Wikiscanner hacker Virgil Griffth told me a while ago about his latest data mining project, to visualise the relationship between books and SAT scores. Today he released his findings at Booksthatmakeyoudumb.
He does this by cross referencing the 10 most popular books at every college, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score. He then presents it all in this nifty little visualisation.
I find it somewhat amusing and surprising that erotica takes top and bottom positions, with Lolita at the top and the author Zane coming in last (perhaps it says something that the lowest scoring book is actually miscategorized.) The book named “I don’t read” also comes pretty far down.
In all, the results aren’t that surprising, but as Virgil said to me; “but isn’t it wonderful to have concrete data to back it up?”