Last year was the second straight year the poverty rate stayed flat after four years of going up in the United States.; Credit: David McNew/Getty Images

Income in greater Los Angeles is rising – slightly - according to new American Community Survey numbers released Thursday from the Census Bureau, but greater L.A. still ranks as one of the poorest major metropolitan areas in the nation.

The L.A. area (defined as L.A., Long Beach and Anaheim) had a median household income of $58,869 last year, which is $804 more than the year before, but still $1540 under the 2010 level, during the first full year after the recession.

"These numbers paint a bleak picture for California,” said Marybeth Mattingly, a researcher at Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Mattingly is particularly troubled by the child poverty rate, which was 25.3 percent in 2013, up from 22.6 percent in 2010.

“In the West, Hispanics have the highest poverty with nearly one in three Hispanic kids poor, and it's even a little higher for blacks” she said.

Nationally, last year was the second straight year the poverty rate stayed flat after four years of going up. Among big metro areas, the L.A. area had the highest poverty rate in the nation, tying Phoenix, Miami, and the Inland Empire. But that’s based upon a national poverty line of $23,550 for a family of four; When you take into account how much it really costs to live here, L.A. fares even worse.

“We find that Los Angeles stands out even more, unfortunately," said Sarah Bohn, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California. "Housing costs are really playing a big role in family budgets and being able to make ends meet.”

Bohn says these new numbers suggest we’re going in the right direction, but she wishes we’d move at a faster pace.

Bitcoin continued to make records as supportive inflation numbers raised the market's expectations of further interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. What Happened: The world's largest cryptocurrency sailed above $93,000 during U.S. trading hours Wednesday, before a sharp correction into the…

Street vendors at a vegetable market in Delhi's Najafgarh will have to display their names on carts in a move the local councillor and the market association claimed was aimed at preventing "illegal" Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants from selling pro

Street vendors at a vegetable market in Delhi's Najafgarh will have to display their names on carts in a move the local councillor and the market association claimed was aimed at preventing "illegal" Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants from selling pro

Use this printable math daily warm-up to reinforce your students' number and numeration skills.

Use this printable math daily warm-up to reinforce your students' number and numeration skills.

Kerala Lottery Fifty Fifty Winners November 13. Discover the latest results and winning ticket numbers for this popular weekly lottery.

Windmill launched Monitor in August 1998 and mailed it to just 42 people. Very soon after they started offering their data acquisition software suite free to everyone signing up. At that time it cost non-subscribers Euro 500,00 to purchase the software - so not surprisingly a great many people took advantage and tried the software for free. In fact, around 70% of subscribers still download the software and they've given away over 17000 copies of Windmill! Dedicated to PC-based data acquisition and control, Monitor is sent by e-mail every month.

Headlights illuminate a group of soldiers smoking and drinking steaming cups of coffee on the side of a road in northeastern Ukraine.

Always a sucker for late-80s pogo-stick guitar pop from Scotland, I cannot resist the Groovy Little Numbers, yet another late-80s pogo-stick guitar-pop outfit from Scotland.

They're noteworthy—or at least more of a curiosity than others—and differentiated from contemporaries in a few ways, however. Lead vocals were often shared by Catherine Steven and Joe McAlinden, who started the band and seem to be considered the only core members, and this boy-girl tag-team adds a twist the Pooh Sticks, Close Lobsters, the Soup Dragons, the Hepburns, and most the rest in the scene didn't have.

Additionally, while trumpets were certainly a feature of the post-Postcard Scotish sound, the way these guys laid it in was gentler, sweeter. Generally, they were gentler, sweeter, more reserved Burt Bacharach than twitchy Violent Femmes.

As you might expect, this two-singles group was a sort of power-pop incubator for at least a couple of those involved: McAlinden started Superstar and was in BMX Bandits; Gerard Love got in with Teenage Fanclub at the onset.

I have a JDM-import 2005 Fit DBA-GD1 with the L13A engine and need to replace the front discs and pads. I used https://jp-carparts.com/ to find what I thought were the correct parts, then used...

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The Apple Watch will no longer be counted in podcast listener numbers for Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab partners because it has been found to falsely inflate listener numbers.

Currently, when a podcast is automatically downloaded by an ‌Apple Watch‌ user, it is counted as two listeners; one from the ‌Apple Watch‌, and one from its paired iPhone. Since the ‌Apple Watch‌ and ‌iPhone‌ download the same podcast episode by default, and they both report different device user agents, the podcast appears to be downloaded by two different people. This means that the ‌Apple Watch‌ falsely inflates podcast listener numbers.

Dr. Constantinou continues her Introduction to the Bible, this time focusing on the Book of Numbers.

Dr. Constantinou enumerates the various behaviors in which the Hebrews engaged that caused God to deny them the Promised Land.

Dr. Constantinou contemplates the person of Moses, the behavior of the Hebrews, and the Moses typology in the Gospels.

Dr. Constantinou concludes her discussion of Numbers and begins a new study on Deuteronomy.

Elissa takes a look at the recent Pew Research Center report on religious affiliation in the United States and speculates on some of the possible causes of the decline in Orthodox Christian believers.

I didn't even realize iOS automations could do this #

Airport bosses are predicting further growth in 2025

Middleport Pottery has been given £250,000 by the National Lottery's heritage fund.

Perhaps one of the biggest "sex myths" making the rounds these days is to what extent experiences like mine are (or are not, as it is claimed) representative of sex workers in general.

(Of course, I personally make no claim to be an "average" sex worker and certainly not to speak for prostitution as a whole. I would love to see more and more voices claim the title of sex worker publically so we can demonstrate once and for all what a diverse group it is.)

But when it comes to studies and statistics, this is an issue that comes up a lot. Addressing the question of how representative a sample of people is of a population in general is one of the cornerstones of good study design. It's one of those things that, if wrong at the start of a research project, is a devil to try to correct in retrospect. In many cases it's impossible.

The Sex Myth discusses at length how this affects virtually all studies relating to prostitution. A large number of researchers assume street-based sex workers to be the majority of sex workers, which has the tendency to skew (and sometimes fully invalidate) their results. Because they often recruit research subjects via outreach or addiction programs, their sample is necessarily biased towards sex workers whose lives are chaotic.

Streetwalkers may often be the most visible face of sex work but it's far from the whole story.

So how representative is the cliche of the drug-addicted streetwalker leaning into a punter's car anyway? This is in some ways difficult to answer. But I highly suggest if you are interested in the topic to check out Maggie McNeill's excellent summary of what we do know. She makes the case far more succinctly that I ever could here, here and here. Go on and read those then come back when you're done.

In general, the data seem to agree that in most Western countries the percentage of sex workers who are streetwalkers is about 15%.

That's an aggregate estimate from a number of studies in a number of countries, most of which put the streetwalker population at between 5% and 20% of prostitutes. Of the remaining percentage, the splits of incall/managed vs outcall/escort vary by location and factors unique to those places. To see an example of what this looks like, you can check out the New Zealand sex worker breakdown here (scroll down for tables).

What this tells us is that studies recruiting their subjects only from street-based sex workers, and in addition doing so through crisis centre referrals, can never claim to represent sex workers at large. That would be about as ridiculous as reading my previous books and using that "data" to conclude all sex workers love pies and pints. They can at best be said to be a study of those people at that time which makes the results non-generalisable.

Promising studies do exist which try to address the problem of imbalance of numbers in counting sex workers. While it's hard to generalise 'sex work' from what is necessarily a very diverse group, I found this study from Suzanne Jenkins at Keele [pdf] to be a useful example of how we can begin to build a better sex worker survey. Note for example that it includes male and trans sex workers: a lot of studies ignore these groups altogether. While the mainstream heterosexual female sex worker is still in the majority, writing gender and sex diversity out of the story only serves to promote a narrow ideological viewpoint that paints all sex work as abuse of women by men. A viewpoint which is not true.

As you may know a bugbear of mine is the tendency to present scare stats about sex workers in isolation and not to involve a control group. I go on about lack of controls in all kinds of studies, not just sex worker ones, in detail in The Sex Myth if you would like to read more. So say, to take a non-prostitution example, you heard a statistic that claimed the majority of strippers got unwanted attention from clients. Presented without context it sounds impressive, but it is meaningless.

What would be a control group here? People with similar working hours in licensed establishments might be one - barmaids at non-strip clubs for example. Or people of a similar age in service industry professions involving tipping - like waitresses. Have a think: do you know any front-of-house people in food service who haven't had difficult and at times physically aggressive customers? I don't. Any study that doesn't even address the possibility that their results come from the service industry and alcohol rather than sex work per se has not fully examined the evidence in a way that should be taken seriously.

When it comes to population statistics like these getting control groups are hard. I get it. But that is, as we say where I come from, hard cheese. So there's no perfect control like a group of homeless, drug-addicted nuns somewhere we can use to see whether it's the sex that drives people to despair or not. But you still have to make an effort. And you recruit and match your controls up front, not after the fact.

Finally there is the matter of where data originates. As a scientist I know that it is damned difficult, if not impossible, to do work that is totally free of any external conflict of interest or internal hope for a particular outcome. But there are ways we can help sieve the believable from the unbelievable: if a study comes from a source with a strong ideology and a financial interest in promoting this stance it is right to question whether that affects both study design and interpretation of results. These generally fall into the category Laura Agustin has dubbed "the Rescue Industry".

There are a large number of other common problems with these studies flagged up in The Sex Myth. Bad estimation methods, lack of controls, lack of trends, avoiding peer review... and many more.

This is not to say that academic publishing is always right and self-publishing or internal reports always wrong. But there is a significant grain of salt we should take when the people who present themselves as experts on the topic of sex workers are from the same stable of folks better at generating press coverage than at reporting their mistakes.

Do I expect saying these things will please everyone? No, not at all. There are a lot of people with a big investment in keeping the myths about what sex work is supposedly "really" like alive. As well, there are people whose opposition to sex work isn't affected by the many well-adjusted people who do it anyway. It's also fair to say my particular bias is to prefer the quantitative over the qualitative: for as "Uncle Joe" Stalin so elegantly put it, quantity has a quality all its own.

But if you are the sort of person to whom the evidence is more important than the anecdote - and if you're a reader of this blog, I assume you are - then take the numbers seriously. The next time someone tries to sell you the poor-addicted-hooker myth, call it for the nonsense it so clearly is.

1. ‘Been a long time since I felt that way’: Sexually transmitted infection numbers provide new hope  POLITICO
2. There are millions of sexually transmitted infections in the US every year, but new data shows the epidemic may be slowing  CNN
3. America's STD explosion laid bare and the shocking number of people catching one every minute  Daily Mail
4. At Long Last, the Surge in S.T.I.s May Be Leveling Off  The New York Times

Added February 17, 2006:

; Credit: LA Johnson/NPR

Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

"That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen.

"Despite all kinds of hopes and expectations that things would get better, they've only gotten worse in the spring," Shapiro says. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education. There will be no easy fixes or quick bounce backs."

Overall enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, and that was true again this spring, which saw a 3.5% decline — seven times worse than the drop from spring 2019 to spring 2020.

The National Student Clearinghouse attributed that decline entirely to undergraduates across all sectors, including for-profit colleges. Community colleges, which often enroll more low-income students and students of color, remained hardest hit by far, making up more than 65% of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring. On average, U.S. community colleges saw an enrollment drop of 9.5%, which translates to 476,000 fewer students.

"The enrollment landscape has completely shifted and changed, as though an earthquake has hit the ground," says Heidi Aldes, dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, a community college in Minnesota. She says her college's fall 2020 enrollment was down about 8% from the previous year, and spring 2021 enrollment was down about 11%.

"Less students are getting an education"

Based on her conversations with students, Aldes attributes the enrollment decline to a number of factors, including being online, the "pandemic paralysis" community members felt when COVID-19 first hit, and the financial situations families found themselves in.

"Many folks felt like they couldn't afford to not work and so couldn't afford to go to school and lose that full-time income," Aldes says. "There was so much uncertainty and unpredictability."

A disproportionately high number of students of color withdrew or decided to delay their educational goals, she says, adding to equity gaps that already exist in the Minneapolis area.

"Sure, there is a fiscal impact to the college, but that isn't where my brain goes," Aldes says. "There's a decline, which means there are less students getting an education. That is the tragedy, that less students are getting an education, because we know how important education is to a successful future."

To help increase enrollment, her team is reaching out to the high school classes of 2020 and 2021, and they're contacting students who previously applied or previously enrolled and stopped attending. She says she's hopeful the college's in-person offerings — which now make up nearly 45% of its classes — will entice students to come back, and appeal to those who aren't interested in online courses. So far, enrollment numbers for fall 2021 are up by 1%. "We are climbing back," she says.

A widening divide

Despite overall enrollment declines nationally, graduate program enrollments were up by more than 120,000 students this spring. That means there are more students who already have college degrees earning more credentials, while, at the other end of the spectrum, students at the beginning of their higher ed careers are opting out — a grim picture of a widening gap in America.

"It's kind of the educational equivalent of the rich getting richer," Shapiro says. "Those gaps in education and skills will be baked into our economy, and those families' lives, for years to come."

The value of a college degree — and its impact on earning power and recession resilience — has only been reinforced by the pandemic. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans with a college degree were more likely to stay employed during the pandemic, and if they did lose a job, they were more likely to get hired again. Unemployment rates were higher for those without a degree or credential beyond high school.

"Almost all of the income gains and the employment gains for the last decade have gone to people with higher education degrees and credentials," Shapiro says. "Those who are getting squeezed out of college today, especially at community colleges, are just getting further and further away from being able to enjoy some of those benefits."

In the National Student Clearinghouse data, traditional college-aged students, those 18 to 24, were the largest age group missing from undergraduate programs. That includes many students from the high school class of 2020, who graduated at the beginning of the pandemic. Additional research from the Clearinghouse shows a 6.8% decline in college-going rates among the class of 2020 compared to the class of 2019 — that's more than four times the decline between the classes of 2018 and 2019. College-going rates were worse for students at high-poverty high schools, which saw declines of more than 11%.

For the communities and organizations tasked with helping high school graduates transition and succeed in college, the job this year is exponentially harder. Students have always struggled to attend college: "It's not new to us," says Nazy Zargarpour, who leads the Pomona Regional Learning Collaborative, which helps Southern California high school students enroll and graduate from college. "But this year, it's on steroids because of COVID."

Her organization is offering one-on-one outreach to students to help them enroll or re-enroll in college. As part of that effort, Zargarpour and her colleagues conducted research to help them understand why students didn't go on to college during the pandemic.

"Students told us that it's a variety of things, including a lot of just life challenges," she says. "Families being disrupted because of lack of work; families being disrupted because of the challenges of the illness itself; students having to take care of their young siblings; challenges with technology."

The biggest question now: Will those students return to college? Experts say the farther a student gets from their high school graduation, the less likely they are to enroll, because life gets in the way. But Zargarpour is hopeful.

"It will take a little bit of time for us to catch up to normal and better, but my heart can't bear to say all hope is lost for any student ever."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Back after four years, PACK EXPO International convened more than 44,000 attendees, surpassing the 2018 event. With 2,200 exhibitors and more than 1.2 million net square feet at McCormick Place in Chicago, PACK EXPO International took place Oct. 23-26, showcasing the latest innovations and trends impacting the packaging and processing markets.

In a Time of Loss, Let Us Build to Heal- From Numbers to Names, Abraham I Am Calls for a Wall of Unity and Peace from Covid-19

Squaring numbers can have surprising consequences

A new mathematical proof helps show whether a sequence of numbers is “pseudorandom”

In the 1970s mathematicians found a simple way to create all numbers, from the infinitely small to infinitely large

Want to create more randomized effects in your JavaScript code? The `Math.random()` method alone, with its limitations, won’t cut it for generating unique random numbers. Amejimaobari Ollornwi explains how to generate a series of unique random numbers using the `Set` object, how to use these random numbers as indexes for arrays, and explores some practical applications of randomization.

Pin Point: The Most Common 4-digit PIN numbers by Information is Beautiful was a redesign of Nick Berry’s original work. Having a pin that’s easy for you to remember, could also be an easy one to guess. Check out this infographic and see how safe your favorite PIN may be.

Chip and PIN card, phone passcode, hotel safe – how predictable is your chosen PIN number?

3.4 million data points visualized from several data breaches.

Created by the late great Nick Berry of Data Genetics (redesigned and used with permission). He wrote a great data story around this which is also worth a read.

I really like this heatmap. Visually, it reveals a number of insights from the data:

• The diagonal line shows the PINs where two digits are repeated to create a 4-digit PIN. 1111, 3434, 5050, etc.

• The lower left corner is brighter with PINs starting with low numbers, generally representing dates. The section goes to the right up to the number 31, representing the day. Birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

• There is a bright horizontal line of PINs starting with “19” the wraps into a line starting with “20”, representing a year that someone has chosen for some significance. Birth year, wedding, graduation, etc.

• The black squares are the least used PIN numbers, also listed at the bottom of the infographic.

Found on Information is Beautiful.

Patricia McCarney (World Council on City Data, U of T’s Global Cities Institute) explains how making a first-ever international standard for cities is helping urban centres to grow, improve and take on a transformative role for citizens. Learn more at http://news.utoronto.ca TRANSCRIPT The Cities Podcast – Ep. 2 The Power of Numbers with Patricia McCarney […]

Use this printable math daily warm-up to reinforce your students' number and numeration skills.

Academic cheating seems to be growing at an ever alarming rate. Cheating occurs at every level of education and certification and it includes students, educators, and administrators. Technology has also given cheaters new methods for cheating and, unfortunately, you can find most of these methods demonstrated on YouTube (you can find additional resources on cheating HERE).

Best College Reviews created an interesting infographic about cheating in high school and college that I wanted to share with you. They provide resons for cheating and how cheating occurs among other interesting factoids.

Please take a look at their website to find additional resources on cheating (listed below the infographic).


Source: BestCollegeReviews.org (please follow the link for additional resources on cheating)

Josh Bachman explains the rule of “3 Plus 1” an algorithm helping build and understand business metrics.

On Tuesday, 9 July the full House Appropriations Committee marked up their Commerce-Justice-Science, Interior and Environment, and Energy and Water spending bills for fiscal year (FY) 2025. These bills collectively set the spending amounts for U.S. federal science agencies, including NASA, NOAA, NSF, USGS, EPA, the Department of Energy. Under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress established spending caps for fiscal years 2024 and 2025. The Act allows only a 1% …

The post FY25 Appropriations overview part 1: House spending numbers mark weak support for science appeared first on The Bridge: Connecting Science and Policy.

In this Bridge post, continued from our FY25 Appropriations Overview Part 1 blog, we’ll cover the House’s Interior-Environment, Energy-Water, and Labor-Health and Human Services (HHS) spending bills for fiscal year (FY) 2025—detailing relevant funding levels and sharing committee report highlights that impact the Earth and space sciences.   House Interior-Environment Appropriations bill and accompanying report.   United States Geological Survey (USGS) FY2024 President’s Budget Request FY2025 AGU Request FY2025 House …

The post FY25 Appropriations overview part 2: House spending numbers mark weak support for science appeared first on The Bridge: Connecting Science and Policy.

Notation for national and international telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and web addresses

Application of Recommendation ITU-T E.164 numbering plan for universal international freephone numbers for international freephone service

Operational Bulletin No. 1283 (1.I.2024) and Annexed List:
List of issuer identifier numbers (In accordance with Recommendation ITU-T E.118 (05/2006)) (Position on 31 December 2023)

List of issuer identifier numbers (In accordance with Recommendation ITU-T E.118 (05/2006))

[Capital FM] Nairobi Kenya -- The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has exempted tourists from the requirement to declare their gadgets' International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers upon arrival, to support tourism and ensure ease of access.

[Capital FM] Nairobi -- The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has exempted tourists from declaring the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers of their gadgets upon arrival, aiming to maintain seamless entry for visitors while enhancing tax compliance.