At right, the top block is the 2007 "blockbuster season," running from spring to fall; the bottom block is the same time period from 1987. This sums up the major trend in a nutshell: over time, the opening-weekend peaks have grown larger, and the tails (indicating longevity and sustained money-making) have grown shorter. But there are exceptions to the rule, and all sorts of odd little easter eggs that pop with with close scrutiny: for example, scroll back so that July/August 1998 is at the far left of the browser window, and hover over Saving Private Ryan — you'll see its tail diminish to nearly nothing, then bubble back up in February with an Oscar-season revival (also note, just above it, a late-breaking yellow sliver for Life is Beautiful). Or look around August-September 2002: see that big red vein of revenue running through the middle of the graph? That's the truly anomalous, slow-starting, "word-of-mouth" hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Find any other oddities? Let us know in the comments.

The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2007 (NYTimes.com)

Full disclosure: I almost never watch Frontline on PBS anymore. I usually watch it online.

But the other night, however unexpectedly, I sat down and watched "Growing Up Online" on PBS. The show examined how this first generation to grow up within the MySpace/Facebook sphere socializes on and is socialized by the Internet.

"Growing Up Online" refuses to reel off cautionary tale after cautionary tale in a tone of shrill alarm, as many media profiles of this issue seem to. Rather, the filmmakers try to offer a more nuanced documentation of how children, their parents, and teachers struggle to find their appropriate levels of interaction with the limitless resources of the Internet age.

Watch "Growing Up Online" on Frontline's website, where not only are the most recent shows available, but most programs since 2001 are archived, along with some older classic episodes from the show's 25-year history. If you've already seen it, there are some great topical resources on the show's site, along with some follow-up on the kids documented by the program.

"Growing Up Online"
Frontline Archive

For instance, a post recently noted their newly uploaded collection of early baseball photos from A. G. Spalding (yes, the guy whose name is on your basketball). Paula Baxter, Curator of the Library's Art and Architecture Collection, has been sharing her thoughts on an upcoming exhibition on Art Deco fashion and design.

Links:
New York Public Library Blog
Photo: "New York City Public Library front" by melanzane1013 via Flickr.

...a two-hour television event, with viewers playing at home as they watch our six teams of Canadians compete in our Toronto studio. By the end of the test, you'll know if you've been paying attention to the world around you, or if you've been sleepwalking through the last eight years.

The show will also reveal information about others who are playing at home and in the studio. Who will turn out to be more century savvy? The Men or the Women? Will the meat eaters devour the vegetarians? Will the coffee drinkers overpower the tea drinkers? We'll find out as Canadians give us their answers on the most technologically advanced and information saturated century the planet has ever seen!

If you don't get CBC TV, you can still take the test at the Test the Nation website (starting Sunday) and find out how you measure up against test-takers around the world. You can warm up this week in the "Mental Gym," or take tests from previous shows: IQ Test and Watch Your Language.

If you do tune in, watch for my smiling mug to pop up somewhere between questions 26 and 27, offering up some "expert" commentary on the test...

Test the Nation: Trivia

Once again, here's a peek at "The World at a Glance" from the pages of The World Almanac 2008. This time, some assorted facts about Arts and Media.

Number Ones

Top-grossing U.S. movie, 2006: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, $423.3 mil
All-time top-grossing U.S. movie: Titanic (1997), $600.8 mil
#1 syndicated TV program, 2006-07: ESPN NFL Regular Season, 8.7% of TV households
All-time most watched TV program: M*A*S*H finale, Feb. 28, 1983, 50.2 mil households
#1 commercial radio format in U.S., 2007: Country, 2,034 stations
#1 recorded music genre in U.S., 2006: Rock, 34% of all music sold
All-time top-selling U.S. album: Eagles/Their Greatest Hits 1971-75, Eagles, 29 mil copies

Then and Now

If you can manage to stay awake to click through a few interesting links, you can get the full Thanksgiving story on the World Almanac for Kids site, or visit the Census Bureau for a great round-up of Thanksgiving-related stats—turkey, cranberry, and sweet potato production in the U.S., number of places in the U.S. named after the holiday's main course... enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Links:
Thanksgiving Day (The World Almanac for Kids)
Thanksgiving Day Facts (US Census Bureau)

Image: Happy Thanksgiving! from ckirkman's Flickr stream

The year is winding down, which means it's time for media outlets everywhere to start summarizing 2007 with variously-themed lists. While we don't yet know who the Time "Person(s) of the Year" will be, one of my favorite lists has already been released: the Oxford Word of the Year and its runners-up. I like the Word of the Year lists because they provide an interesting perspective on what people have been talking about during the year, and how they've chosen to talk about it.

The 2007 Oxford Word of the Year is locavore, which defines the movement, becoming more popular in some regions of the country, toward committing to eating only locally grown food.

A few Word of the Year runners-up:

• bacn: email notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted "spam" (coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in Aug. 2007 and popularized in the blogging community)
• colony collapse disorder: a still-unexplained phenomenon resulting in the widespread disappearance of honeybees from beehives, first observed in late 2006
• tase (or taze): to stun with a Taser (popularized by a Sep. 2007 incident in which a University of Florida student was filmed being stunned by a Taser at a public forum)

Check out the rest of Oxford's list, which includes a nice etymology for locavore, at the link below. Or grab a copy of The World Almanac 2008, where you'll find Merriam-Webster's list of new words for 2007 on page 722.

Oxford Word of the Year

Flickr photo by Pay No Mind

Want to work in theater, dance, music, or publishing? Move to New York.

That might not be surprising advice, but a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics backs it up with numbers. "During the first quarter of 2006, 1 out of every 4 jobs (25.8 percent) associated with the creative arts industries in the country was located in either New York or Los Angeles," according to the report.

So what qualifies as a creative arts industry? The authors defined 27 industries as having "activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property." They then compared employment and wage data for those 27 "cultural output industries" in New York and LA for the earliest and most recent figures, the first quarters of 1990 and 2006.

Over the 17-year period, the movie production industry in LA has grown 111.3 percent while jobs in theater companies and dinner theaters plummeted from 14,042 jobs on average to 1,466.

In New York, there are more jobs in most creative arts fields than in 1990, but they don't pay as well in comparison. While city-wide private wages in New York had tripled between 1990 and 2006, the percent earned by the creative arts dropped from 8 to 5.4.

Nationwide, jobs in most parts of the music industry have dropped but the number of record producers grew from 813 to 2,595. Record producers now make the most money on average out of all of the creative arts listed. Other job sectors that increased greatly are cable and other subscription programming, fine arts schools, independent managers for public figures, internet publishing and broadcasting, motion picture and video production, museums, and promoters with or without facilities.

The economic impact of the creative arts industries: New York and Los Angeles
Via Docuticker

"TriBeca alley during student film shoot" from Flickr by eugene.

Oh, and since I missed "Talk Like a Pirate Day" and haven't found another excuse to post the attached picture, I think Halloween is at least reasonably appropriate. So please enjoy the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates. Arrrrrrrr!

Links:
Birthdays and Holidays (The World Almanac for Kids)
Post Like a Pirate (Language Log)
Wake Up With Whoopi, Oct. 25, 2007 (5MB mp3)

"Queries to newspapers from radio listeners throughout the United States tonight, regarding a reported meteor fall which killed a number of New Jerseyites, are the result of a studio dramatization."

Of course, the meteor carrying Martians with flame-shooting guns and poisonous gas was just Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast. Old history from the time of cure-all elixirs and eugenics. Right?

Well, maybe not. The major Italian magazine L'espresso ran an article on Friday (in Italian, "E.T. Speaks Sicilian") that aliens may have caused hundreds of unplugged household appliances to burst into flames in northern Sicily back in 2004. It cited a leaked interim report by the Italian government that either a secret military test or alien experiments caused a brief electromagnetic emission between 12 and 15 gigawatts.

The Cabinet of Wonders delves into British newspaper reports for an answer.

Without a real report it's pointless to speculate about the source of this event. To add a little solid science to this entry I should mention that electromagnetic waves from solar superstorms have been known to cause problems with electric grids, a phenomena we briefly covered on page 302 of the 2007 World Almanac.

Links:
Solar Storms and Their Human Impacts (NASA)
War of the Worlds broadcast (Internet Archive)

Flickr photo by The Redbird

I'm surprised we haven't blogged about this one before: FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, which holds political candidates (no matter what party they represent) to task for mis-statements, distorted facts, and outright untruths in major speeches, debates, and other appearances. It's the kind of detailed fact-checking you expect, but rarely get, from major media outlets—and it's an incredibly useful resource as we head for a contentious primary season. An example of a recent summary:

Tongues were sharpened before Sunday night's GOP presidential debate in Orlando, with the candidates drawing blood right out of the gate. We found them factually challenged in several areas:

• Giuliani stretched till he broke, in calling Thompson "the single biggest obstacle to tort reform" in the Senate.
• Romney boasted of his Massachusetts health care plan and criticized Hillary Clinton's, although her plan is strikingly similar to Romney's Massachusetts program. He also falsely accused her of favoring "all-government insurance."
• Giuliani claimed the price of health insurance would drop more than 50 percent if millions more people purchased it directly, a statement unsupported by any evidence he's offered so far.
• Thompson said the most affluent 40 percent of Americans pay "about 99 percent of the taxes." Actually, they pay less than 85 percent, and also have nearly 74 percent of all the income.
• Giuliani made an inflated boast about bringing down crime in New York "more than anyone in this country - maybe in the history of this country." But the decline started before he took office, continued after he left, and even the FBI itself warns against attributing crime statistics to any specific cause.

Link: FactCheck.org

Speaking of printing presses: Whoopi asked if I had any insight into a "fact of the day" about the first English Bible being printed in Switzerland—something that didn't make much sense to her. Why not just print in England? My guess, on the spot, had to with printing technology being more advanced at the time in Switzerland, yadda yadda yadda. But now that I listen back to that segment, and actually hear the date in question (1535) I realize my off-the-cuff speculation was way off the mark. By that time, Gutenberg's technology had spread all across Europe, so that wouldn't have been the reason... what would have been problematic was the English clergy's abhorrence of the idea of translating scripture into the vernacular. Myles Coverdale (who I think is the translator of the Bible in question) would have found a more hospitable climate in Switzerland for such an endeavor... or anyway, that's my second guess after a few more cups of coffee. Corrections to my shoddy half-remembered history of Bible-printing are most welcome, in the comments.

Anyway. It was still fun to talk with Whoopi & Crew about the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, back in 1582 (or 1752, for Britain and the American colonies). Pope Gregory decreed that the day following Oct. 4, 1582, would not be Oct. 5, but rather Oct. 15—establishing what we now call the Gregorian calendar, and bringing the calendar year in line with the solar one. Fun stuff, if a little confusing. Enjoy....

Download: Wake Up With Whoopi, Oct. 4, 2007

Seriously, if you live near any kind of small- to mid-sized metropolitan area and you don't have a public library card, what the heck are you thinking? We're spoiled here in New York—the main NYPL Research Library (at right) is reference-geek paradise, and an NYPL card grants you access to a staggering number of specialized online databases—but even smaller library systems have much to offer. So get going, already!

No, wait: listen to the interview first. Then get going.

Listen: Wake Up With Whoopi, August 30, 2007 (mp3, 6MB)

• Popular sections and common uses of The World Almanac
• A light scolding from Whoopi for not having the complete World Almanac available online
• A quick chat about the value of Wikipedia relative to other reference sources, and what happens when you look up "Paul Cubby Bryant"
• And the meaty topic of the day: a quick survey of some interesting sumptuary laws, drawing on information in this year's World Almanac for Kids. (Click here for a variation of the New Jersey law that closes the segment, plus some additional reading on sumptuary laws around the world)

More to come this week, I swear!

Listen here: Wake Up With Whoopi: Aug. 23, 2007(mp3, 8MB)

Image: Screen capture from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). The Quasimodo reference will make sense when you listen to the clip...

Yup, August 16 is the day that Capt. Joe Kittinger set a particularly astonishing set of records in 1960. And in my excitement to talk about inventors, parachutes, and insanely high-altitude free-falls, I mixed up a few key details. Most notably: Kittinger didn't jump from 18,000 feet, that was the height at which his main parachute opened; he actually jumped—out of a balloon dubbed Excelsior III—from an altitude of more than 100,000 feet. In the process, he set records for highest balloon ascent and highest parachute jump, and also set the record for fastest speed attained by a human without the assistance of an engine.

As penance for my fact-flubbing, I offer this video of his jump, which is far more interesting than listening to me talk. But you can still click here to listen to the show and catch up on some other facts (accurate ones!) about the first Census, National Inventors' Month, and how some of those off-the-wall "National [Something-Very-Strange] Month" holidays come about in the first place.

More:
Kittinger speaking at the Kircher Society Meeting (Part 1; be sure to click on parts 2 and 3)

Anyway, I had another fun visit with the incredibly warm and friendly Wake Up With Whoopi crew yesterday. In this week's free-for-all:

• The awesome lap-breaking power of the The World Almanac hardcover edition (yes, we publish one, and yes, the type is bigger than the paperback)
• In honor of the anniversary of Nixon's resignation (announced Aug. 8, 1974, but in effect at noon on Aug. 9), some selections from our list of Embarrassing Presidential Moments. Some bonus links: President Ford's 1942 Cosmo cover appearance (not an embarrassing moment, just an interesting one), and Pres. Carter's official report on his UFO sighting.
• A heads-up about this weekend's Perseid meteor shower
• And at the very end, a quick hello from the next guest: Abby Cadabby, Sesame Street's newest resident. Even at my age, it was a truly great, geeky thrill to meet a Muppet.

Image: From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (Katsuhiro Mouri & Shuji Kobayashi, Nagoya City Science Museum / Planetarium)

Keep visiting our blog for information about future appearances—and in the meantime, you can listen to last week's segment by clicking here here (mp3, 7MB).

12 Kinds of Ads

Don't take my darling boy away from me,
Don't send him off to war
You took his father and brothers three,
Now you've come back for more

[Recording from firstworldwar.com]

On April 6, 1917, the U.S. officially entered WWI. To mark this anniversary, check out this vintage audio from 1917 on www.firstworldwar.com. There you’ll find both speeches and music from the year Americans went “Over there.” You can find similar audio for the other war years, but for today we're sticking with 1917.

For the first three years of the war, which began in 1914, the U.S. remained neutral. U.S. businesses and banks sold supplies and granted loans to the allied countries, but the government didn't send troops. Americans at the time had little interest in joining that “European conflict” and were content to stay on their side of the Atlantic. The lyrics posted above were written almost as an anti-war protest song two years before the U.S. entered. But once the U.S. became engaged, the song sort of got pushed aside for more pro-war pieces such as “I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way.”

This is definitely one of the best sites out there for historical information and resources for those looking to learn more about “The War to End All Wars.” It does a good job of presenting the political, military, social, and cultural aspects of the War.

For a basic synopsis of the First World War, turn to page 127 in the 2007 World Almanac. For casualty figures from all U.S. wars, skip over to page 135.

Photo: U.S. troops resting on the road to the Front lines in France from www.firstworldwar.com.
Original source: Liberty's Victorious Conflict: A Photographic History of the World War, (Woman's Weekly, Chicago, 1918)

Lore Librarian
MrLibrarian
Subversive Librarian
...and the less-entertainingly named NYS SBDC Research Network

We've always known that the book holds a special place in the hearts (and ready reference shelves) of librarians. But strangely enough, we don't get many specific content suggestions from librarians, who I imagine are more intimately familiar with the contents of the World Almanac than the average reader...and those average readers have a lot to say about what we put into the book, and what we take out of it, each year.

So here's a request for the librarians in our audience: tell us what parts of the World Almanac you use most often... or what parts you've never used in all your years behind the reference desk... or what facts and statistics you think we've neglected for too long.

We're just getting into "Almanac season" now, mapping out the contents of the 2008 edition (yes, we do start this early in the year), and as always there is much debate about how to keep this classic reference book interesting, informative, useful, and relevant in the digital age. So let us know what you think, either in the comments or by e-mail, to cjoyce [at] waegroup.com. And spread the word!

Image from Mr. Guybrarian's Flickr stream

Whether people need to accept all those channels in a lump package is a hot issue. Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin has been outspoken about giving consumers channel-by-channel or “A la carte” cable selection. Last February, he countered his predecessor, former chairman Michael Powell, by reporting that “a la carte and increased tiering could offer consumers greater choice and the opportunity to lower their bills.” But only Congress can make that possible by changing the 1992 Cable Act. The a la carte option has horrified people in the cable industry since it would upend their entire finance system for niche channels (goodbye five versions of ESPN). Some advocacy groups, including the conservative Parents Television Council want to give viewers the right to refuse channels whose content they deem indecent.

[Last year, 86.2% of U.S. households subscribed to cable. See pages 249-251 in the 2007 World Almanac for more TV-related stats.]

Average U.S. Home Now Receives A Record 104.2 TV Channels, According to Nielsen

TV Noise 3 from Danagraves flickr stream

1. Bible [Library holdings: 796,882 Bibliographic records: 93,567]
2. Census (United States) [Library holdings: 460,628 Bibliographic records: 10,617]
3. Mother Goose [Library holdings: 67,663 Bibliographic records: 2,036]
4. Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri [Library holdings: 62,414 Bibliographic records: 2,917]
5. Odyssey, Homer [Library holdings: 45,551 Bibliographic records: 2,087]
6. Iliad, Homer [Library holdings: 44,093 Bibliographic records: 2,526]
7. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain [Library holdings: 42,724 Bibliographic records: 1,132]
8. Lord of the Rings [trilogy], J. R. R. Tolkien [Library holdings: 40,907 Bibliographic records: 685]
9. Hamlet, William Shakespeare [Library holdings: 39,521 Bibliographic records: 2,008]
10. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll [Library holdings: 39,277 Bibliographic records: 1,942]

IBM's Many Eyes continues to expand their already impressive lineup of visualization tools, most recently with a tag cloud option. Upload any text you like, and get an instant cloud showing frequency of single words or two-word combinations. I'm hoping for a modification to this that lets you chart frequency changes over time, like Chirag Mehta's cool presidential speeches analysis tool. But in the meantime, click on the image at right to see a quick cloud generated from the U.S. Constitution.

Self-proclaimed "YouTube for data visualization" Swivel has also beefed up its services slightly, first with the ability to embed images in graphs (mostly useless, but pretty), and now with a "Swivel It" bookmarklet that greatly simplifies the process of sending data from Google Spreadsheets to Swivel.

Links:
Many Eyes
IBM's Many Eyes App After One Month (Read/Write Web, March 5, 2007)

Swivel
Numbers...You're Swimming In Them (PDF; Fast Company, March 2007)

West of House.
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
>_

In case that line doesn't ring a bell: it's the opening of the classic text adventure game Zork, which ranks as one of the "ten most important video games of all time," according to a committee headed by Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University.

Lowood and his fellow committee members (game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, researcher Matteo Bittanti, and game journalist Christopher Grant) envision this list as the start of something akin to the National Film Registry, which every year adds new films to its massive list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" American films (see pages 238-39 of the 2007 World Almanac for that list).

I'm interested to see if this list gains as much widespread recognition as the Film Registry:

• Spacewar! (1962)
• Star Raiders (1979)
• Zork (1980)
• Tetris (1985)
• SimCity (1989)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
• Civilization I/II (1991)
• Doom (1993)
• Warcraft series (beginning 1994)
• Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

Is That Just Some Game? No, It's a Cultural Artifact (The New York Times, March 12, 2007)

Image: Zork in 1980 from the-tml's Flickr stream (CC)

Although Tosches is practiced in investigative reporting, this particular quest into the world of stock photography proves maddening as he bounces between reps at Windows, a public relations firm, and a state tourism department among other potential sources.

He expends all this effort because, as he writes,

I return to Paris, go from there to Tokyo, from there to Milan and Lake Como, then back here. I'm tired of everything, everywhere. I want only to go to Autumn.

Link: "Autumn and the Plot Against Me" (vanityfair.com)

Photo: A little bit of Autumn.

It’s not news that girls are being encouraged through mass media to look and act more adult and sexy. It is also well known that this type of constant exposure increases the risk of girls developing low self-esteem, eating disorders, and depression. But the report is alarming because it asserts that girlhood is being cut short dramatically, and that girls are starting to think of themselves as sexual beings as early as 6 years old. It’s one thing to depict children acting as adults, but there has to be a limit, which I think was surpassed long before this became the norm:

Ten-year-old girls can slide their low-cut jeans over "eye-candy" panties. French maid costumes, garter belt included, are available in preteen sizes. Barbie now comes in a "bling-bling" style, replete with halter top and go-go boots. And it's not unusual for girls under 12 to sing, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?" (Washington Post, Feb. 20 2007)

Report on the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls , American Psychological Association (PDF download)
"Goodbye to Girlhood," Washington Post, February 20, 2007.