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    • Slightly amusing and demoralizing facts about the large-scale failure of published books

    25th March 2008

    Slightly amusing and demoralizing facts about the large-scale failure of published books

    I hate apologizing for not posting in three days but.. I guess I just did. Kind of.
    Moving on:

    The topic that has drawn me back from my busy work week into the blogosphere is statistics on book sales. These stats come from the great book “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson.

    I understand these stats are a little out-dated, but they are still relevant today, I am sure.

    “In 2004, 950,000 books out of 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen BookScan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200 sold fewer than 1000 copies.”

    What is worse is:

    “The average book in the US sells 500 copies.”

    Damn you Chris Anderson for crushing my hopes and dreams of becoming a successful author. I think you just don’t want to share the secrets of your publishing success.

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    11th March 2008

    When Statistics Make You Sick

    Beware, these stats will dampen your day:

    Current Cost of War in Iraq Is Almost $11 Billion Per Month. “In FY2007, DOD’s monthly obligations for contracts and pay averaged about $12.3 billion including about $10.3 billion for Iraq and $2.0 billion for Afghanistan.” [CRS Report.pdf, 2/22/08]

    That Amounts to…

    * $332,258,064 Per Day
    * $13,844,086 Per Hour
    * $230,734 Per Minute
    * $3,845 Per Second

    U.S. Has Already Spent $526 Billion on War in Iraq. “This $700 billion total covers all war-related appropriations from FY2001 in supplementals, regular appropriations, and continuing resolutions including not quite half of the FY2008 request. Of that total, CRS estimates that Iraq will receive about $526 billion (75%), OEF about $140 billion (20%), and enhanced base security about $28 billion (4%), with about $5 billion that CRS cannot allocate (1%).” [CRS Report, 2/22/08]

    thanks democratic caucus for the stats

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    7th March 2008

    it is official - Google is no longer top doggy

    While it is true that Google has had a comfortable lead among search engines across the world (check out Alexa’s stats), Yahoo has been quietly number one for some months now.

    Here is the graph for the traffic rank which rates the popularity. You can see yahoo.com has been number 1 for the past six months while Google is faltering, if you consider second and third most popular site in the world as faltering.

    yahoo vs google

    Why is Yahoo more popular?

    1. Maybe yahoo is paying alexa.com to up their rankings. This can be evidenced by the static flatline at number one while google’s line looks like real data.

    2. I noticed that Yahoo’s image search yields much better results than google. Try it out yourself.

    3. Yahoo provides news and updates on their news page, while you have to go to igoogle to get the same content rich information. I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing that google.com is purely search. It has been working for years, but maybe the model is changing… maybe users want to get all of their information in one place without having to necessarily search for it.

    Hat tip to GigaOM for the inspiration behind this post.

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    21st June 2007

    Skeptical Stats - I Do Not Trust These Stats About Bush vs Clinton Presidency

    Be skeptical about these stats reader, I think some of these numbers are definitely skewed. I don’t remember there being a 119 billion dollar surplus during Clinton’s presidency, even though he did balance the federal budget.

    Also, most of the stats listed are not the result of any presidential policy personal to each president, but due to external factors, like the stats driving the stock market gains was due to the tech and internet stocks taking off.

    The only stat that Bush looks really bad on is the US troop stats, and what is an even better stat is that Clinton was pushing for peace in the Middle East while the Bush’s historically have clamored for conflict. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing.

    clipped from neoconmen.blogspot.com

    Better off under Bush?

    Then and Now:
    Jan 2001 / NOW (as of 3/5/07)

    Dow
    GW Bush: (1/19/01): 10,578 / (3/5/07): 12,128 (+2.2% /yr)

    Clinton: (1/19/93): 3,257 / (1/19/01): 10,578 (+15.5%/yr)
    Euro= $0.94 /=$ 1.31
    Oil (per barrel) $25.70 / $60.45 (up 135%)
    Unemployment 3.8% / 4.6% (Jan 01 to Jan 07)
    U.S. Treasury surplus +$119b / deficit -$478b

    Trade deficit, per month

    $33.5b / $66.2b
    National Debt
    $5.73 Trillion / $8.90 Trillion (+55%)
    National Debt per US citizen:
    $20,00/$29,000
    Average New Jobs Per Month
    +236,000 (Clinton) / -28,500 (Bush II)
    US Troops in Iraq
    Zero / 140,000
    US Deaths in Iraq

    Zero / 3,171 (as of 3/5/07)

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