The good news is that Ithaca, NY was rated the
smartest city in America. The bad news, well, it isn't really bad news, but
wait till you examine the criteria used -- and consider the messenger: the
Daily Mail.
But here's the lead:
Ithaca in upstate New York was honored as the smartest city in America after a lengthy study that used brain games to evaluate the intelligence of people across the country.
State College, Pennsylvania came in second place and Lafayette, Indiana in third.
Luminosity, a company that developed the test for the study, came up with five different types of mind games that they feel determines a person's level of intellect.
Here's a link to the Daily Mail piece and this link will take you to some more propaganda about the San Francisco outfit called Lumosity, which came up with the study and rhymes with pompousity. The "vintage" photo of Cornell comes straight from the British newspaper. This priceless press-release paragraph combines the charm of tautology with the sadistic pleasure that academics enjoy when they state the obvious with more syllables than needed and with the aroma of the laboratory in the air.
“One of the most interesting findings from this analysis is that most of the top metro areas contain major research universities, suggesting that education is an important predictor of cognitive performance,” Lumosity data scientist Daniel Sternberg said in a statement. “Neuroscience research has found that those who are engaged in learning and cognitively stimulating activities throughout the lifetime build up a ‘cognitive reserve’ that helps maintain and improve cognitive performance.”
-- DL
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