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statistics

Almost every second German is superstitious


And almost every fifth is feeling uneasy today on Friday 13th.

This can also serve as a nice example for biased choice of words :mrgreen: – since Statista titles (in German; my translation) “Friday 13th spreads only little fear”, based on the same number of 17.9% (see here (German); by the way, 22.3% of women say they’re “especially careful”).

The latter numbers are from a different poll (2007 Germans aged 14+, GfK, June 2008) than the one asking for particular objects or situations of superstition that is the basis for this post’s title (2000 Germans 16+, Allensbach, Nov. 2000):

statista-aber

Top to bottom: four-leaf clover; shooting star; chimney sweeper; black cat; the number 13; finding a horseshoe; cuckoo calling; spider in the morning; swallow’s nest; Friday; clock stopped ticking; the number 7; bad luck when a little owl calls; borrowing salt means bad luck; knife’s edge at the top brings quarrel: sheeps to the left; walking back when stumbling; door opens by itself; rain on bridal veil; touch a hunchback.

It’s of course hard to tell this way if those not believing in clover do believe in other stuff, so there may actually be more than 43% who decided to give their brain some time off in favor of their superstition.

Addendum: Julia reminded me about the extreme superstitions of US presidential candidate McCain and, to a much lesser extent or maybe not at all, Obama.

Statistics!!!

At statista.com there are numerous statistics data of a lot of German surveys, “over 1 million“, they say – and not just small ones like in some blogs, but real, representative ones by major institutes.

The servers currently seem to ache under the number of visitors…

You can embed the statistics easily – I picked this one as an example:

Do you have a web blog (online diary) of your own?

Unmarried ones are blogging more than in another family status, and, no wonder, young people more than old people:

statista-blog

The differences between the sexes are very low and almost dissolve in rounding errors (men blog a little more), similar to monthly income with intermediate incomes blogging a little less.

Survey by: Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, January to August 2007, published on 16.10.2007. 7594 German internet users aged 14-64 were asked.

(via Golem)

Browser statistics and more (2)

Exactly 6 months ago, I posted a few statistics about my visitors – time for an update…

Numbers are again based on the data from blogcounter.de from late August 2007 until now (which of course contains the data I posted in October, but that was less than 8 percent); my own visits were not counted.

Browsers:

The Internet Explorer is still dominating, there was only a slight decrease from combined 57.5% to 55.5%; IE 7 can’t recompense for IE 6’s decrease (from 28.7% to 23.2% total or 22.8% from Nov to Apr):

Browsers up to 2008/04

Operating systems:

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Myriad


Myriad is a classical Greek name for the number 104 = 10,000. In modern English the word refers to an unspecified large quantity.
Wikipedia

So I’m looking forward to the next myriad of spam comments/trackbacks. Not.

Akismet 10004

If I wouldn’t change the name of the wp-trackback.php from time to time and block several typical words inside before they even reach Akismet (the spam filter running here), this number would already have been reached a long time ago…

:motz:

Desperately seeking sh*t

I’m currently testing the WordPress statistics plugin WassUp – it offers a nice chronological list of the recent accesses (including search phrases and result pages), a live view of current activities and more. And all this locally, without relying on external servers.

We’ll see how well WassUp works – and how exactly it counts, because even with hiding bots and spams, there seem to be more views than other tools tell (well, the feed accesses apparently have to be subtracted manually…).

So far, I quite like it – I also noticed that the detection of known bad hosts by comparing the name against a 6700+ lines text file costs quite some server performance; 1.5 instead of 0.7 seconds for a typical page generation ist not much, sure, but a clear difference all the same, which is why I disabled that feature for now.

Why this post title, you ask? Well, while looking at the Visitor Details I came across a few search engine users’ visits worth mentioning (click the screenshots to go to my respective posts):

A US American searching for a certain gross video (Wikipedia) clicks his way through to the 39th results page – is he really so desperately searching?
wassup1

My rebus about certain celebrity escapades made the first page of the German Google image search: :)
wassup2

Lotto dreamers, at least, receive the proper information (well, except for a browser update):
wassup3