As promised, here is how to determine basic percentages. Too many of my college students don’t understand basic percentages. Clearly GTF has the same problem. So here is how it works — in words — with no math symbols. I’m totally serious. It’s never too late to learn. And not knowing how to relate “doubled”…
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marijuana I wonder if an end-the-drug war voter is just an law-and-order conservative whose backyard okra garden was raided by local cops after being spotted from a helicopter funded by the Drug Enforcement Agency Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program? Barstow County, Georgia, resident Dwayne Perry may be a recent convert: “I do the right thing and…
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The need for better crime stats, from David J. Krajicek at the Justice Report. “I don’t think we know if we’re in the midst of a heroin epidemic. I do know there are localities where the numbers are up. But to use numbers from four years ago as evidence of an urgent national problem today…
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There are two main clearinghouses for crime stats in this country, the UCR (The Uniform Crime Report) and the NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey). The former is collected from police departments and thus only includes reported crime as recorded by the police. The latter is conducted by surveys and sampling and asks people (160,000 per…
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Check out this lengthy piece (and well worth reading the whole thing) by David Simon about murders, stats, the BPD, the state’s attorney’s office, and the need for main-stream media. (And thanks to an anonymous comment for cluing me in.) The Stat: In 2011, the Baltimore Police Department charged 70 defendants with murder or manslaughter.…
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The New York Times reports today on a RAND study (behind the Great Damned Elsevier Pay Wall) by Ruopeng An and Roland Sturm about the lack of “food deserts” in poor neighborhoods. Or more precisely about the lack of link between food deserts and obesity. More specifically, it questions the very notion of food deserts.…
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Ronald Weitzer tries to dispel the myths of human trafficking.
Play with these census data. In the past, to gather data like this (change in neighborhood population and demographics over 10 years) used to be so much work and take so long. From 1990 to 2000, the Eastern District lost about 30% of its population. (In 2002 it took me days of work to figure…
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From the Village Voice, debunking everybody from Ashton Kutcher to CNN and the New York Timeswho repeat the absurd claim that there are “between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today!” We examined arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation’s 37 largest cities during a 10-year period. … Law enforcement records…
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That’s the bullshit detector going off after seeing this: Expert: 40,000 – 50,000 slaves currently in U.S. How much you wanna bet he just made up that number? Being exploited for cheap labor does not automatically mean you’re a slave. Have we forgotten what slavery was?