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Houston needs some better PR (though could say the same about my home city). When looking at the charts in the link it is amazing how different DFW appears to Hosuton, or is that Austin?
If Austin would love to see the ratings in general of those who have been and have not; overall with places like Seattle, Portland, Austin etc while nice (though I have to be honest Austin seems very over-rated to me but does have some great PR) I wonder if the perception would change?
You think everyone who thinks Portland is awesome has been there? Doubtful, many of them have probably either read the latest Forbes list, read Stuff White People Like, or watched Portlandia on IFC.
I TOTALLY agree that Austin gets too much hype and the media tends to overlook its problems, but I don't buy that a larger number of people who react positively to Austin have never been there; keep in mind it barely cracked the Top 10; Portland & Seattle were 5th and 1st respectively.
The author pointed out that our initial perceptions of cities are grounded in statistical reality. Of course he also mentioned that respondents didn't seem to consider traffic in their reactions (major prob in Austin).
Before we get to the results, some notes on methodology: I found my survey respondents via Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online labor market designed to allow the completion of tasks that are hard for computers to do but easy for people. Have a lot of photos that need captions? There are respondents on hand, called Turkers, who will complete these tasks for very small amounts of money. Recently, social scientists have realized that MTurk can be an amazing testbed for social experiments, ranging from behavioral economics to network science. It can also be used for surveys.
That said, MTurk is by no means a representative sample, but it can at least give us a starting point for thinking about our questions. So on a scale from one to nine (very negative to very positive), I asked 310 Turkers how favorably they viewed the country's largest metro areas. We then gathered up their responses and looked for patterns.
Another dubious "list". Anyone could randomly poll 100 people and pass it off as an ranking too! Let's leave the polling to professional polling agencies.
Alot of interesting things here. Take a look at "Top 5 cities by region" for example.
Midwest --- this is the most depressing of the 4 regions. Apparently Midwesterners like at least 5 cities outside the Midwest before some of their own.
Northeast --- The days of sailing ships are long over but apparently Yankees still need to live by the ocean or something.
South --- I can see Austin and Orlando, plus thumbs up to Denver. But I this is the first time I think I heard Southeners were that attracted to the Pacific Northwest??? Nothing wrong with that of course.
West --- the most postive of the 4 regions. At least the top 5 picks are in the West, maybe showing that Westeners are most happy with their region.
You can spin the West answers negatively too. Its the Durf/San Jose homers effect.
Yeah, you're right Montclair, Oakland doesn't have a high crime rate at all. LOL.
And spare us the same old pictures of the minority of Oakland that has mansions for rich people. We've seen you post them dozens of times before to prove that Oakland is not ghetto. But we all know that it is.
The Midwest is the most self-loathing region, and the West is the most self-absorbed region.
Yeah, the Midwest is kinda dumped on by everybody. It's a land with a populist heart, plodding along through an era that favors libertarianism, the opposite of populism. There's a great resurgence in the Plains, though, and who knows but what it could spread eastward?
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