The most important people on Wikipedia might be Carl Linnaeus, Jesus, Michael Jackson, and Hitler

If you use two approaches to ranking web pages — PageRank (Google-developed) and 2D Rank (which measures how many external sources cited) — and you apply those ranking systems to Wikipedia, here’s what you learn about the “most important people… Continue Reading

High school dropouts seem to be moving to Riverside, CA and Cape Coral, FL

Check out the chart above; it’s from the awesome-to-read Richard Florida at CityLab. The stuff on the far right shouldn’t surprise you: the “most educated” people are heading to Seattle, San Francisco, DC, Denver, and San Jose/The Valley. This corresponds with previous… Continue Reading

If you’re super popular at 13, you probably won’t be at 22

A new study, suitably summarized by NPR: if you’re in the cool crowd earlier, that’ll fade and you’ll likely have drinking, drug, or relational problems as you exit college. Lesson: the kids that tormented you in middle school ultimately get theirs.… Continue Reading

Is Dublin, Ohio going to be the future of the American neighborhood?

Here are a few things we seem to know about the America of the future: walkability will be important to residents, as will good public transportation options (even though BRT seems to be meeting with opposition in some places), and the… Continue Reading

Most urban sprawl, 2000-2010? Myrtle Beach. Least? Tallahassee.

Sprawl is a pretty big topic — and has ties back to politics, too — with a lot of impact on where people eventually want to move/settle. Now there’s a new report doing a longitudinal study of urban sprawl from 2000-2010;… Continue Reading

The One D Index (which sounds dirty, yes) will tell you to live in Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, Seattle, Austin or Portland

One Detroit just created a portal and scorecard system to essentially compare their region to 53 other large metro regions in the United States. You can learn a little more about their methodology here, and get a simpler breakdown here, but… Continue Reading

When politics confuses you, remember this: it’s mostly about voting by party

Politics can often be confusing, but if you dig just below the surface, it doesn’t have to be. Consider this. Pew recently did a study on Presidential candidate traits, and they found some things you’d expect: military experience, Governor, business… Continue Reading

Potential might matter more than achievement, via research from Zakary Tormala at Stanford

As a society, we broadly seem to value the young and virile — every year that you add is an opportunity for jokes about adding said years, and we take care (well, often) of the very old as if they… Continue Reading