DailyDirt: In The Long Run, We're All Dead

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you're looking for some good data to put into an infographic, it's not too hard to find statistics on death. Reliable stats of how people died go back quite a ways, too. Sure, it's a bit morbid, but most people don't think about dying until they're close to doing it. So if you're curious, check out a few of these visualizations on how we die.

• The leading causes of death have changed significantly since 1900, so the flu (or pneumonia) isn't killing off as many Americans as it used to. Instead, heart disease and cancer have replaced the flu/pneumonia and tuberculosis. [url]
• What are the odds? Dying of heart disease has relatively common 467:1 odds -- compared to dying from cycling (340,845:1) or an asteroid impact (74,817,414:1). [url]
• Another infographic on how the world died (in the 20th century) shows non-communicable diseases and infectious diseases are obviously really deadly, but so are wars and drugs. It could be difficult to change these stats. Medical technology could wipe out some diseases, but we haven't cured old age.... [url]
• Is it worth it to try to minimize your risks of dying? If you want to try, remember to focus on the activities that are actually high risk, not the spectacular deaths that don't kill that many people (eg. stepladders vs terrorism). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: accidents, cancer, data, death, flu, health, heart disease, infographics, non-communicable diseases, pneumonia, risk, statistics, tuberculosis

DailyDirt: Don't Just Give People Numbers... Draw Charts?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A number is often meaningless without a unit attached to it, but sometimes a unit is useless if it's an unfamiliar one. Given all the reporting on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a few helpful folks have created some charts to better explain what the radiation dosages mean. These graphs aren't perfect, but they attempt to put some uncommon figures into context. If you don't know what a sievert is, check out these charts.

• XKCD has a chart that illustrates radiation dosages to help folks understand what the sievert unit means. No stick figures were harmed in the production of this chart. (Also, feel free to copy and distribute it because it's public domain material.) [url]
• A slightly more colorful chart of what a sievert unit means is available for purchase -- with all the money going to help with the disaster relief effort. The logarithmic scale on this one is kind of easy to miss on this chart, though... [url]
• Here's a chart that's a bit more complicated to read, but it also incorporates exposure time. Unfortunately, Roy G Biv is apparently not helpful for determining the order of severity. [url]
• The New York Times published a nice table explaining how far the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster have spread. For the radiation detected near British Columbia, "a person would have to drink 3 million glasses of water at one time to reach a problematic dose in the thyroid." [url]
• To find more stuff on research & research tools, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: charts, fukushima daiichi, infographics, radiation, sievert, xkcd

Infographic Does A Great Job Misrepresenting Opportunities Of The Digital Era

from the ooo-pretty-charts dept

This infographic depicts the number of sales that must be made in order for a solo artist to make "minimum wage" in a month. The graphic is obviously meant to be a bit shocking, but even the slightest bit of digging turns it into more of a shoulder shrug. First of all, it is a bit misleading in that it compares not quite apples to oranges, but apples to apple slices to apple sauce to apple juice -- all in one chart. It compares albums and singles and streams all on the same scale, which is a bit unfair. If you sell 1 album for $9.99 (that had 10 tracks on it), then of course you would expect to have to sell (roughly) 10 times as many tracks for $0.99 to make the same amount of money -- that's not really much of a revelation. By looking at the data, we can compare apples to apples and get a better sense of what is going on:

format	average retail price	musician revenue	sales to earn min. wage
Self-Pressed CD	$9.99	$8.09	143
iTunes Album Download	$9.99	0.94	1,229
cdbaby Album download	$9.99	7.49	155
Retail Label-backed CD	$9.99	$0.30	3,871

Clearly, it's difficult to make a living simply by selling albums, but it's always been that way. Musicians have long known that in order to make real money, they'd either have to be U2 big, or tour. However, it's very interesting to note that in the new, digital era, artists actually make more off of their album sales in iTunes than they did in the old, physical world. And selling albums digitally through cdbaby, without a label, stands to bring in much, much more money for the artist -- and frees them from the headache of distributing a physical product. The band Pomplamoose, for example, is making a perfectly good living doing just that.

Moving on, the data claims that to make minimum wage, an artist would need 4.6M plays on a streaming service like Spotify. While that might be technically true, it's a pretty meaningless calculation. It does not take into account the promotional value of streaming -- and unlike selling 143 CDs, getting 4.6M plays of a digital track would certainly lead to significant revenue elsewhere. Surely an artist would be able to translate that much attention into successful live shows or their own CwF+RtB offering. After all, we've seen time and time again that focusing on something as narrow as money earned per track sold (or streamed play) is a limited way to view a musician's earning potential.

So, while at first glance, this infographic may seem pessimistic, digging a little deeper into the data gives the real story. Exciting opportunities still abound in the world of music for those creative enough to seize them.

Filed Under: infographics, music industry