Forget the US elections, things are hotting up in London’s mayoral race. Any PR is good PR for Boris Johnson it seems. His web visibility is rising faster than Ken Livingstone’s…
Well you heard it here first. April Fools and gooseberry fool are both on the up.
April Fools is getting more popular pretty damn fast actually (try some other controls like silly fool).
Reading The tyranny of pink in the Guardian today I had to try this one out:
The thrust of the article, that cutesy pink stuff is increasingly turning our daughters into zombie consumers, is true. Although pink was all over Compare Stuff News first…
Another time trend plot, showing Barack Obama’s relatively faster rise to fame compared to the Clinton brand. Perhaps no surprise as I (in the UK) had never heard of him until the current race.
Let’s see if talk of house repossessions is on the rise, and let’s use a similar phrase as a control:
It seems to be true, although no meteoric trends here.
The plot below shows the biological sub-disciplines leading in the area of open access publishing (click on the plot for readable x-axis labels):
Bioinformatics has by far the largest amount of “open access” chatter. In purple you can see the relatively flat distribution of “journal” as a control. As a bioinformaticist myself this seems to make sense, as the leading figures in the open access movement come from this field. However, other communities (physics, computer science) have been operating an informal open access model for a lot longer (preprint servers and/or widespread preprint availability).
A lot of new x-axis categories have crept in over recent weeks - I’ll try to feature some on the blog. How about the old homepage faithful stressed/relaxed with respect to major life events…
That suggests that being pregnant and starting school are the most stressful events, but wait, let’s try it with “stressful” too, just as a sanity check:
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The best time-based trends on Compare Stuff come from phrases that are new:
Have you seen Swivel yet? It’s another site for graph and data junkies like me. You can upload data there and plot it (a handy tool for bloggers). I find the interface a bit of a struggle when creating a new graph, but I’ve managed OK with the graph below, showing homelessness as a fraction of US state population. This means we can look to see how Compare Stuff’s approach (using web search engine hit data) measures up against real-world data.
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Let’s do a nice simple time trend for bike vs. car…
Ignoring the sharp upturn for 2007 (this seems to happen quite often - I’m not yet exactly sure why…) bikes seem to be rising slightly faster. Note that you have to have the y-axis starting at zero if you want to compare gradients.
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