Posts Tagged ‘useless data’

Trending: What we name our children

Monday, May 6, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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In 2011, the most popular baby names across the nation were Jacob for boys and Sophia for girls. But here in Connecticut, Jacob barely cracked the top five, with only 195 baby boys being given the name. In fact, while Jacob has been the top name for newborn boys across the nation every year since 1999, the name had its Connecticut peak at No. 3 in 2010.

Check out the most popular baby names in the state over the last 50 years, and how they compare to the national trends.

Curious to know how popular your name was the year you were born? The Social Security Administration keeps a list dating back to 1960, which you can sort through. I checked for my name the year I was born, and (no surprises here) Margaret didn’t even crack the top 50 that year.

How does your name — or your child’s — stack up on the list of the most popular?

What $500,000 will buy you in Southwestern Connecticut

Thursday, April 25, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Want to live on the water for less than $500,000? Give Stratford a look. We found this two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom condo with a deck and 1,478 square feet of living space on the market for $475,000. The Census reports the median value of an owner-occupied house in the town is $289,300.

Want to live on the water for less than $500,000? Give Stratford a look. We found this two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom condo with a deck and 1,478 square feet of living space on the market for $475,000. The Census reports the median value of an owner-occupied house in the town is $289,300.

Last week, we looked at what the average New Englander’s home-buying budget of $260,000 would get for house hunters in our neck of the woods. The short answer: Not much. So we decided to raise the budget a little bit and shop around Southwestern Connecticut, armed wit a $500,000 budget.

Just like last week, we saw quite the variation from town to town, which makes sense. According to the Census, the median value of an owner-occupied unit in Naugatuck comes in at $221,400, so the budget stretched pretty far in that town. But in places like Greenwich and Westport, where the median value of homes is more than $1 million, it was slim pickings.

Trending: Where the Lucky Ones Are

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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There were plenty of reasons to be outside on a sunny Saturday morning in early April. Yet the inside of a convenience store on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk was buzzing with activity near the lottery counter, with several people scratching tickets and others calling out strings of numbers to be fed into the terminal for the daily lottery draw in hopes of hitting it big.

If hitting it big is what the folks at One Stop Variety in Norwalk were looking to do, they were in the right place. A Hearst Connecticut Media Group analysis of lottery winners over the last four years shows that the store, which is in a strip mall near Exit 14 of Interstate-95, has sold more lottery tickets with prizes of $10,000 or greater than any other store in Southwestern Connecticut.

Between April 2009 and late March 2013, One Stop Variety sold 11 big winners, putting the store in a tie with a Shop Smart in Seymour and a Stop & Shop in Branford for top retailers in the state in that time.

“We sell a lot of lottery tickets here,” said Sohel Memon, a cashier who has worked at the store for two years. “People buy all of it, the scratch-off tickets, everything.”

But there’s one ticket played with more success than any other, he said.

“We get the most winners on 10X Cash,” he said, walking over to a plastic display case, where the $10 ticket was sitting in a cubby, labeled No. 44 of the more than 50 varieties of tickets the store had for sale.

Victor Figueroa, 47, of Stamford is one of three people who have earned a $10,000 prize as a result of buying that particular ticket at the Norwalk store, in what he called “a lucky shot.”

“Sometimes I stop in that store in the morning, when the guys I work with are grabbing breakfast at the deli in that strip mall,” he said Wednesday evening. “It’s just down the street from where I work, so I’ll play a little here or there. Not every day, but if I’m there in the morning, I’ll probably get a $5 or $10 scratch-off, whatever I have in my pocket.”

On Feb. 5, he happened to have $10 in his pocket, and after a few scratches on a 10X Cash, he soon had $10,000. It wasn’t the first time Figueroa won big at the store. In October of 2012, he won $10,000 on a $5 scratch-off ticket, purchased at the same store. Still, he says he likes the odds best on 10X Cash.

“You know, it’s funny, believe it or not, my neighbor across the street won $10,000 on 10X in downtown Stamford a couple months before I won on it,” he said. “It’s a good game — a lucky one.”

In addition to the three $10,000 winners One Stop Variety has sold for that ticket, there have also been smaller winners trickling through the teller on a regular basis, said Memon, who pointed to a string of banners taped to the walls and called out winners who have taken home $550, $2,000 and $5,000 from the ticket.

Maggie Gordon takes a swing at scratching off a ticket in hopes of pocketing a few bucks.

I tried my hand at hitting a jackpot, buying a 10X Cash of my own and crossing my fingers before putting them to work, scratching for glory. The purple ticket was decorated in Vegas-style lights, calling out reasons to play, such as “More than 100 $10,000 prizes,” “More than $17,000,000 in total prizes,” and “10 chances to win!”

It seemed simple. There was a column labeled “Your number,” to the left of another column labeled “Winning number.” All I had to do was hope the two numbers matched in any of the 10 rows, and I could win the prize hidden behind the three sacks of cash, just waiting to be scratched off.

I started slowly: My No. 23, winning No 58. Darn.

My No. 30, winning No. 53. Darn again.

By the 10th row (my No. 55, winning No. 46) my reaction was more damn than darn. I never even scratched the money sacks to see what I could have won.

Memon asked if I wanted to try again, but at $10 a pop, and with only $20 in my pocket, one failure was enough for me. A moment later, Gwen Grimes from Bridgeport bought the next ticket in the line.

“Nothing so far,” she murmured as her hand moved halfway down the card. By the end of the ticket, she declared that she had bought a dud.

While 10X Cash is the winningest scratch-off in the state, during the four years analyzed, with 102 winners claiming $10,000 or more, the ticket only pays out a winner once in every 3.95 tickets on average. While One Stop Variety has had more big winners than any other store in the state on the 10X Cash card, Stamford is home to the most large winners on the ticket than any other town.

Stamford has sold more lottery tickets paying out $10,000 or more than any other city in the state, with a total of 51 such payouts in the four-year period, including a $1 million Powerball ticket sold at Shippan Candies, which brought a windfall upon a group of employees at Toyota of Stamford in November 2012 and a $254 million Powerball prize sold nearby at the Shippan Point Getty in November 2011.

The city of Norwalk has sold the second-most big prizes, with 44, thanks in large part to One Stop Variety, and is tied with Bridgeport for the No. 2 spot. Danbury follows at No. 4, with 42 wins, and New Haven rounds out the top 5 with 36 winning tickets paying out $10,000 or more.

But while the city of Stamford has paid out more than $258 million in the last four years, making it Connecticut’s luckiest town, Grimes said she thinks Norwalk might have an edge on the nearby city.

“A lot of people know that people won big here, and that’s probably why there’s always so many people playing here,” she said as she took a rest between tickets.

A moment later she was back to it, in hopes that she might be the next person to have her name tacked to the wall at One Stop.

maggie.gordon@scni.com; 203-964-2229; http://twitter.com/MagEGordon; http://facebook.com/TrendingWithMaggieGordon

Curious to know more? Check out this map, which shows how much money was won in each town during the four years analyzed.

Trending (March Madness): Where the Ballers Play

Friday, March 29, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Happy March Madness! As a diehard fan of my alma mater’s basketball team, these few weeks of the year are some of my favorite, and we’re celebrating here at Trending with a look back at this year’s high school basketball season.

Earlier this week, while waiting not-so-patiently for the big games to make their way back onto the TV schedule, I got my basketball fix on the Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s web site, tallying up the scores for every boys’ varsity team, as reported on the conference’s records page in an effort to pinpoint which team outscored all its opponents this year. Check out the slideshow above to see where the ballers play.

And good luck on your brackets!

In Connecticut, we find love at Stop & Shop

Friday, March 1, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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An infographic created by Psychology Today

Nothing screams romance quite like the frozen foods section, am I right? A new map, published in the February edition of Psychology today broke down the hot spots for love state by state. In Connecticut, we spot our “missed connections” at Stop & Shop more frequently than any other spot, according to their research.

The map shows the most common places for “Missed Connections” – a post on Craigslist, in which the poster tries to track down a person they met somewhere and want to get in touch with – in each state. And it seems we’re not the only grocery-store love state in the union. Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Maine, New Hampshire and Alaska also have a penchant for the produce aisle.

As the map has made its rounds on the Internet, Psychology Today says it has received a wide variety of feedback, including:

Oklahomans crushing on Oklahomans at the state fair? Adorable!

WalMart, a leading love incubator in 15 states? How sad!

Indianans missing connections at home? Hm…

New Yorkers, Atlantans and Northwesterners commiserated about nearly meeting someone in transit.

Californians patted themselves on the backs for working out all the time.

What do you think, Connecticut?

Study: Connecticut in a ‘sad’ state

Thursday, February 21, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Things are looking a little gloomy in Connecticut residents’ Twitter feeds.

A new study out of the University of Vermont found that Connecticut is the No. 14 saddest state in the nation, according to an analysis of Twitter posts by state residents. While the island state of Hawaii enjoyed top billing as the nation’s happiest state, and Louisiana fell to the bottom as the saddest, Connecticut found itself sandwiched between Tennessee and Pennsylvania in the bottom third of the list.

While most Connecticut cities escaped the bottom 15 cities nationwide, Waterbury had the dubious distinction of finding itself in the bottom rungs. According to the Vermont researchers, The Brass City is the No. 11 saddest city in the nation, tucked between Alexandria and Houma, Louisiana. Well, at least it’s not Beaumont, right?

The Stamford-Bridgeport area fared a little better. A little.

While Waterbury was No. 363 of 373, Southwestern Connecticut found itself just barely above the saddest third of the country, at No. 244.

Why so serious, Connecticut? The researchers based their rankings on Tweets sent by Twitter uses in each of the 373 areas during the 2011 calendar year, assigning values to certain words, to compare the general happiness of residents throughout the course of the study.

The report’s lead author, Lewis Mitchell said in an email this afternoon that Waterbury “came out as a sad city because of an abundance of profanity, as well as a relatively large frequency of more subtle sad words like ‘not’, ‘nasty’, ‘dumb’ and even ‘bills.’”

And it looks like Waterbury isn’t the only Connecticut city with its fair share of curse words showing up in a large share of Tweets. Here’s what the word chart looked like for the Stamford-Bridgeport area:

The graph can be a bit hard to understand, but it’s actually pretty simple. The closer to the top the word is, the more influence it had on the area’s happiness coefficient (so “lol” had the greatest percentage contribution to the overall average happiness difference). The + and – signs indicate whether a word is relatively happy or sad, compared to the average for all cities, and the up and down arrows indicate whether the words were used more or less in this sample than in the nationwide average.

It’s an interesting idea, but even the study authors note that there’s room for error.Here’s the caveat the study authors include in their report:

“There are a number of legitimate concerns to be raised about how well the Twitter data set can be said to represent the happiness of the greater population. Only 15% of online adults regularly use Twitter, and 18-29 year-olds and minorities tend to be more highly represented on Twitter than in the general population. Furthermore, the fact that we collected only around 10% of all tweets during the calendar year 2011 means that our data set is a non-uniform subsample of statements made by a non-representative portion of the population.”

Southwestern Connecticut wasn’t quite as happy as our neighboring area of Norwich-New London, which was ranked No. 188 happiest, barely missing the top 50 percent. But we were a bit cheerier than Hartford, which was ranked at No. 272, and New Haven, ranked at No. 293.

What do you think?

How easy is it to find a few good men in Southwestern Connecticut?

Monday, February 18, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Last week, the Atlantic’s website published a story pointing out locations where it can be tough for a well-educated single lady to search for a few good men.

Of all places in the country, Sarasota, Fla., is apparently the worst place for college-educated young single women to find a man in their age bracket who is similarly educated, with 18 such women to every 10 such men. Here’s the Atlantic’s explanation:

No offense intended to Sarasota’s bachelors — I’m sure they’re lovely. But for every ten guys under 35 with a diploma, there are roughly 18 female college grads the same age roaming the city’s greater metro area. Nobody’s beach body is worth battling those odds.

Of course, Sarasota is just an extreme example of what’s true all over America. The number of college-educated women now far outstrips the number of college-educated men, which in turn has diminished their options in the dating pool.

But who cares about Sarasota? Where does Southwestern Connecticut rank?

According to the Atlantic, the Stamford-Bridgeport metro area (which lines up perfectly with the outline of Fairfield County) has good odds for young women, with a 24.2 percent gap between the number of “eligible” women and men — that means for every 10 men who fit the specs outlined by the Atlantic, there are about 12 women. That’s better than the national average, which was a 29.7 percent gap, meaning there were about 13 women per 10 men fitting the bill.

The Stamford-Bridgeport area seems to have it a bit better for young women than New Haven, where the gap is 30.6 percent, but according to the data, Hartford has the best balance in the state, with a 18.6 percent gap, making it the 11th most balanced metro in the country.

Nutmeggers movin’ on out

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 by:Maggie Gordon
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Screenshot of migration patterns from United Van Lines.

Connecticut has the seventh highest percentage of movers shipping out of the state in the nation, according to a recent study released by a moving company.

United Van Lines conducts a survey each year, tracking which states the company’s customers move into and out of over the course of a year, and found that 56 percent of the moves it performed in Connecticut during 2012 were customers movin’ on out.

Most of the cities with the top outbound populations can be found along the east coast, according to the moving company, which noted that “The Northeast is the most well-represented region on the high-outbound traffic list. In addition to New Jersey, New York (58 percent), Maine (56 percent) and Connecticut (56 percent) are also included” on its website.

So who took the cake? Here’s the list of the top five states movers are leaving:

  1. New Jersey – 62.3 percent
  2. Illinois – 59.5 percent
  3. West Virginia – 57.9 percent
  4. New York – 57.7 percent
  5. New Mexico – 57.6 percent

Washington, D.C., had the highest rate of in-migration, where 64 percent of moves were for people moving into the city. Surprisingly, Oregon came in second, with 61 percent of moves commissioned for new state residents.

The company has been conducting this study since 1977, and this year’s analysis included data from more than 125,000 moves, according to United. They defined states as “high inbound” if 55 percent or more of the moves are going into a state and “high outbound” if 55 percent or more moves were coming out of a state or “balanced” if the difference of inbound and outbound is negligible.

While the 56 percent may sound like a lot for Connecticut, the state shouldn’t worry about creating an ad campaign just yet; the 1,991 outbound Nutmmegers represent less than 1/20th of a percent of Connecticut’s population. Read more.

Are you surprised? Or have you seen it happen again and again? Let us know in the comments section below.

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