Unfortunately, adults who responded to a 2004 poll by ABC reported that the quality of their sex lives does correlate negatively with the length of time they’ve been married. The odds they have sex at least several times a week worsen from 1 in 1.39 (72%) if they’ve been married for less than three years to 1 in 3.13 (32%) if they’ve been married for ten or more years. The odds they actually enjoy the sex they’re having a great deal worsen from 1 in 1.15 (87%) to 1 in 1.43 (70%) for the same range, and the odds that their sex life is something they’d call “very exciting” decrease from 1 in 1.72 (58%) to 1 in 3.45 (29%).
Click the bookofodds.com link for more details.
Between 1994, when the legality of using domestic violence as insurance underwriting criteria was first recognized, and 2008, 42 states passed legislation that specifically prohibits the practice. And a 2008 report by the National Women’s Law Center pointing out that 9 states and the District of Columbia still didn’t have such legislation spurred several state insurance commissioners to respond with surprise and, even more importantly, with action. Arkansas passed a law in April 2009, and, as of October 2009, 4 more states have taken up the issue in their state legislatures: North Carolina, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Mississippi. Still, that leaves some stragglers: in Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia, it’s not illegal to call domestic violence a pre-existing condition.
It’s time for a random dose of statistics courtesy of The Internet Movie Database. Let’s consider all movies that have been released theatrically over the last 60 years and see whether there is a trend in their perceived quality over time. That is, do new movies generally receive higher or lower scores on IMDb than old movies?
Before looking at the numbers though, we need some rules to clarify what types of movies we are considering:
- We only consider theatrically-released films — no straight-to-video movies or TV movies.
- Short films that were released theatrically (such as Pixar’s Presto) are included.
- We only consider movies that have received 1000 or more votes. This restriction is to prevent movies with only a handful of votes from skewing the results too much.
- The theatrical release date of the movie must have been at least as recent at 1950.
IMDb contains 10034 movies that satisfy the above criteria. The average score (on a scale of 1 to 10) of those movies is 6.38 and the median score is 6.6. The average score per release year is given by the following graph:
As you can see, older movies (1950 – 1975) have abnormally high scores, as do very recent movies (2000 – 2009). These differences are indeed statistically significant. For example, the p-value associated with the test that the mean score in 1950 is the same as the mean score in 1989 is less than 10-19. The p-value associated with the test that the mean score in 2008 is the same as the mean score in 1989 is about 0.0021. Other nearby years give similar p-values.
So this tells us that, in general, particularly old movies receive the highest scores, followed by newly-released movies, followed by “semi-old” movies from the 1980’s and 1990’s. So why the differences? Were movies from the 1980’s really just that bad? Possibly, but the more likely explanation is that movies from the 1950’s through 1970’s have artificially higher scores because people don’t generally go back and watch the crummy movies of the last generation, so they get forgotten and do not have 1000 votes on IMDb. Will people be watching Disaster Movie in forty years? I sure hope not.
On the other hand, particularly recent movies tend to draw a fair amount of hype and fanboyism. Remember when The Dark Knight had a score of 9.8 and was at #1 on the IMDb top 250? Now, one year later, it has a score of 8.9 and is located at #9 on the top 250. It will likely dwindle a little further down over the coming years as well.
The Best and Worst of Each Year
While we’re looking at ratings of movies over the years, I suppose I might as well provide a list of the best and worst movie of each year (based on the votes of IMDb users), since such a list is not available on the IMDb website itself to my knowledge. Keep in mind that, as before, only movies with 1000 or more votes are considered. Enjoy!
Downloads:
- IMDb rating data [.zip of an Excel spreadsheet -- 341KB]
- IMDb rating data [tab-delimited plaintext -- 0.97MB]
http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-countries-spend-their-money/
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I've written for 20th Century Fox and Disney, developed video games with WORLD OF WARCRAFT designer Rob Pardo, helped SPIDER-MAN creator Stan Lee bring his superheroes to the internet, and was part of the Wii team at Nintendo.
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