All posts tagged: Charts

‘There’s a double layer of nostalgia’: David Nicholls on One Day returning to the book charts | Books

‘There’s a double layer of nostalgia’: David Nicholls on One Day returning to the book charts | Books

Published by skeptic

The TV adaptation of One Day, starring Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod, shot straight to No 1 in the UK Netflix chart when it premiered earlier this month. Now, the book it was based on is back in the bestsellers chart, too – 15 years after it was first published. Author David Nicholls says he was influenced by romcoms including When Harry Met Sally when he wrote the story of Dexter and Emma, who meet every year on St Swithin’s Day over the course of 20 years. “I had a desire to write something full of emotion and affection, that owed a debt to romantic comedy, but was also about life and death, the highs and lows of our professional lives, the insecurities of your 20s.” Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod in a scene from the Netflix series One Day. Photograph: AP “I thought I was writing the book for my generation, people who grew up in the 70s and 80s,” Nicholls, 57, says. “But when it came out in 2009 I knew it was …

Microsoft Copilot AI climbs app store charts after Super Bowl ad

Microsoft Copilot AI climbs app store charts after Super Bowl ad

Published by skeptic

If you watched the Super Bowl NFL championship football game last night — and sat through all the many commercials — then you probably saw an ad from Microsoft for its new Copilot AI app. Promoting the successor to Bing Chat as “your everyday AI companion,” and a way to do far more than search, including create new imagery and code for games using the underlying generative AI large language models (LLMs), Microsoft’s Copilot Super Bowl ad seems to have done its job and gotten more people to download the Copilot app. Copilot was the second most free popular app in the Apple App Store at the time of this article’s writing, and the number 12 most downloaded app in the Google Play Store for Android devices. Screenshot of Apple App Store Top Charts on iPhone as of Feb. 12, 2024. Credit: VentureBeat Screenshot of Google Play Store Top Charts as of Feb. 12, 2024. Credit: VentureBeat Yet, all is not well for Microsoft’s AI ambitions: a number of users on X (formerly Twitter) noted …

Biden vs. Trump on immigration and border security, in 12 charts

Biden vs. Trump on immigration and border security, in 12 charts

Published by skeptic

Immigration is a polarizing issue in U.S. politics, and will probably play a central role in the November presidential election. Illegal border crossings have averaged 2 million per year since 2021, the highest level ever, and Republicans are eager to run against President Biden’s border security record. Polls show broad public disapproval of how Biden has handled the surge, and former president Donald Trump, who also faced criticism for his immigration policies, is running for office on promises to crack down and deport millions of people. Trump’s opposition to senators’ recently proposed $118 billion bipartisan border bill, tying border reforms to Ukraine aid, influenced many Republican legislators to reject it. It also dealt a potentially fatal blow to the possibility of new laws and tools that could reduce illegal crossings and ease strains on cities with overwhelmed shelters. Biden may have to manage such issues without Congress’s help during his reelection run. He could attempt to blame Republicans if crossings spike again and the situation slips out of control. Here are 12 charts showing the …

7 Super Bowl Charts That Sum Up Fan Expectations

7 Super Bowl Charts That Sum Up Fan Expectations

Published by skeptic

As the Super Bowl approaches, anticipation is mounting, not only for the rematch between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs but also for the spectacles that come with it: the ads, the parties and sadly this year, Taylor Swift.  The crew over at RotoWire recently checked in with fans to gauge their expectations not only for Sunday’s game – but also for Sunday’s spectacle. Here’s what they found. As far as the game itself goes, fans are expecting Kansas City to win slightly more than San Francisco. The Vegas-favorite 49ers, enjoying a solid 46.6 percent of fan support and holding the sportsbooks’ endorsement, aren’t in the underdog position but rather emerge as potential dark horses, ready to deliver a twist. As far as excitement levels, they run the gamut for this year. More than half of the fans are highly excited, rating their enthusiasm at a vibrant 4 or 5. Nearly 70 percent of fans view Taylor Swift’s association with the NFL positively. Yet, the modest enthusiasm for her presence at the Super …

China’s Real Estate Crisis Explained In Two Charts

China’s Real Estate Crisis Explained In Two Charts

Published by skeptic

Evergrande – once China’s largest real estate developer – was forced to liquidate on January 28th. It was yet another strike against the country’s now flailing real estate market, adding to a growing list of China’s economic worries. In the charts below, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley shows two annual metrics related to China’s real estate crisis from 2003 to 2023. The first looks at apartment and commercial property sales using Bureau of Statistics data from Bloomberg, and the second examines new housing starts using data from the World Bank. Things to Know About China’s Property Slump Property sales by value in China climbed pretty steadily from less than ¥1 trillion RMB in 2003 to over ¥15 trillion in 2021, but have since dropped to under ¥12 trillion in 2023. This was the case across both residential and commercial sales. In China’s residential market specifically, new home sales dropped 6% in 2023, with secondhand home prices declining in major cities. And on the development side, new residential developments have fallen 58% from 1,515 million m² in 2019 to 637 million m² …

‘Literally off the charts’: global coral reef heat stress monitor forced to add new alerts as temperatures rise | Coral

‘Literally off the charts’: global coral reef heat stress monitor forced to add new alerts as temperatures rise | Coral

Published by skeptic

The world’s main system for warning about heat stress on the planet’s coral reefs has been forced to add three new alert categories to represent ever-increasing temperature extremes. The changes introduced by the US government’s Coral Reef Watch program come after reefs across the Americas were hit by unprecedented levels of heat stress last year that bleached and killed corals en masse. “We are entering a new world in terms of heat stress where the impacts are becoming so pervasive that we had to rethink how we were doing things,” the Coral Reef Watch director, Dr Derek Manzello, told the Guardian. Coral reefs are considered one of the ecosystems most at risk from global heating, driven by burning fossil fuels and deforestation, and are home to a quarter of all marine species. Excessive heat can cause corals to separate from the tiny algae that give them their colour and much of their nutrients. Bleaching can kill corals, but scientists say even those that survive are more susceptible to disease and struggle to reproduce. Coral Reef …

French film charts half a century on a dairy farm

French film charts half a century on a dairy farm

Published by Sam

Gilles Perret’s “La Ferme des Bertrand” is something of a rarity in French film: a tale of rural success for three generations of a family of dairy farmers. Its release next week has acquired added resonance as farmers across France rise up in protest at taxes, costs and regulations they say are killing their livelihoods. The plight of France’s farmers is a well-trodden path in French cinema, typically focusing on the stricken family businesses that modern life has left by the wayside. In his seminal trilogy “Profils paysans”, Raymond Depardon followed octogenarian farmers and herdsmen scraping a living in remote areas blighted by the rural exodus. Others have investigated the damage wrought by intensive farming and the agrochemical industry, with their trail of livelihoods wrecked and family farms pushed into bankruptcy. French farmers now number fewer than half a million, a fraction of their postwar total. But their fading world still occupies an outsized place in the national psyche, infused with nostalgia for France’s rural past and tinged with guilt at the hardship experienced by …

Britney Spears Fans Send 2011 ‘Selfish’ Song Up the Charts as Justin Timberlake Drops His Own ‘Selfish’ Track

Britney Spears Fans Send 2011 ‘Selfish’ Song Up the Charts as Justin Timberlake Drops His Own ‘Selfish’ Track

Published by Sam

Fans of Britney Spears have rallied together to push the Princess of Pop’s 13-year-old song, “Selfish,” up the charts amid the release of her ex, Justin Timberlake‘s, new track of the same name. Timberlake dropped his comeback single, “Selfish,” on Thursday, while Spears’ devoted fan base seized the opportunity to elevate her 2011 track from the deluxe version of her album, Femme Fatale. The Britney stan account BritneyxYtube claimed credit for the ingenious move, stating that it all “started as a joke” when Timberlake announced the title of his new single.  Fans then playfully speculated that Spears was making a grand return with a “brand-new song.” The orchestrated effort quickly gained momentum, propelling the vintage “Selfish” song to the top 40 of the U.S. iTunes chart, with sights set on the top 10. Expressing joy over the unexpected success, the person behind BritneyxYtube told Entertainment Weekly, “I still can’t believe that it became so big, and we see the results we see now. We are all so happy to see her song making a comeback after all these …

Justin Timberlake: Britney Spears song Selfish back in the charts after new single release

Justin Timberlake: Britney Spears song Selfish back in the charts after new single release

Published by Sam

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free A song by pop star Britney Spears is back in the charts almost 15 years after it was first released, thanks to a fan joke about her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake’s new single. Timberlake, 42, is preparing to release his first studio album since 2018’s Man of the Woods. Titled Everything I Thought It Was, the project was announced along with the release of lead single “Selfish” on Thursday 25 January. Fans of Spears quickly began discussing her own song, also called “Selfish”, which featured on the deluxe version of her 2011 album Femme Fatale. It is now riding high in the US iTunes charts after a Spears fan account on X/Twitter joked that she was the one releasing “Selfish” this week. At the time of writing, the track was in the top 10 on iTunes, after entering the top 40 on Thursday evening. The fan behind the X …

Two charts that reveal a key weakness in Trump’s reelection bid

Two charts that reveal a key weakness in Trump’s reelection bid

Published by skeptic

Donald Trump’s win in New Hampshire’s Republican primary on January 23, a week after his decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses, means that he is almost certain to be the Republican nominee for the US presidential election in November 2024. All US presidential elections are different, but a renewed contest between Joe Biden and Trump is rather unusual. It is rare for the same candidates to be nominated by their parties to run on two separate occasions. The last time it happened was in 1956, when the Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson for the second time in a row. American politics is currently very polarised in a way that was not true in the past. One source of this division is political ideology, which research shows plays a central role in defining people’s political identities. A large proportion of Americans identify themselves as liberals or conservatives. People look favourably on those who share their ideological views, regarding them as “insiders”, while at the same time looking unfavourably on “outsiders” in the opposite …