Providence ranked 22nd-smartest city at Tina Brown's 'Daily Beast'
3:09 PM Mon, Oct 12, 2009 | Permalink
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Projo Subterranean Homepage NewsBottom-up journalism from the pros: News, tech and culture by Sheila Lennon |
Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown's Daily Beast site ranks America's Smartest Cities--From First to Worst and Providence is #22: #22, PROVIDENCE 25% of the intelligence ranking comes from nonfiction book sales, where we seem to be unexceptional. The Web has certainly collapsed my cookbook buying. Oddly, The education half encompassed how many residents had bachelor's degrees (35 percent weighting) and graduate degrees (15 percent). No credit was given for "some college," or "some grad school"--we rewarded those who finished the race. This seems to leave out the students, "one-quarter of the city's population." But the actual race is life, to most of us: Money woes and financial burdens, job offers, boredom, a better idea, parenthood, illness or wanderlust all can lead to dropping out before the next degree. Goals change. This is a silly bias, and a myopically narrow gauge of intelligence. The full list:
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I'm toying with the idea that counting _misspellings_ will give a rough measure of IQ for different websites, and that the misspelling themselves can be ranked from dumber to smarter:
low iq
in tact/intact
to/too
lose/loose
-ys/-ies
'nt/n't
alot/a lot
you're/your
than/then
threw/through
who's/whose
its/it's
[apostrophes]
their/there
consensus/concensus
led/lead
high iq
ps-- your captcha system SUCKS-- if it's not necessary for previews, the preview button should be above the captcha, and there should be a button specifically labeled different-captcha
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The most common misspelling I've seen in news copy is commerical. It's a finger typo, I think, just comes out that way.
As for intelligence, how about ranking cities by the percentage of resdients who fell for Nigerian spam scams?
Good idea about changing the captcha process, jorn. I'll look into it tomorrow. Btw, you get used to that flaky font. I usually type it right on my first try these days.
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