Reading Habits Statistics : Who Reads eBooks? (via ePublish a Book)
Reading Habits Statistics : Who Reads eBooks? By Patricia de Hemricourt As we saw last week, the penetration rate of ebooks in the US is currently reaching about 20% of the population. Now, that is a steep increase from the 2.7% penetration rate…
Cheating (the kind that students do when taking tests) has existed for ages – perhaps the very day that man started to exist – and it seems that as time goes by, the methods used for this unscrupulous activity just gets more creative. Blame whatever you want for that, but technology does play a part.
Unsurprisingly, technology is also becoming a bane for cheaters. There is actually a company that specializes in technology that catches cheats. Caveon Test Security has been in operation for several years now and uses statistical anomalies to determine if students have been cheating. The algorithm that they use is not exactly public, but neither is it a secret.
As a matter of fact, using statistics as the basis for catching cheats is an age old trick – Caveon only makes it more advanced and accurate. The basic idea is that their algorithm checks for patterns that show up if test takers have been copying from each other (high number of the same incorrect answers). It also checks for illogical patterns such as people getting correct answers for harder questions and getting easy questions incorrectly.
It is easy to see that while those ideas do make sense, it may not be foolproof. Critics are actually pointing out that the methods used by Caveon may not be that accurate – and they may very well be right. Then again, it might be better than allowing cheating to go unchecked.
What do you think of Caveon’s premise? Is it logical or does it put too much faith in technology?
Photo via Instructables
The colleagues over at the Blog Herald sat down and gathered some interesting data about Twitter usage and demographics, putting these against Facebook statistics. The result is an amazing infographic with lots of interesting data.
Here at The Blog Herald we wondered How did Twitter grow that much? and Where do those Tweets come from?
The results are rather surprising and we learned that the top three tweeting cities in the US (Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco) averagely tweet less in one minute than when basketball fans and football/soccer fans go crazy and start updating the world in 140 characters maximum.
To see the complete infographic, you’ll have to head over to The Blog Herald: The Meteoric Rise of Twitter. Here’s a teaser already.
As Google’s Android mobile operating system turns one year old today, here are a few interesting statistics for you.
According to mobile advertising firm AdMob:
A survey of 1,000 mobile phone users found that Android users download about nine applications per month, compared with about 10 for iPhone users and over 18 for iPod Touch users.
Though Microsoft is hoping its latest initiatives will push its flavours of Windows Mobile OS forward, I’m sure Android will continue to flourish as more handsets become available in the coming year.