Tag Archives: number

John Kasich on How to Reduce Mass Shootings: More Death Penalty

by RodolfoSpowers4 Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ohio Governor John Kasich told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday that he considers the death penalty and long prison sentences a better approach than gun control when it comes to reducing the number of mass shootings.

Kasich, who voted for a federal assault weapons ban as a Republican congressman two decades ago, demurred when asked what steps Washington should take in the wake of the Thursday massacre at Umpquah Community College in Oregon that left 10 people dead. “I don’t believe that gun control would stop this,” he told a scrum of journalists after a town hall in Goffstown, during which the subject did not come up.

Kasich continued:

I think they have very tough gun laws in that state. The fact is that more and more people believe that they should be able to defend themselves. And if take guns away from people who are law-abiding the people who are going to cause these horrible things are still gonna have them. I don’t agree with that. That is not—you know I favor, in Ohio, the death penalty. I favor long prison sentences.That’s the way I would go.

When a reporter asked him what specifically he would do to curb mass shootings as president, Kasich said it wouldn’t be his responsibility. “I don’t think any president can stop mass shootings,” he said. “And again I think that all of these places that are soft targets need to be hardened. My own state, as I’ve said, it’s frustrating to see some school districts not taking it seriously. These are terrible tragedies and we need to find out more about who this person is. If this person’s had mental illness they should never have had a weapon. That’s the rules.”

In an earlier interview with NBC News, Kasich offered a clearer idea of what he means by hardening “soft targets.” He said he wants all schools, including universities, to implement warning systems that would allow them to go into “lockdown” mode if there is a campus threat.

Kasich’s emphasis on the death penalty is curious given that more than half of the perpetrators of mass shootings over the last three decades took their own lives. The number goes up if you count “suicide by cop”—that is, those instances when a shooter was killed by law enforcement.

Moreover, Ohio’s death penalty process is notoriously flawed. Last spring, a federal judge placed a seven-month moratorium on all executions in the state after a lethal injection left a convicted killer writhing on his deathbed for 25 minutes. On Thursday, an Ohio court struck down an inmate’s death sentence, citing flaws in the state case.

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John Kasich on How to Reduce Mass Shootings: More Death Penalty

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George Zimmerman Posted a Photo of Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

by Bobbie07Ynuwisj Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, George Zimmerman retweeted an image of Trayvon Martin’s dead body. The image was first tweeted to him by a fan who wrote, “Z-Man is a one man army.”

After the tweet was deleted, apparently by Twitter, Zimmerman posted a tweet directing media inquiries to the phone number of a car audio shop. When I called it, a disgruntled man said it was not affiliated with Zimmerman. I asked what he meant, and he said, “It’s pretty cut and dry, dude. Do you understand English?” Then he hung up. The number, it turns out, belongs to a man Zimmerman has been waging a social media campaign against.

Twitter would not comment on why they took down the photo, but the company directed me to its policy, which states that users “may not publish or post threats of violence against others or promote violence against others.”

Previously, Zimmerman’s tweets have referred to black people as primates and “slime.”

In August, Zimmerman teamed up with the owner of a gun store with a no-Muslims-allowed policy to sell prints of his Confederate flag art, which he says “represents the hypocrisy of political correctness that is plaguing this nation.”

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George Zimmerman Posted a Photo of Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

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Spreadsheet of the Day: How Many People Did VW Kill?

by MavisNewton7 Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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How many people did VW’s NOx defeat device kill? Over the weekend I did a rough estimate and figured that over the past six years VW’s excess NOx emissions probably killed about a dozen people in Southern California. Since then I’ve slightly revised my spreadsheet to account for an error, which increases my estimate to about 17 people killed. My figuring was based on:

50,000 cars sold in Southern California between 2009-2014
3,800 excess tons of NOx over six years
0.0044 deaths per ton of NOx

VW sold 500,000 altered cars in the US and 11 million cars worldwide, so this extrapolates to about 170 deaths in the United States and about 3,700 deaths worldwide.

The number of cars sold is a solid figure, and as near as I can tell the estimate of 0.0044 deaths per ton of NOx is reasonable (this paper estimates a range of .0019 to .0095). But others have come up with higher mortality estimates than mine based on a much higher estimate of excess NOx emissions. So here are my calculations:

The ICCT, which discovered the violation, says VW cars “exceeded the US-EPA Tier2-Bin5 (at full useful life) standard” by 10-35 times depending on model.
The Tier2-Bin5 standard is 0.07 grams per mile.
If VW cars averaged 30x the standard, that’s 2.1 grams per mile.
Based on (a) increasing sales year over year and (b) the fact that older cars have driven more miles, I figure that the affected cars have been driven about 1.6 billion total miles over six years.
That comes to 3.5 billion grams of NOx, or about 3,800 tons.

Over six years, this extrapolates to 38,000 tons for the United States. But at an excess emission rate of 30x, the Guardian figures about 31,000 tons per year. That’s five times my estimate.

My full spreadsheet is here. I invite comments.

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Spreadsheet of the Day: How Many People Did VW Kill?

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A Third of American Kids Will Eat Fast Food Today

by JerryStull Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Every day, more than a third of children in the United States eat fast food. A new report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention also showed that teens eat twice as much fast food as younger children; on average, 17 percent of teens’ daily calories come from fast food.

Fast food consumption among children grew between 1994 and 2006, rising from 10 percent to 13 percent. The new report, which used data from the CDC’s 2011-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, shows only a slight decrease—overall, kids ages 2 to 19 consume 12 percent of their calories from fast food. Surprisingly, these numbers weren’t different across socioeconomic status, gender, or weight.

Percentage of children and adolescents aged 2–19 years who consumed fast food on a given day, by calories consumed: United States, 2011–2012 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Over the last 30 years, childhood obesity in the United States has more than doubled. Between 1980 and 2012 the number of kids considered obese increased from 7 percent to 18 percent and the number of teens during that same period quadrupled.

In an interview with USA Today, Sandra Hassink, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, pointed to fast food ads geared toward kids as a main factor in the soaring obesity rates. Indeed, as my colleague Kiera Butler wrote earlier this year, McDonald’s, in an effort to revive its flagging sales, is marketing inside schools:

Over at Civil Eats, school food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel explained in December that McDonald’s targeting of kids is no accident. Rather, it’s part of the company’s strategy to revive its flagging sales. In a December conference call, Siegel reported, McDonald’s then-CEO Don Thompson and the company’s US President Mike Andres told investors that the company has “got to be in the schools. When you look at the performance relative to peers of the operators whose restaurants are part of the community–it’s significant.”

Hassink also noted that diet-related diseases, like type-2 diabetes, are affecting Americans at much younger ages than they used to. (In fact, the youngest type-2 diabetes patient on record, a three-year-old girl, was recently diagnosed.) This, said Hassink, should be cause for concern:

“Childhood is not a place where you can say, ‘Let everyone eat what they want and we can fix it later.’ “Hassink said parents should remember that daily choices about food can contribute to long-term chronic disease. “Health doesn’t happen by accident,” she said.

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A Third of American Kids Will Eat Fast Food Today

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Waiting For Number 34

by WSIMargene Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama has the support of 31 Democratic senators for his Iran nuclear deal. So naturally we’re now beginning to ponder the truly important stuff:

It looks increasingly likely that the nuclear agreement will survive its congressional trial — even opponents are starting to accept that seeming inevitability.

Which leaves just one question: Who will be the deal-clinching senator No. 34?

Quite so. Who will be the history maker? Or, if you prefer, the final nail in the coffin of treachery? This is what truly matters.

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Waiting For Number 34

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When Schools Serve Pizza and Corn Dogs for Lunch, These Companies Make Bank

by MauriciDoherty Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

It’s no secret that school lunch isn’t exactly healthy—Cheetos, Domino’s, and funnel cake are still fair game to serve to the millions of kids that receive free food under federal breakfast and lunch programs.

A report released this week by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reveals which companies are profiting off of school meals. Schools buy a lot of their food, at very cheap rates, from the US Department of Agriculture—which in turn buys ingredients from private companies.

The report found that in 2013, the USDA bought over $500 million worth of food from 62 meat and dairy companies—and just six large companies accounted over half of those sales.

In addition to buying food from the USDA, schools can buy directly from private companies—and the meals have to comply with a set of regulations that went into effect last summer and require the meals to contain a certain amount of whole grains, fruits and veggies. Since then, a number of companies have reformulated their products to meet the minimum requirements, marketing supposedly nutritious options like corn dogs made with whole grain flour and antibiotic-free chicken tenders.

When the Physicians Committee reviewed ads targeting the School Nutrition Association (SNA), a professional organization representing the 55,000 school food service employees that decide which food to buy, they found that the ads were dominated by these faux-healthy foods. As they put it,

Of 106 ads for unhealthful meat and dairy products, 23 were full-page ads for Domino’s or Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza. Pizza is the number-two source of calories for children and adolescents ages 2-18, according to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It is also the second-leading source of saturated fat and the third-leading source of sodium.

A Domino’s ad in one issue of the magazine even urges “Help us take a slice out of cancer,” despite the fact that a daily serving of pepperoni or other processed meat is linked to colorectal cancer risk. Similarly, women who consume the most red meat during childhood are at higher risk for developing breast cancer.

Here are a few examples of ads for “healthy” foods—pizza, mozzarella sticks, and corn dogs—from SNA’s School Nutrition magazine, which came out in advance of the organization’s annual conference.

Link:

When Schools Serve Pizza and Corn Dogs for Lunch, These Companies Make Bank

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Do we really need to spend money on social science?

by BessBaskett Posted on June 29, 2015

Do we really need to spend money on social science?

By on 29 Jun 2015commentsShare

When it comes to budgeting out a pittance to cover a range of activities, I probably should be an expert by now (hello, journalism salary in a rapidly expanding and expensifying city!), but I am most definitely not. Did I need to spend approximately $200 on farmers market strawberries last month? No, but they were goddamned delicious. If only I didn’t also have to pay for rent and electricity and internet — you know, the important, if somewhat less fun, stuff.

The National Science Foundation seems to be having a similar problem, says Stanford physician and molecular biologist Henry Miller in an LA Times op-ed. Instead of prioritizing hard science with definite social utility — like research into Alzheimer’s, or, say, the physical science of climate change — one sub-group of the NSF has been funneling that funding into more, er, questionable uses:

Here are some doozies: the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey, Viking textiles in Iceland, the “social impacts” of tourism in the northern tip of Norway, legal careers in transition following law school, and whether hunger causes couples to fight (using the number of pins stuck in voodoo dolls as a measure of aggressive feelings). …

Several academics and others have recently written commentaries praising the value of social science projects and condemning congressional attempts to rein them in. The wrongheaded notion that social science projects are inherently just as worthy as basic research in the physical and biological sciences and engineering has distorted and diminished the value of public investment in scientific research.

Do the mandarins of the social sciences really believe that a study of depictions of animals in National Geographic magazine (which the foundation funded) should take precedence over research to identify markers for Alzheimer’s disease or pancreatic cancer? A large fraction of highly ranked, important grant proposals are not accepted because of limited resources.

As for the geosciences, research on climate change is legitimate — when it is performed by meteorologists, oceanographers, physicists and biologists. But the NSF and other federal agencies have been funding redundant, politically overheated and even ludicrous climate change boondoggles. For example, the NSF has wasted millions of dollars on projects that include a climate change musical ($697,177), a series of games ($449,972) and art shows ($2.51 million).

I do have to disagree with Miller on that point. While the number of open questions about the climate (What happens in the deepest parts of the sea? What do clouds even do?) is significant, the main part is pretty well-trod territory: Human-caused carbon pollution is cluttering up the atmosphere, and heating it up at a truly alarming rate.

We know all this — what we don’t know is how to translate fact into definite action. For that — sorry, science hardliners — we are going to have to delve into the messy world of people. And, yes, that might just mean we need Climate Change: The Musical after all.

Source:
With NSF funds limited, is $697,177 for climate change musical worth it?

, LA Times.

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Do we really need to spend money on social science?

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The forecast for the next century? Scary with a chance of dying

by AgnesCoronado Posted on June 23, 2015

The forecast for the next century? Scary with a chance of dying

By on 23 Jun 2015commentsShare

Time for a quiz! Climate change will increase the size and frequency of which of the following?

A) Droughts B) Floods C) Hurricanes or D) Blizzards.

Sorry — trick question! A new study in medical journal The Lancet adds more credence to the theory that climate change will bring more of E) All of the above — and what’s more, that many more people will be directly endangered by these natural turbo-disasters. Since most climate assessments look at models averaged over the whole globe — including huge unpopulated swaths like, say, the Pacific Ocean (no shade to whales) — this study offers new insight by focusing on where (and how) actual humans are living.

The New York Times explains:

The report, published online Monday, analyzes the health effects of recent episodes of severe weather that scientists have linked to climate change. It provides estimates of the number of people who are likely to experience the effects of climate change in coming decades, based on projections of population and demographic changes.

The report estimates that the exposure of people to extreme rainfall will more than quadruple and the exposure of people to drought will triple compared to the 1990s. In the same time span, the exposure of the older people to heat waves is expected to go up by a factor of 12, according to Peter Cox, one of the authors, who is a professor of climate-system dynamics at the University of Exeter in Britain. …

Says Cox: “We are saying, let’s look at climate change from the perspective of what people are going to experience, rather than as averages across the globe,” he said. “We have to move away from thinking of this as a problem in atmospheric physics. It is a problem for people.”

Wait just one second: Is this a study that focuses on the actual, meaningful impacts that climate change will have on the lives of humans, as opposed to the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere? Yes, please, scientists!

Source:
Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says

, New York Times.

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The forecast for the next century? Scary with a chance of dying

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This One Tweet About the Confederate Flag Shows Why Everything Is Awful

by LeandroHogle Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Update 2:42pm ET, Tuesday, June 23, 2015: Amazon says it is pulling Confederate merchandise, too.

Walmart and Sears and a bunch of other retailers are doing the wise thing and dropping Confederate flag merchandise from their stores. So, what’s a Confederate (I just vomited in my mouth a little) to do? Well…

It’s officially the number 1 flag on Amazon.

(via Pat Caldwell)

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This One Tweet About the Confederate Flag Shows Why Everything Is Awful

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You May Soon Be Able to Calculate How Many Calories Are in Your Food Porn

by Emilie7110 Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are you the kind of person who relishes publishing over-saturated photos of your dinner onto Instagram? If so, a new project, reportedly being developed by Google, may soon provide you with yet another interactive activity with your food—other than simply eating it.

The Guardian reports the prospective project, coined “Im2Calories,” aims to help users calculate the caloric makeup of food photos. Using an artificial-intelligence technology that would “analyze the depth of pixels in an image” it would then figure out “the size and shape” of our meals by subjecting that analysis to various algorithms. After all that? Voila! That caloric content of those perfectly manicured entrees.

It’s not perfect. Developers say that initially the technology may only be able to correctly measure the calories in a photo 30 percent of the time. But in a recent presentation, Google research scientist Kevin Murphy said that success rate is good enough to attract enough curious users to improve it over time.

Although a spokesperson for Google said the tool is still only in research mode, its potential creation could certainly help people keep tabs on their calorie intake. But is this really effective for losing weight? Research suggests such knowledge does little to impact a person’s food choices.

This might not matter much to Instagram’s crowded food wing, reflected in popular accounts such as You Did Not Eat That and You Wish You Ate This, which is likely to gobble up the calorie counting tool. Just look at the overnight success of Microsoft’s age guessing app. And after all, there is only so much satisfaction the number of likes a perfectly manicured food post can provide a person.

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You May Soon Be Able to Calculate How Many Calories Are in Your Food Porn

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