that the entire populations of those cities share those same abilities.</p>
<p>C’mon people - I mentioned this study to my 18 year old son who has never had a statistics class last night and asked him what the problem with it was. It took him less than a minute to say “They only studied the people who played the games?” </p>
<p>The problem with news media and the like propagating the results of such studies is that we’re teaching people to accept the results and yell “Woot!!! Woot!!! We made the list! We’re smart HERE!!!” Instead of thinking criticially about the study, questioning the methods, analyzing the results…ironically, probably the skills that Lumosity claims its players possess.</p>
<p>Forbes ranked America’s Geekiest Cities…</p>
<p>[Geekville</a>, USA: America’s 20 Geekiest Cities - Forbes](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/08/02/geekville-usa-americas-20-geekiest-cities/]Geekville”>Geekville, USA: America's 20 Geekiest Cities)</p>
<p>In Science and Engineering Indicators 2010, the NSF ranked the top 20 cities in the United States by the percentage of workers with jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics…</p>
<p>*Based on the NSFs criteria, the densest concentration of geeks in the U.S. cities is not necessarily where you would expect, with one big exception.</p>
<p>The capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose, Calif., is the geek capital of America, with 18.2% of the workforce employed in tech or science jobs. In second place: the counter-culture center of Boulder, Colo. Its not only a favorite of hippies, nature and sports loversBoulder has also become a hotbed for tech startups. Some 17.4% of the workforce is engaged in tech or science jobs.</p>
<p>In third place is Framingham, Mass., where 16.6% of workers are science and math geeks. The city hosts the corporate headquarters of the consumer electronics maker Bose and the office supply chain Staples, and a sizable Genzyme research center.</p>
<p>Is there anything geekier than rocket science? In fourth place is Huntsville, Ala., home to NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, which has been at the forefront of the nations space exploration mission for five decades. Some 16.2% of the workforce is employed in science and math jobs.</p>
<p>[San</a> Jose, Calif. - William Pentland - Forbes](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efee45fied/san-jose-calif/]San”>http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efee45fied/san-jose-calif/)*</p>