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Showing posts with the label correlation

American iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS usage mapped

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Mashable had an interesting report to show us from July 2011: It occurred to me that the North-East, Mid-West and South/West looked vaguely reminiscent of American political party affiliation data by state, so I found this Wikipedia map of the gubernatorial election results data from 2010 : L egend:    Republican gains    Republican holds    Democratic gains    Democratic holds    Independent win    not contested Well, a slight correlation can be discerned, anyway - California may be favouring Android overall, but Mashable's article did report that there are iOS-heavy cities (to be specific, they were reported as  San Francisco, San Jose, Modesto, Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Chico, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo and Napa). Given my personal history in Massachusetts and the fact that most of my friends (and colleagues) are iPhone owners, one might think I'd also jumped onto the iOS bandwagon. Apple had also been the most popular smartphone manufacturer in Japan. However, wh

A hoax correlation study: IQ scores and browser choice (amended 8th August 2011)

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One of the news aggregators that I visit is Mashable, and recently they published the results of a false correlative study of browser use and IQ score , which supposedly used data from 100,000 users (and was run by a Canadian company).  Here's the l ink to the Mashable article . Supposed correlation results from the published hoax: The fictitious study's conclusion was that " “individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.”  Since I blogged about it well before the false nature of the hoax was published, I've decided to keep an amended version up (thanks to Caesar for the comment). My own anecdotal impression had been that on corporate hardware, vestiges of IE6 uses was attributable to bigger bureaucratic organizations, who actually do exhibit tendencies to resist change. Another variable that has historically influenced rates of browser use of course, is factory settings. Microsoft's IE certainly enjoyed year