Tacoma, aka “Tacompton,” is a city less known for cupids shooting arrows than for Crips shooting handguns. Nonetheless, Grit City is apparently the “most romantic city in America” according to that most reputable of troll-run websites, Yelp.How on earth did the site decide on Tacoma as the romance capital of the U.S.? By tracking what people search for online, of course. Specifically:It all starts with identifying a set of romantic queries such as searches for “romantic restaurants,” “chocolate covered strawberries,” and even “lingerie,” which occur in a statistically significantly greater proportion the week before Valentine’s Day than at other times during the year. The next obvious step to take would be to count up the number of romantic searches by city and order by that count, right? Unfortunately, that just isn’t fair. Cities that are massive Yelp communities, like New York, may have a much larger absolute number of romantic searches. We take this into account by dividing by total search activity in a city to calculate the proportion of romantic queries (if you want to get super technical, the lower bound of the Wilson binomial confidence interval, but basically a proportion). That gives us a much clearer and fairer picture of just which cities have set their hearts on matters of the, well, heart!The top five on the list:1. Tacoma2. Los Angeles2. Santa Cruz, Calif.4. New Haven, Conn.5. El Paso, Texas Other things Tacoma is known for: being the most stressful city in the country, having one of the highest divorce rates, and having one of the highest crime rates in the country. But when people aren’t divorcing, overworking, or shooting each other, apparently they’re buying each other chocolate.
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