statistics

librato – metrics, monitoring and alerts

Dialect Survey Results

This is one of the coolest things on language dialects that I’ve ever seen. A whole bunch of tiny differences all mapped out across the USA. Just change the question in the dropdown menu on the left, and look at the map on the right. Both composite and individual maps are available.

Via kottke.

Friendship of nations through notable statues

This heavily edited image found its way into my Facebook stream (sorry, don’t know who’s the author of the image):

These are, of course, three iconic statues photoshopped together (left to right): The Motherland Calls, Christ the Redeemer, and the Statue of Liberty. Each one has interesting stories and unique value to the nation of its people.

My interest was more in the relative sizes of one to another. On the edited images, all three appear somewhat the same. But is it true in real life? Wikipedia (links above) shows that they are not.

The Motherland Calls was the tallest statue at the time of construction, in 1967. It measures 87 meters from the tip of the sword to the base of the platform on which it stands.
The Statue of Liberty was constructed in 1886 and measures 46 meters. It does appear much higher, because of the pedestal on which it stands. With the one it goes as high as 93 meters.
Christ the Redeemer was built in 1931 and is only 30 meters tall. Together with the pedestal it’s 38 meters high.

There is another metric that escaped the generalization – The Motherland Calls’ sword is 33 meters long. Look at the numbers above. It’s actually longer than the whole statue of Christ the Redeemer (without the pedestal). Wow! That’s a lot of scaling for the image of friendship.

While reading up on these statues, I found another image, which actually puts them together on a scale.

Oops! So much for the friendship of nations. There’s a the Spring Temple Buddha, built in 2002, rising up 128 meters. I guess nobody wants to be friends with him. Or any of those smaller statues to the right of Jesus the Redeemer.

On Google’s Transparency Report

While catching up with my RSS feeds, I saw the latest Google Transparency Report from the end of last month. The summary of the report basically says that the number of governmental requests to remove content from Google is raising quite rapidly.

There are also some clarifications of why that might be:

There was a sharp increase in requests from Brazil, where we received 697 requests to remove content from our platforms (of which 640 were court orders—meaning we received an average of 3.5 court orders per day during this time period), up from 191 during the first half of the year. The big reason for the spike was the municipal elections, which took place last fall. Nearly half of the total requests—316 to be exact—called for the removal of 756 pieces of content related to alleged violations of the Brazilian Electoral Code, which forbids defamation and commentary that offends candidates. We’re appealing many of these cases, on the basis that the content is protected by freedom of expression under the Brazilian Constitution.

Another place where we saw an increase was from Russia, where a new law took effect last fall. In the first half of 2012, we received six requests, the most we had ever received in any given six-month period from Russia. But in the second half of the year, we received 114 requests to remove content—107 of them citing this new law.

During this period, we received inquiries from 20 countries regarding YouTube videos containing clips of the movie “Innocence of Muslims.” While the videos were within our Community Guidelines, we restricted videos from view in several countries in accordance with local law after receiving formal legal complaints. We also temporarily restricted videos from view in Egypt and Libya due to the particularly difficult circumstances there.

One thing that I am missing is a correlation to the actual size of the Google index. I mean, I of course understand that it is incomparably larger than all these requests combined, but I keep thinking that the more content you’ll index, the more removal requests you’ll get. So, I think, it would be interesting to see the correlation in growth of removal requests to the growth of the Google’s global index.

Happy 8th birthday, YouTube!

YouTube is one of those services that feels like it was here forever. In digital years it might have been. But in human years, it’s a few month younger than my son. YouTube blog reminds us that it was launched in May of 2005.

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

Millions of partners are creating content for YouTube and more than 1,000 companies worldwide have mandated a one-hour mid-day break to watch nothing but funny YouTube videos. Well, we made that last stat up, but that would be cool (the other stats are true).

Happy birthday, YouTube! You are awesome. Keep it up.