has there every been a poll?

I'd be interested in finding out if there are significantly more lefties among slashdot readers.

There is no national plan to cover the whole road network in these cameras yet

The gaps are great: roads can be categorized as "approved" (with cameras) and "dark".
Law-abiding citizens will use the approved roads.
People won't use the dark roads unless they have something to hide. So it'll be easier to catch the bad guys.
Sounds like a win-win to me.

IE 34.19%
Firefox 22.52%
Safari 21.38%
Chrome 14.80%
Android Browser 4.42%

Here are my numbers for a number puzzle site:

Chrome 30.67%
Firefox 25.36%
IE 23.94%
Safari 15.87%
Android 1.45%
Opera 1.21%

(also over the whole of 2012 so far, 443,255 visits, the site is http://www.calcudoku.org/

So quite different obviously. Maybe a set of ~ 10-50 "representative" sites should be picked (e.g. a few news sites, a few tech sites, popular blogs, etc.), and the numbers averaged over those?

And I'd be interested in the numbers of Fox News vs. the New York Times for example..

If the Apple Retina display is already beyond the point a human eye can resolve - what's more resolution going to get you?

Larger filesizes, longer download times, shorter battery life, worse performance?

When a user enters a search in Chrome, the browser preloads an invisible tab not shown to the user, and these were being counted by StatCounter. Net Applications, another usage tracking group, ignores these invisible tabs and reports IE at 54%, Firefox at 20.20%, and Chrome at 18.85%."

Is this a slashvertisement for Net Applications? 54% for IE?? Did they grab their data from 2009?

Also, not all traffic is search traffic. The stats for the last two months at http://www.calcudoku.org/ (which has < 35% search traffic):

1. Chrome: 31%
2. Firefox: 25%
3. IE: 24%
4. Safari: 17%
5. Opera: 1%
6. Android: 1%

There's nothing worth censoring in that comment, a guy made a post,

Well, he did mention Google+

Doesn't this more likely mean that there are just a lot more people using IE than Chrome and so their average is going to be closer to the mean of the greater population?

From the paper, these were the browser shares by the end of 2011:

At the end of 2011, browser shares were 39% for IE, 38% for Firefox, 27% for Chrome,
and 11% for Safari (the version breakdown for IE was 1% for IE 6.0, 13% for 7.0,
53% for 8.0, and 33% for 9.0).

The causation probably is: More educated or intelligent people have learned about Chrome and have switched. The default browser on the most widespread system is always the one that will have the least sophisticated users.

Yes, that's what I'm thinking too. Here's the relevant bit from the conclusion of the paper:

In summary, based on the findings that Chrome users solve Calcudoku number puzzles the fastest, and that IE users give up on solving them the most, it appears that Chrome users have the highest numerical intelligence, followed by Firefox users, then by Internet Explorer users. Note that it does not follow that using Chrome makes you smarter, for example ("correlation does not imply causation"). Also, we can only speculate about the causes of the differences: perhaps Chrome is the browser of choice for more technically inclined people, who tend to have better number skills. And maybe because IE is the default browser for Windows, people who do not choose a different browser possibly are less technically skilled.

Well, I'm reporting on statistics of people solving number puzzles, this was not a test advertised as "please come do Calcudoku puzzles for a scientific test".

And publishing your "paper" on your own website doesn't make it peer-reviewed either.

I thought about submitting it somewhere, but then I'd have a couple of 2-3 paragraph reviews after 6 months, and it maybe would have been published after another 6.

This way the Slashdot crowd are the peer-reviewers :-), and it's been helpful: I need to add actual p-values, sampling errors, look into possible problems with multiple comparisons, etc...

You may want to revise the paper to take into account the different use cases for each browser. If users of a certain browser are more likely to be distracted or interrupted (like at work, for instance), and similarly if users of a certain browser are more likely to be looking for an easy-to-digest diversion and abandoning some harder puzzles (like at work), this would invalidate the conclusions. Your statistics might say more about where different browsers are likely to be found rather than about the users of those browsers.

It'll be tricky to evaluate any kind of data by asking users.

On the site's forum, for example, there's been some back and forth about the influence of age. One user has set up a web survey to collect age data. But I can never be sure I'm getting correct numbers. At some point there'll be so much uncertainty in the source data, I can't derive anything anymore.

No, the problem is your entire premise and conclusion are faulty. That's not even getting into your sampling bias and other issues. Getting a statistically significant result is meaningless with poor sampling. You also provide no figures on your sampling error so your claims are even less meaningful. So sorry, but this whole "study" is total bunk just like the hoax study was despite your attempt at "HURR HURR IE users are teh dumb!" conclusion you are attempting to claim.

Yes, I should've included sampling error, and will do so in a later version (sampling error was small).

The fact that the average times were lowest for Chrome and highest for IE was just what it was. If it had been the other way around I would have reported that.

An earlier poster wrote:

There also seem to be potential problems with multiple testing [xkcd.com], but the paper doesn't go into enough detail to be sure.

That's a good point, I need to look into that. You always prefer an interesting result to report on, so there's this risk of "hunting" for one :-(

> You click the highlighted square and the first thing that
> happens is an immovable pop-up covers most of the puzzle.
> I left it unfinished.

It goes away when you pick a number, or when you click
outside the popup. Also, this would not have counted as
an unfinished puzzle, since this is only tracked for timed puzzles.