Statistics // Current

Go For It! Saints Understand Value of Aggressive Play-Calling

UPDATE: Congratulations to the Saints and the city of New Orleans! Although it was... more

atomiclegion
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2 days ago
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0 comments

The Falacy of the Unemployment Rate

Actual unemployment rates are at least twice what the government reports due to the... more

JonRaymond
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4 days ago
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1 comment

Haiti Relief Donations Infographic

The earthquake in Haiti has spurred an intense groundswell of support from around the... more

bellig
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12 days ago
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0 comments

Union Membership Drops 10%, Endangering Influence

Organized labor lost 10% of its members in the private sector last year, the largest... more

remanns
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15 days ago
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1 comment

Canned Beer Turns 75

Be sure to crack open a cold one on Jan. 24, the day canned beer celebrates its 75th... more

TravG73
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17 days ago
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6 comments

Householder Booby Traps

One in 20 householders admit they have rigged devices to halt a burglar. However, the... more

747nomad
added this
9 months ago
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3 comments

The Scots LOVE Their Vodka

Adults in Scotland are drinking the equivalent of 46 bottles of vodka each in a year,... more

lolitanimatronic
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24 days ago
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0 comments

This Is How the Media Amplify Our Terrorism Fears....Be Careful, Think, Then React.

I'm going to run the risk of a take-down order from an AP lawyer and reprint this entire (brief) story so you can see just how Onion-ish it is:

TSA: Unruly Northwest Flight Passengers Questioned

ROMULUS, Mich. -- The Transportation Security Administration says unruly passengers on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit were interviewed by Customs and Border Protection officials after the plane landed.

But the TSA says the passengers were released and no arrests were made.

Air Lines spokeswoman Susan Elliott says the crew of Northwest Flight 243 requested that authorities meet the plane Tuesday after it landed because four passengers didn't follow their instructions. She says nobody was injured but wouldn't describe what the passengers were doing.

Tuesday's disturbance comes less than a week after a Nigerian man pleaded not guilty to trying to blow up a Northwest flight from Amsterdam as it was preparing to land in Detroit on Christmas.

Got that? Some people were "unruly" -- didn't jump when the flight attendant told them to? -- and cops asked 'em a couple of questions. Without knowing the details, it'd be a safe bet that this was a case of drunken obnoxiousness, just like the overwhelming majority of passenger disturbances. They weren't arrested, the terminal wasn't locked down, flights weren't backed up -- that's the whole story.

This almost could have been headlined, "BREAKING TERROR NEWS: Amsterdam-Detroit Flight Arrives Without Incident!"

I'm on a deadline and don't have time for more than a quick point here. And that is: people don't evaluate risk in any rational way -- they don't base their sense of danger on the actual statistical likelihood of being harmed by a given activity.

There are 2-pack-a-day smokers who are absolutely terrified of dying in a terror attack, which is less likely than being killed by lightning (for Americans). Many people ignore routine maintenance on their cars and then brave the daily commute to work without a second thought but are scared shitless about super-safe commercial air-travel. That kind of thing.

Risk-perception is influenced by many factors, and one of them is "media amplification."

So those of you who are ready to give up your rights every time someone screams 'bomb' or 'terrorist', slow down, breathe, and think before you act.

More at the link:I'm going to run the risk of a take-down order from an AP lawyer and reprint this... more

Monkey_Films
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28 days ago
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CPS Social Workers admit its all about the money... This is a way that "order" for adoption is fulfilled

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- The Chief Supreme Court Justice of Kentucky is surveying judges... more

MotherForTruth
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1 month ago
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5 comments

Economic and CRIMINAL Decline?

Despite recession, crime keeps falling By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer... more

remanns
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1 month ago
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0 comments

Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors.

More @ linkA hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on... more

Future_America
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1 month ago
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6 comments

Rape victims offer advice to today's college women

(CNN) -- If you are already in college or headed there, sit down. If you're the... more

jcamille
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1 month ago
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0 comments

Social Media Statistics (infographic)

Social Media has invaded every aspect of your life. Almost everyone you have ever met... more

digitalfever
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2 months ago
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0 comments

Boys are slipping further behind girls after just two years of schooling

Boys are slipping further behind girls after just two years of schooling, official... more

MotherForTruth
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2 months ago
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9 comments

HIV AIDS in Africa...so what, who cares?

A brief video on the Global Natural Health Care Trust working in South Africa.... more

Pinkpasty
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2 months ago
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0 comments

The Peace Freedom & Prosperity Movement » Blog Archive » Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People!

This makes sense. Crime always goes up when gun ownership goes down. All studies show... more

Monkey_Films
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3 months ago
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BIG BUDGET-relative expenditures

The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful

remanns
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3 months ago
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1 comment

What Would Happen if You Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.”

(This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)

Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”

It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-10/what-would-happen-if-i-ate-teaspoonful-white-dwarf-star“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at... more

pjacobs51
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3 months ago
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7 comments

Personal Injury in the Wild

Every year, thousands of people across the world are seriously injured and even killed... more

digitalfever
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3 months ago
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0 comments

Statistics reject global cooling

"The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA's climate data center to... more

dancore
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4 months ago
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2 comments

TAGS

tagged w/ Statistics

Go For It! Saints Understand Value of Aggressive Play-Calling

The Falacy of the Unemployment Rate

Haiti Relief Donations Infographic

Union Membership Drops 10%, Endangering Influence

Canned Beer Turns 75

Householder Booby Traps

The Scots LOVE Their Vodka

This Is How the Media Amplify Our Terrorism Fears....Be Careful, Think, Then React.

CPS Social Workers admit its all about the money... This is a way that "order" for adoption is fulfilled

Economic and CRIMINAL Decline?

Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

Rape victims offer advice to today's college women

Social Media Statistics (infographic)

Boys are slipping further behind girls after just two years of schooling

HIV AIDS in Africa...so what, who cares?

The Peace Freedom & Prosperity Movement » Blog Archive » Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People!

BIG BUDGET-relative expenditures

What Would Happen if You Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

Personal Injury in the Wild

Statistics reject global cooling

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