The Aniston Effect: a Tale of Two Halves of a Career

Today, the Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston flick Wanderlust premiers in theaters. This film marks Aniston's 13^th feature film in the post-Friends era. Believe it or not, Aniston's cinematic career spans all the way back to Leprechaun (1993).

Personally I think most of Aniston's films range from average to pretty terrible, with more films fitting in the latter category. However, this is just my own impression of her work. I have no data to back this up. What's more, in order to make an assertion about the quality of her work I would need a baseline to compare it to (e.g., average quality of all movies released, average quality of films released by former Friends cast members) and depending on the yardstick, Aniston could come out better or worse, so it's not really a question worth asking.

On the other hand, I can evaluate the quality of her body of work over time using data from critic and fan sites to determine if there are any interesting patterns in the data (e.g., trends in quality and box office revenue). That is what I aim to do with this post.

On building a lego scale model of the Death Star

Some might say why? Some might say who cares? I say it's an empirical question.

(Source: Wired)

Examining Hollywood with Data

I love this very thorough quantitative analysis of Hollywood brought to us by a couple of gentleman at the blog Asymco. They address some very interesting Hollywood-related questions including 1.) drama / comedy vs. adventure / fantasy, 2.) the role of summer in movie releases, 3.) what happens to Hollywood startups, and 4.) the peculiar power of theaters in an age of television.

Their results are somewhat surprising. For instance, despite for making up about half of all films made, drama and comedy fall behind other genres when you examine box office results. Specifically, fantasy, action, and adventure account for more "blockbusters." You can see their graph below, and you can see much, much more if you check out the main article.

Is your wallet slowly leaking?

Our daily expenses never seem like much, but when you really start to evaluate the costs long-term. The amount you spend on that morning coffee, putting gas in your car, and taking care of Fido add up. Moneyland has collected some stats from a variety of sources. Here are some of my favorites:

Pets: According to the American Pet Products Association, the average dog owner spends $1,542 annually, while the average cat owner spends $1,183.

Beverages: The average U.S. household spends an estimated $850 annually on soft drinks, for a total of $65 billion on soft drinks alone. A total of $101 billion was spent on beer in 2010.

Shoes: Estimates for what the average woman spends on shoes range from $370 per year ($16,410 over 67 years), up to $25,000 over a lifetime.

I take issue with that last one. First, the shoe data have to be horribly skewed, meaning that a small proportion of women are spending a lot of money and it's driving up the average. Of course, this may be true for many of the averages on that list. The second problem I have with it is that they only list the average for women. Do men not buy shoes? And if so, is $400 a year excessive?

Facebook is the top search term of 2011 (sort of)

Mashable reports that "Facebook" was the top search term of 2011. They must really have a lot of "mindshare," right? Well, sort of. This study really shows what kind of people use Google (primarily) to get to their favorite website, and not necessarily that they are looking for other information about that site. Other top searches this year included "facebook login" and "www.facebook.com".

Facebook has 800 million registered users, this is a year when practically anyone with a computer and an internet connection has an account. Many of those users know very little about bookmarking, or the advanced capabilities of most web browsers. We've all seen a relative trying to "surf the web". They pull up Internet Explorer and go to Google (or maybe google is their homepage) and type the full address of the site they want, then click the first result that appears. That's not exactly any indication that the user is any more invested in that site or that brand. And, while I'm a big fan of shortcuts and timesavers to reduce repetitive tasks like entering the same search term every time I use my computer, but that might not really be a priority for many users.

This kind of report is more of a reflection on the users of search engines and how people are using technology, not what they searched for. The study by Hitwise is pretty comprehensive, and defines the majority of top searches as "navigational search," which seems to hit on what Mashable's article misses.  Its also unfortunate that the study didn't include mobile searches, which is rapidly growing and becoming the primary means of search and experiencing online content.

TED Tuesday: How Economic Inequality Harms Societies

This selection was inspired by my most recent Deconstructing December post.

Many people have a gut feeling that a large gap in wealth between the richest and poorest in a country is bad. However, it's nicer to have data illustrating these negative associations. This talk has lots of interesting graphs demonstrating the associations between economic inequality and various important outcomes. They pass quickly, so I recommend repeatedly pausing. The presentation is rather ho-hum, but I find the content fascinating.

These are the stats of our lives

I love data. I don't know if I make that clear enough here on the blog, but I always am thinking about how to quantify things, from the macro ("how much money the average american spends on Christmas gifts") to the micro ("how much money to I spend on snacks a year"). I track everything and regularly do minor analyses on the (admittedly) stupidest things. That's why I loved this slideshow from the week on the stats of our lives. Here are my favorite stats from the article:

• #4 - 19, the number of times a day men have sexual thoughts (remember folks, this is an AVERAGE)
• #5 - 4.7, the estimated degrees of separation by which everyone in the world is actually separated based on 721 million facebook users.
• #7 - 2.4/3.4, the average number of lbs that college freshmen men and women gain in their first year, respectively.

Despite the data most Americans believe that crime is worsening

Gallup reports that despite the 17 year decline in violent crime reported by the bureau of justice, 68% of americans say that crime is worse today than it was a year ago.