February 2012
3 posts
3 tags
It is estimated that two countries which share a common language trade 42% more with each other than two otherwise identical countries that lack that bond.
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Only 7% of marketing dollars in the US are spent on targeted ethnic campaigns, although nearly half of Americans belong to ethnic minorities.
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Facebook employs only around 3,000 staff, giving it an average revenue of $ 1.2 million per person in 2011.
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January 2012
6 posts
3 tags
The average US share holding lasts 22 seconds.
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Just 20% of the British public call themselves members of the Church of England, down from 40% in 1983.
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Recreational walking is by far the most popular leisure activity in Britain: 16% of Britons do it each week compared with 11% who go to the gym.
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Games specifically designed to be played on mobile phones already account for $8 billion of the $56 billion global games market, even though they typically sell at less than a tenth the price of a traditional console game.
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In the UK, some 45% of people smoked in the mid-1970s; now 21% do.
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In 2010, 1.6 billion handsets were sold worldwide, a 31% rise on 2009.
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December 2011
4 posts
2 tags
The average webpage has grown 33% in size in the last year, up from 726 kilobytes in 2010 to about 965 kilobytes in 2011.
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The percent of photographs taken with a smartphone has increased from 17% to 27% over the past year, while the share of photos taken with a dedicated camera has dropped from 52% to 44%.
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1 tag
At last count, there are 5,334 streets in Paris.
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More than one in every 10 banknotes in circulation in Britain is contaminated with cocaine.
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November 2011
23 posts
1 tag
The average Briton says thank you up to 5,000 times a year.
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4 tags
The average shower lasts 8 minutes - using 62 litres of hot water, compared with an average bath’s 80 litres.
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There are on average 3.74 degrees of separation between any one Facebook user and another. [Misreported claims of 4.74 degrees of separation confused the number of degrees with the distance - or hops - between each of the people on the friendship chain. ‘Degree of separation’ is the same as ‘distance minus one’.]
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There are now 215 million first-generation migrants around the world: that’s 3% of the world’s population.
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While immigrants make up an eighth of America’s population, they founded a quarter of the country’s technology and engineering firms.
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Start-ups in America add around 3 million jobs a year.
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The number of patent applications in the world rose from around 800,000 in the early 1980s to 1.8 million in 2009.
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Dollar General is now the largest retailer in America by store count, and is adding 600 shops a year.
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Women make up 59% of e-reader owners, and only 43% of tablet owners.
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British parents buy their children an average of 41 toys per year.
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Only 4.6% of Americans were married to a foreigner in 2010, up from 2.4% in 1970.
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Only 10% of Japanese managers are female, compared with 46% in America.
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Less than two years after the iPad went on sale, 11% of American adults now own a tablet and more than half of this group read news on it each day.
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Despite earning two-thirds of its revenues abroad, Fiat still has almost half its employees and 40% of its plants in Italy.
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Commercial fishing in general is one of the riskiest occupations in the US, with a death rate 32 times the average for U.S. workers.
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U.S. consumers spent 15% of their online time at Facebook in September 2011 - but Facebook is expected to capture just 6.4% of total online ad spending this year.
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Of the $1.2 trillion spent globally each year on R&D across corporations and academia, 40 percent—much the largest share—pays for people.
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The amount of time that individuals and businesses in America spend preparing and filing their taxes amounts to 6.1 billion hours each year, not including audits. If you monetize that, the national cost of complying with US tax laws in 2008 was $163 billion, or 11 percent of total income tax receipts.
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The US Income Tax code runs into more than 72,000 pages.
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As a rule of thumb, a 1% improvement in energy efficiency knocks more than $1 million off an airliner’s fuel bill over its lifetime of roughly 20 years.
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The number of text messages sent and received by Americans aged between 45 and 54 rose by 75% in the year to the second quarter of 2010. Over the same period, the number of phone calls made and received by adults of all ages fell by 25%.
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To make seawater fit for human consumption its salt content of approximately 3.5% must be cut to 0.05% or less.
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With around 7,000 people per square kilometre, Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world.
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October 2011
31 posts
1 tag
The average human understands about 100 million different “common sense” ideas.
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1 tag
Gmail has an estimated 260 million users.
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Around 8 million units of the Microsoft Kinect were sold within 60 days of its launch in November 2010. No consumer-electronics device has ever sold so fast, according to Guinness World Records.
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A gigabyte (GB) of storage cost around $200,000 in 1980; today a disk drive holding a terabyte, or 1,024GB, costs around $100.
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According to estimates, 468 million smartphones will be sold this year.
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According to Facebook, people who visit its network via mobile devices are twice as active on it as those who tap into it via other means.
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It’s been estimated that almost 18 billion apps have been downloaded since the first app store was opened by Apple in 2008.
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The average wait before getting in contact with someone after a first date is now 1.52 days.
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Samsung is currently a network of 83 companies that account for a staggering 13% of South Korea’s exports.
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An experienced worker laid off when the country’s unemployment is at 9% faces a reduction in lifetime earnings nearly twice that of someone sacked when the rate is 5%: a loss of 20% on average.
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The average flight in European airspace is 50 km (31 miles) longer than it need be - largely due to primitive air-traffic management (ATM) systems.
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The number of tweets per day now (in Oct 2011) exceeds 230 million, up more than 100% from the beginning of the year.
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The average Frenchman drinks 40 shots of whiskey each year.
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In the 1970s only about 15% of all CEO vacancies in Forbes 1,000 firms were filled by outsiders. By the early 2000s the share had climbed to 33%.
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