"So, since you live in Russia and not North Korea, you make the turnout 98%."

"One of the interesting things that sets even superficially similiar genres of music apart is their lyrical content. Last.fm tags can overlap to a great degree, but we were interested to see what the words can tell you about the subtler shades of meaning that go along with those tags. As usual around here, the best way to answer questions like these is by asking the data."

"The last few years, possibly since the introduction of Europe-wide televoting, it is being suggested that the voting results of the Eurovision Songcontest are (getting) more related to geographical location or common history than to the songs performed by the artists on the event. This page is dedicated to a modest analysis at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) about the extend to which these suspicions are genuine."

"Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library ("the Reg"): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms."

"As part of an upcoming TypePad homepage redesign, I wanted to know how many people are using Facebook, Twitter and OpenID to log in to TypePad."

"Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction."

"We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message; a note about how we protected user privacy is here."

"As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions. The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people. It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence"

As title.

"Now, I love jokes that tackle the difficult subject of stereotypes as much as the next person but I spied an interesting footer after the final joke: “SEND THIS TO SMART WOMEN WHO NEED A LAUGH AND TO MEN YOU THINK CAN HANDLE IT !!!”. I decided to test her sense of humour and see what she could “handle” by responding with the following..."

"The approximately 800 million mostly middle class adults and children act as a massive epidemiological experiment that allows hypotheses that faith in a creator or disbelief in evolution improves or degrades societal conditions to be tested on an international scale. ... the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards."

"In an interview with CNET News this week, Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of Universal Music Group's eLabs, said the largest of the top recording companies is bringing in "tens of millions of dollars" from YouTube. "

"Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. .... If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months."

"Mira Dontcheva, a researcher at Adobe Systems, explains how Zoetrope can be used to browse back through a Web page’s history. She demonstrates a few advanced techniques for looking at historic data and shows how to compare several Web pages over time."

"What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre. Click on a genre name to see a close-up that shows exactly what words were used."

"Average SAT (with margin of error) for the 100 most popular books on facebook."

"The most surprising result is that the activity of the Wikipedia community appears to have been declining during the last 6 months"

A very interesting flash visualisation tool that creates animated graphs for certain statistics on international development.

"While the ratio of men to women in the West was nearly even, in countries like China, India, and Pakistan, there were far more men than women."

Stats about different types of gamers.

A comparison of console prices over the years, both absolute and also taking inflation into account.

The mood levels reported by LiveJournal users plotted on a graph.