All Over Albany

Well, Albany metro area

New York's didn't fare too well in these rankings. But it's not West Virginia.

The Albany-Schenectady-Troy metro area ranked #58 nationally in the annual Gallup-Healthways "Well-Being Index" for 2012 (out of 189 metros). That's a big jump from 2011, when it ranked 101. And it was the top score in the state (take that, Rochester).

The report surveys people across the country, asking them questions in six categories: life evaluation (current and the in the future), emotional health (happiness, sadness, worry), physical health, healthy behavior, work environment, and basic access to things like healthcare and healthy food.

The Albany metro's rise in the rankings appears to be attributable to big jumps in two categories: life evaluation (67 from 117) and work environment (74 from 128).

This metro's lowest ranked category was emotional health (#138), as it was in 2011 (#151). The emotional health category is based on questions about topics that include: smiling or laughter, being treated with respect, enjoyment, happiness, worry, sadness, anger, stress, learning or doing something interesting, depression.

The index also ranks states -- New York was #30. And two of its metros were near the very bottom of the rankings: Binghamton (176) and Utica-Rome (179).

The top ranked state in 2012 was Hawaii -- for the fourth straight year. West Virginia was last.

The top ranked metros, by size category: Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV (large), Lincoln, NE (mid-size), Burlington-South Burlington, VT (small).

The report for New York State is post jump.

(there's more)

Musical metro

The Albany metro area ranks #9 in the nation for musical acts per 10,000 people, according to an analysis by an academic institute at the University of Toronto that includes Richard "Creative Class" Florida and published today at Atlantic Cities.

This analysis follows up on previous work by Florida and his colleagues looking at clusters of musicians around the nation. In that earlier work, based on federal jobs and industry data, Albany ranked 14th among "centers for musicians and the music industry."

As with that previous analysis, this new work has some important caveats. The foremost: it's based on data pulled from MySpace in 2007. That's not totally a bad thing. Using that data helps get around the problem of only including people who are identified as professional musicians in the federal data. But, still... it's MySpace and it's from 2007. And, of course, such an analysis doesn't necessarily account for quality.

That said, it's not surprising that this area would rank relatively high. We have a bunch of musical acts here -- and a lot of them are good.

[via @SeanPCollins]

Earlier on AOA: Find other people who do what you do, and then push each other to get better