Buying Individuals, Data Collections and Online Ads

From the great article A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's Watching Your Every Click, published in The Atlantic by Communications professor Joesph Turow.

What Average Americans Are Doing: Sleeping, Eating, Working and Watching Television

This is how an average American over the age of 15 spends his or her 24 hours of daily existence (based on 2008 statistics). Playing with the different categories of Americans makes for a good fifteen minutes of entertainment and brain workout trying to figure out why, on average, at 8:50pm as many as 55% of the 65 or over are watching television while at as little as 8% of the 18-25 are socializing. 

Graph by Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Kevin Quealy, Amy Schoenfeld found in The New York Times

Taste for Beer and Inclination for First Date Sex: Data on Dating

I recently discovered the most insightfully fascinating blog. Written by the good people behind OkCupid, on it they compress their users profiles' data into these simple graphs with powerful one liners: they objectify people, correlate oral sex and eating habits, and activity on twitter with masturbation probabilities. It's amazing!

My favorite so far links beer appreciation with the potentiality of sleeping with someone on a first date:

How amazing?

Weirdly the same day I heard about this blog, I finished an old New Yorker article on online dating that mentions it. In the article we learn about the science and math behind meeting a significant other, potential differences between the photo pauses that attract men versus those that attract women, the OKcupid founders' marital status, and the religious rigor behind eHarmony's experiments. About the blog we learn that the data is based on the analysis of 34,620 couples and that, according to its author, Nick Paumgarten, the blog's purpose "is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes [in its early days the site's four Harvard math majors founders attracted members through quizzes] are to lure you."

Not so sure about being lured by OKCupid, but totally lured by human beings.