Barack Obama will be sworn in for a second term today. Here are some interesting facts about the event from around the web:

• At the swearing in ceremony Obama will be using a Bible used by Abraham Lincoln resting on top of a Bible used by Martin Luther King Jr. This is to mark the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of MLK’s March on Washington. (Yahoo News)
• Yesterday there was a dress rehearsal for the event. Military officers stood in for both the President and the First Lady. (Time)
• Wireless carriers are encouraging inauguration attendants to text their friends instead of using data heavy services such as phone calls or Facebook. Just in case they choose not to heed this advice the carriers have installed temporary mobile units to try to cope with the demands on their network (Washington Times)
• According to one interpretation of the constitution, yesterday America had a President Joe Biden for a few hours. (Josh Blackman)
• Guests aren’t sure what to wear for the event. (Wall Street Journal).

Parents who work hard so that they have the money to send their children to a good college should pause and think according to a study reported on by Scott Jaschik:

• According to the study, the greater the financial support that students received from their parents, the lower their grades were.
• This was especially true of students at expensive out-of-state private colleges.
• However parental support isn’t all bad. Those students who received it were more likely to graduate – probably because the students who have to pay for their own college might have to drop out if they lose their job.
• Parents communicating their expectations to their children seems to mitigate the problem of low grades.

Read more about the study, its findings, and its methodology over here.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

Andrew Sielen put together an exhaustive analysis of the price of Lego sets over the years. Here are some highlights from his findings:

• Contrary to popular perception the price of Lego has decreased over time.
• We might think that Lego has become more expensive because while the average price per Lego piece has gone down, the number of Lego pieces in a set has gone up, meaning more expensive sets overall.
• These new, more complex Lego sets are marketed to an older crowd who have deeper pockets and more of an interest in difficult projects.
• Lego has also increased the number of sets it produces in a year. Retailers can only have so many Lego products on their shelves and they may be choosing to only stock the most expensive ones – thus contributing to the perception that the price of Lego has increased.
• We might also think that Lego sets are now more expensive because when we were kids we never truly appreciated how much they cost.

Read much more over here. Sielen goes through the price per gram, the price of signature Lego sets, and presents a bunch of fascinating graphs.

Source: Reality Prose

Claire Suddath went over a study that looked at the effects of the CEO of a company having a child. Highlights include:

• Employees of a company see their salaries go down when their CEO has a child.
• This money ends up going to the CEOs…who award themselves larger salaries after the birth of a child – presumably to better take care of their family.
• The wages of male employees go down by a greater percentage than those of female employees when the CEO has a son. This might be because the CEO has a new respect for motherhood.
• When the CEO has a daughter the wages of male employees go down but the wages of female employees actually go up.

Read more about what happens with the birth of multiple children, and how this might apply to the United States over here.

Source: Business Week

Via: Marginal Revolution

Ten years ago Americans drank half a liter of sodas like Coke and Sprite every day writes Derek Thompson. Since then though a drink that can be just as sugary but without the association with adolescence has become the American drink of choice:

• In 2003 Americans spent $4 on soda for every $1 that they spend on coffee.
• Since then soda revenue has fallen 40% while coffee revenue has increased 50%.
• This may be because sodas have become linked with bad health while coffee has no such stigma attached.
• Bottled water, sports drinks, and energy drinks have also benefited from soda’s association with bad health.
• There has been a rise of coffee culture as evidenced by the spread of chains such as Starbucks. Younger consumers especially seem to buy into this culture.

Read the full piece here to see a graph that shows the rise of coffee and the decline of soda, and find out the effect that coffee prices have had.

Source: The Atlantic

Amy Webb used her background in data analysis to figure out which female profiles attract the most attention on a popular dating site…and then used that information to write her profile and find the love of her life. Here are some of the things she found that seemed to attract the best male attention:

• The most popular female profiles have a relatively short description – about 500 words – and are full of aspirational language about what they would like to do.
• They also lie about their height, making themselves seem shorter than they actually are.
• Reaching out to male daters rather than passively waiting for attention was an effective strategy.
• The most popular profiles were of females with straight – not curly – hair.

Read more about what a good profile should lead with, how to approach humour, and Webb’s methodology over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Marginal Revolution

The branches of America’s military are waging a battle similar to the one being fought between Apple and Samsung: a battle for style. D.B. Grady wrote:

• In 2002 the Marine Corps introduced a new uniform called MARPAT. Field testing indicated that it was more effective at camouflage than existing uniform designs.
• The army wanted to show that it could compete with the Marine Corps by introducing its own new uniform. Except it decided to settle on the worst performing uniform design available.
• The Navy was willing to put its pride aside and introduced a new uniform that was similar to the Marine Corps’ well-performing MARPAT design. However the Marine Corps spoke out against it, stating that it was too similar to their design.
• The branches of the military seem to be more focused on cultivating a distinct brand identity rather than on more important objectives such as protecting the lives of soldiers.
• By agreeing on one common uniform across all branches not only would all service members get the best possible uniform, there would also be significant cost savings

Read more about some of the other troubles with army and navy uniforms, as well as how the branches could continue their competition in dress uniforms over here.

Source: The Atlantic

Yesterday Facebook previewed graph search – a move into search that many consider to be Google’s worse nightmare since it provides a personalized search experience unavailable on other platforms. Steven Levy had the inside scoop on its development:

• The new search allows you to search for queries such as “friends who like Game of Thrones and microwave Popcorn in California” to allow you to set up a viewing party.
• Facebook itself doesn’t consider it a ‘search’ product – since it leaves most of the standard searching to Bing. In fact executives tried hard to come up with a name for the service that didn’t include the word ‘search’ but were ultimately unable to do so.
• Generally search engines work best when you use broad-level queries to cast the widest possible net. Graph search, however, benefits from you being as narrow, and adding as many criteria to your search field as possible.
• Advertizers can already target you by your age, region, gender, and interests. Facebook is simply making this – and other – information available to users.
• The initial launch will be limited. It will only be available in English and won’t be useable through smartphone apps.

Read more about what this new search can do, why LinkedIn should be scared, and some of the privacy issues involved over here.

Source: Wired

The next time you set up a game of Scrabble you might want to look into changing the amount of points that each letter is worth writes Laura Gray:

• The inventor of Scrabble assigned the values of the letters based on the frequency with which they appeared on the front page of the New York Times in the 1930s.
• Yet language has evolved since then, and the dictionary of legal Scrabble words has expanded. Letters such as Z which are now worth 10 points should only be worth 6.
• Mattel, the maker of Scrabble, refuses to change the value of the letters, stating that this misallocation of points is part of the game and that skilled players can use this to their advantage.

Read more about other letters whose values need to be readjusted, and play around with a calculator that would show you how much words would be worth after the change over here.

Source: BBC

Chris Kirk and Stephen Laniel at Slate have used data from the Centers for Disease Control to create a calculator that looks at the likelihood of Supreme Court justices passing away in the next four years. Centives played around with the calculator and this is what we found:

• There’s a 63% chance that at least one justice will die in the next four years.
• There’s a 45% chance that it’ll be a conservative member that passes away.
• There’s a 33% chance that it’ll be a liberal.
• Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia are the least likely to survive until 2017 with an 18% chance that one of them will pass before then.
• There’s a 0.05% chance that five justices will pass before Obama’s second term is over – giving him the opportunity to stack the Supreme Court with like-minded individuals.

You can try out the calculator yourself over here. (Your numbers might differ as the calculator seems to recalculate the percentages each time. We averaged out ten attempts for each of the scenarios outlined above.)

Source: Slate