Category: Chart Of The Day

Derek Thompson shares the results of a recent survey about teenagers’ Internet habits. One of his takeaways:

If you’re confused why digital publishers obsess over Facebook and social media, make this graph your smartphone wallpaper. Even the most popular site among teens – BuzzFeed – has fewer daily visitors than any network or app in the graph. (Even Beats, which is considered a tiny music service, has more daily users than any website in the survey.) Seventy three percent of teens don’t read BuzzFeed, 84 percent don’t read Reddit, and 96 percent don’t read Mashable or Gawker.

For young people, Facebook is the newspaper, and websites are the authors.

On what other subject is the public so grotesquely misinformed? And what does it say about the acumen of the Human Rights Campaign that its Number One legislative priority for the last 25 years (with 76 percent national support!) remains as out of sight as ever? Just keep sending them your checks, guys. In another quarter century, you might get something back for them.

Someone data-mapped every use of the word “fuck” on Reddit over an eight-hour period:

Appropriately titled The F Word, the visualization was created by user “codevinsky,” who mined all the fucking data on Monday and wrote the visualization [Tuesday], June 10. He broke it out into multiple categories, allowing you to toggle between instances when “fuck” was coupled to another word (All of the Fucks), and when “fuck” stood alone (Single Fucks). … All told, users said “fuck” or some variation thereof 25,203 times. Which doesn’t strike me as all that staggering. If anything, I’m surprised that figure isn’t actually much higher.

Interactive version of the above graphic here.

A new YouGov poll shows that Americans consider themselves fun drunks. But what about the next morning?

On the whole, most Americans have avoided double hangovers where you feel bad both due to excessive drinking and because of something stupid or mean you did the night before. 26% of Americans say that they have never been drunk, while out of the 71% who say that they have been drunk before most (42% of the entire country) haven’t had to apologize for something they’ve done the night before. Only 31% have had to apologize for the night before. 23% of Americans say that they’ve had to apologize for doing something that they were too drunk to even remember doing.

“Gangnam Style” passed two billion views this week. The Economist puts in perspective the time spent watching the music video:

At 4:12 minutes, that equates to more than 140m hours, or more than 16,000 years. What other achievements were forgone in the time spent watching a sideways shuffle and air lasso?

by Patrick Appel

Keith Humphreys is struck by the rapid decline of America’s prison admission rate:

The shape of the curve is singular. Initially the rate continues its decades-long ascent. But in 2006 it hits an invisible ceiling and begins plummeting with increasing speed. This is an unusual finding in public policy analysis. Particularly at the national level, it usually takes awhile for major policy changes to be consolidated. But in this case, we have experienced an unambiguous U-turn. Further, while the 2007 and 2008 drops in the rate of prison admission are roughly equal in size, from that point forward the drop each year exceeds that of the prior year. The drop in 2012 was about double that of 2010, four times that of 2009 and six times that of 2008.

He adds that “you rarely see national policy go so vigorously in one direction and then abruptly travel with accelerating speed in the opposite direction.”