Statistics – Page 7 – Zelophehad's Daughters

Books, Mormons, and Statistics, part II

Katya3 December 20082 January 20094 Comments

Ziff, Ray, and Kent Larsen had it right — the Book of Mormon has the largest standard deviation in ratings of any book on the site. The stat is called “25 Books People Can’t Agree On” and you can see it at the bottom of this page.

The Book of Mormon may be at the top of the list, but it’s in good company, since books by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Isaac Newton are also on the list. (Of course, the urban vampire fantasy and regency romance do drag down the neighborhood a bit.)

It’s also the most widely-owned of any book on that list, by far. There are around 1,600 LibraryThing members who own a total of around 1,800 copies of the Book of Mormon. The next most widely held book is Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, at around 400 copies. There have been some other popular books on the list, but they tend to drop off when they get very popular, because enough people give them an intermediate rating (2.5-3.5 stars) that it lowers the standard deviation of all the ratings. The Secret, a book made popular by Oprah Winfrey, used to be on the list, but now the standard deviation of the ratings is down to 1.34, well below the current top-25 cutoff of 1.42. Read More

In Fun, Statistics

Books, Mormons, and Statistics

Katya30 November 20082 January 20099 Comments

If you like books and statistics, you’ll love LibraryThing. They have 554,277 members who have cataloged 33,647,263 books of which 3,850,295 are unique works not shared by anyone else on the site.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s [Philosopher’s] Stone is owned by more people than anyone else (37,254 copies, 3 of which are mine), although more people have posted reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (704 reviews, with an average rating of 4.43 stars out of 5).

As you might expect, J.K. Rowling is the top author in terms of number of copies of her books owned, but Stephen King is second, even though his top individual book isn’t even in the top 200.

Oh, and one more thing (which is actually the whole point of this post): The Book of Mormon is at the top of a list based on another site-wide statistic. Care to guess what that statistic is?

In Gender Issues, Statistics

Documenting Changing Church Rhetoric on Gender Roles

Ziff9 September 20082 January 200918 Comments

My impression is that Church rhetoric defines women by their roles more often than it does men. Women are wives and mothers. Even if they aren’t technically mothers, women are mothers, because that’s just who they are. Men, on the other hand, sure we’re admonished to be good husbands and fathers, but those roles are discussed as being much less central to who we are. I would be shocked, for example, if someone gave a talk titled “Are We Not All Fathers?” in General Conference.

When this difference in the centrality of women’s and men’s gender roles is discussed, one hope that is often held out is that the Church is changing. Women are coming to be defined less by their roles and more as people of worth even if they don’t take on those roles, and men are being reminded more often that our roles as husband and father should be central to our lives.

It occurred to me recently that I could easily test for whether such a change is actually occurring by looking at how often different words are used in articles archived at LDS.org. Read More

In Blogging, Statistics

‘Nacle Numbers: Notes

Ziff19 June 20082 January 200911 Comments

In this (probably last) installment of ‘Nacle Numbers, I’ll try to answer a few more questions about the 11 blogs in my sample. (If you haven’t read previous installments, Part 1 describes the sample, Part 2 discusses blogs, Part 3, bloggers, and Part 4, commenters.)

How do posts differ by gender? (ECS asked this question.)

In Blogging, Statistics

‘Nacle Numbers: The Commenters [updated]

Ziff28 April 20082 January 200996 Comments

Who was the most prolific commenter of 2007? Read More

In Blogging, Statistics

‘Nacle Numbers 2007, Part 3

Ziff7 April 20083 January 200936 Comments

The longest bloggernacle post of 2007 that I could find was Kevin Barney’s “On Elkenah as Canaanite El” at BCC, which was 9072 words.

In Blogging, Statistics

‘Nacle Numbers 2007, Part 2

Ziff3 March 200821 November 201539 Comments

What’s the biggest blog in the bloggernacle? It’s By Common Consent. Read More

In Blogging, Statistics

‘Nacle Numbers 2007, Part 1

Ziff26 February 200821 November 201525 Comments

Just how big is the bloggernacle?

In Gender Issues, Presiding, Statistics

Secular Usage of “Preside”

Ziff19 November 20072 January 200917 Comments

In a discussion last year at T&S about what it means for a husband to preside, Jim F. argued that it doesn’t really matter what preside means outside the Church because the word just isn’t much used outside the Church (and perhaps court). Kiskilili disagreed, saying that she thought that secular usage was more common.

At the time, it occurred to me that this would be a relatively simple question to get data to answer, but I put the thought on the back burner, so I am just now getting around to trying to answer it. I chose to search newspapers to attempt to answer the question, given that they tend to have a very broad target audience and are fairly widely read (although I know they aren’t read as much as they used to be).

1. Is preside ever used in a secular context? Read More