Editor’s Note — We’ve updated the post to include official figures from the Pentagon’s report. — Scott @ SFB
I was looking for something like baseball, where there’s a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That’s when I discovered politics.Nate Silver • Discussing his move into the political realm after years as a baseball statistics nerd. The Guardian’s piece on Silver is super-fascinating.
Number-crunchers over at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics realized today that between April 2011 and March 2012, there were 300,000 more jobs created than originally estimated. If this upward revision is correct, President Obama is now in the green for job growth, having overseen a net gain in roughly 100,000 since taking office. This has just been an astonishingly bad week for Mitt Romney. source
We checked into Mitt Romney’s assertion that 47% of Americans don’t pay taxes and are “dependent on government.”
While it’s true that about 46% of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, only 18% don’t chip in something in the form of payroll taxes.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of who pays taxes, who doesn’t and why.
In which a light burns bright on the “47 percent” claims. (Side note: Nate Silver isn’t sure the controversy will actually hurt Romney in the polls. “The news media often jumps the gun in declaring events to be ‘game changers’ when they later prove to little effect on the numbers,” he writes.)
…and thus we get to why it’s usually not recommended to take these tests if you’re known to be in a low-risk group (in low-risk groups, after all, almost every positive is a false positive). Also, this is why you should always take your positive results into a clinic for a confirmatory test before you start panicking. Always always always always. Because unless you’re in a high-risk group, you’re almost certainly looking at a false positive.
Much more to it than that — that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Read sanguinarysanguinity’s full take on the matter over here. (original post here)
(Source: BBC)
» Violent crime down in every region: From 2010 to 2011, violent crimes showed a decrease of 0.8% in the Northeast, 4.5% in the South, 4.9% in the Midwest and 4.7% in the West. Getting into specifics, most major forms of violent crime — including murder, manslaughter, rape and assault — have declined in the past year.
» Also in demand: “Gurus,” “evangelists”: If you’re a techie, companies aren’t afraid to pepper their job postings with such phrases in an effort to get your foot in the door. Don’t expect these monikers in the title — rather, they’ll be in the descriptions. If we ever have an opening here at SFB, we’re going to look for a “plumber who can rock a tanooki suit.”
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» That’s 1 in 10 people worldwide. The World Health Organization says that the rise in diabetic adults will most likely be due to an aging world population, not the increasing rate of obesity. Most cases are Type 2 and come from “weight gain and a sedentary lifestyle.” Count this number as inspiration for 2012’s resolutions.
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