from the Crow's Nest

 

A little humble pie

by Fritz Wagner

 

How to lie with statistics is the name of a book that came out about fifty years ago.  We were undergraduates and we read it avidly.  For me it was the first crack in the façade of the modern effort to give meaning to society through numerical representation, but mostly we read it because it was fun to see how manipulators operate.

 

There are a couple of statistics about VoegelinView that I have become aware of and thought should be passed along. 

 

I reported recently that we had some 428 visitors on line at one time, according to the visitor counter which is found on the home page in the lower right hand column.  But there is also an internal statistical program that excludes from the count search engines, staff contributors, etc.  According to that program, called Firestats, we average between 80 and 110 unique visitors in a 24 hour period.  I believe this smaller number to be a reliable statistic and the larger number represents the activity of search engines such as Google (of which engines there are dozens if not hundreds) which somehow leave a trace behind for each page which is then recorded as a unique visitor.  Even if the search engine spends only a fraction of a second on a page, the visitor tracking program will keep it in memory for fifteen minutes. Hence a site sweep by a few search engine crawlers can easily total 400 "visitors".  It usually happens from late Sunday evening through early Monday morning.

 

The other statistic that is doubtful is the number of people shown as being on line, say, during the middle of an ordinary day.  It generally runs between 42 and 52, give or take. But you shouldn't believe this either.  We have almost 60 Twitter followers. Twitter is a program that keeps track of what others are dong.  If a new article goes up on the VoegelinView home page, Twitter lets all Vv  Twitter followers know. There is a continuous link between VoegelinView and each Twitter follower (if they have their computers turned on and have their browsers (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox) open).  If they close their browsers or turn off their computers our "visitor" number drops accordingly.  There is no way to know if a Twitter follower is actually looking at Vv.  The way I choose to look at it, if the visitor counter says 72, there might well be fifteen or twenty people on line. Considering what we are doing here, that should be readership enough!

 

Gtranslator is the name of the application that allows our visitors to read our site in about 90 different languages.  After having installed it and given it a couple of months of use, it is fair to ask if it is any good. So I called a French friend who teaches French to American students and asked her to look at Voegelinview en française.  She called me back the next day:  "Freetz!  I louked at the site! And let me say that for an American studying French it eez probably veary gouude! But I am afraid a Frenchman woould have deefeeculty weeth the meaning!"  So that's it.  We will keep it here for whatever usefulness it may have and as a tip of the hat to show respect to our readers from other lands.  Oh. . . . There is a fun aspect, too. I translated William Carlos Williams' poem  "Portrait of a Lady" into German. Some of the lines were really very nice:

Welches Land? Welches Land?

Ich sagte Blütenblätter von einem Apfelbaum.

 

We are always looking for a few good staffers to edit and create.  No honors other than a name on the masthead!