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14 Nov 2011 23:21

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World: Just in case we needed another reminder to exercise once in a while

  • 552 million people could have diabetes by the year 2030 source
  • » That’s 1 in 10 people worldwide. The World Health Organization says that the rise in diabetic adults will most likely be due to an aging world population, not the increasing rate of obesity. Most cases are Type 2 and come from “weight gain and a sedentary lifestyle.” Count this number as inspiration for 2012’s resolutions.

17 Sep 2010 11:23

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Tech: Comparison: Posterous is big. Tumblr is a phenomenon.

  • Posterous is growing, yeah, but Tumblr is basically going to be the next Twitter. Eight million unique visitors per month versus less than two million? It’s not really a contest. (Though in Posterous’ defense, though, other companies such as Reddit have complained that these stats  aren’t always accurate – we know, for example, that our stats are totally off and our numbers in July, for example, are nearly triple what Compete says they are.) source

29 May 2010 16:25

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Culture: Dennis Hopper’s death not as Twitter-overtaking as Gary Coleman’s

  • 1.9% of all tweets were about Hopper’s death source
  • How does it compare? It drew less than half the attention of Coleman’s on a slower day. (That factoid has been tweeted a lot today, by the way.) Part of it might be due to the sheer shock of Coleman’s versus Hopper’s more-known health problems.

21 Dec 2009 12:57

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U.S.: Crime’s on the decline in 2009, according to the FBI

  • 4.4% drop in violent crime in 2009’s first half source

09 Sep 2009 01:17

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U.S.: There’s a lot of feral cats out there overpopulating the wild

  • 50% of all cats (out of 146 million cute felines) are estimated to be feral – which means they’re essentially wild
  • 4.9 kittens are born from the average feral cat mother each year, meaning there’s a huge overpopulation problem source

09 Aug 2009 22:11

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Tech: tr.im gets whiny, shuts down their URL shortener, blames Twitter

  • What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.
  • A message posted on the tr.im blog • Saying that despite the site’s popularity, they don’t feel like the service will succeed and they’re going to shut it down. The post attacks other targets besides Twitter and bit.ly – including TweetMeme. They feel that they can’t sell the statistical information because everyone else has it. Nobody wanted to buy the service. And it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Twitter is now gonna be a graveyard of useless shortened links. Great. • source

04 Aug 2009 10:28

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Biz, U.S.: Spending up, incomes down: The economy had a mixed June

  • +0.4% the increase in consumer spending in June, which was better than expected and topped May
  • -1.3% the drop in personal income in June, which was way bigger than expected – the largest since 2005 source
 

16 Jul 2009 16:51

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U.S., World: Veterans are not handling the transition from Iraq, Afghanistan well

  • 37% of returning military have mental health problems source

01 Jun 2009 21:21

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Biz, Tech: Web advertising is more like the stock market nowadays

  • It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.
  • Darren Herman • President of Varick Media Management, on what his company does – looks at statistics on how people are reacting to web advertising, rejiggers some things, and reacts accordingly. The large selection of statistics online make this much easier than it used to be and allow you to track response much better than you could with say, a billboard. As a result of the new data-heavy approach, it’s starting to make sense for laid off workers in the financial industry to move over from Wall St. to Madison Ave. • source

03 Mar 2009 09:43

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Offbeat: Ah, porn. The one thing everybody’s wallets can agree on

  • When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different.
  • Benjamin Edelman • Harvard Business School professor, on a new study regarding pornography usage by region, a study based on anonymous credit card data nationwide. Red states like it a little more than blue, but everyone dips into the porn bin a little. (The top users? Utah and Mississippi.) • source