According to data from Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 96.6 million single Americans. Just 51 percent of the adult population is married, compared with 72 percent in 1960. And a recent Pew/Time Magazine survey found that 39 percent of people think marriage is becoming obsolete.


Our survey was by no means scientific, but it helps to know from whom these responses are coming. The average age of our survey participants was 46.2 years old. Women made up 82 percent of the respondents; men, 18 percent. About 35 percent said their annual income was under $50,000; 41 percent were making between $50,000 and $100,000; and 23 percent bring in more than $100,000 a year.

Data journalism should be designed in a way that takes advantage of the new technology. But it’s not. Most visualizations and graphics are 2-D with little interactivity. Yet this is the Age of Big Data, according to the New York Times, so we should reflect this change in our designs because readers will expect more than a simple graphic.

Shiny, pretty data visualizations are fun and will likely attract more readers, but journos shouldn’t get too preoccupied with including all the neatest tricks so that the visualization becomes too complicated to understand. This is the view of Donald Norman in his book, “The Design of Everyday Things”.

The audience, Norman seems to suggest, is an integral element of a design that many designers often overlook. While it’s difficult to plan for everyone since there’s no such thing as an average person, the design of a thing (in this case, a visualization or a graphic) should try to be inclusionary rather than exclusionary. And that’s why Slate‘s fun little interactive design of the Republican primaries works. It’s simple, it gives readers a clear understanding of who the political candidates are, how they compared to each other, and even shows a small pop out of each candidate’s face to avoid confusion.

And the animated visualization continues to be useful because it’s designed to be “live” through regular updates. If this was a 2-D graphic, I would yawn and change the webpage because in three weeks (the published date is January 23 2012), candidate Rick Santorum has pulled ahead of Mitt Romney. People will continue to view this design because it’s fresh.

How shoes affect human gait is a controversial topic these days. The popularity of barefoot running, for instance, has grown in large part because of the belief, still unproven, that wearing modern, well-cushioned running shoes decreases foot strength and proprioception, the sense of how the body is positioned in space, and contributes to running-related injuries.

Whether high heels might likewise affect the wearer’s biomechanics and injury risk has received scant scientific attention, however, even though millions of women wear heels almost every day. So, in one of the first studies of its kind, the Australian scientists recruited nine young women who had worn high heels for at least 40 hours a week for a minimum of two years. The scientists also recruited 10 young women who rarely, if ever, wore heels to serve as controls. The women were in their late teens, 20s or early 30s.

All of the women strode multiple times along a 26-foot-long walkway that contained a plate to gauge the forces generated as they walked. The control group covered the walkway 10 times while barefoot. The other women walked barefoot 10 times and in their chosen heels 10 times.

It was obvious, as the scientists had suspected watching the woman during their coffee break, that the women habituated to high heels walked differently from those who usually wore flats, even when the heel wearers went barefoot. But the nature and extent of the differences were surprising. In results published last week in The Journal of Applied Physiology, the scientists found that heel wearers moved with shorter, more forceful strides than the control group, their feet perpetually in a flexed, toes-pointed position. This movement pattern continued even when the women kicked off their heels and walked barefoot. As a result, the fibers in their calf muscles had shortened and they put much greater mechanical strain on their calf muscles than the control group did.

“Several studies have shown that optimal muscle-tendon efficiency” while walking “occurs when the muscle stays approximately the same length while the tendon lengthens. When the tendon lengthens, it stores elastic energy and later returns it when the foot pushes off the ground. Tendons are more effective springs than muscles,” he continues. So by stretching and straining their already shortened calf muscles, the heel wearers walk less efficiently with or without heels, he says, requiring more energy to cover the same amount of ground as people in flats and probably causing muscle fatigue.


It should be noted, he adds, that in his study, the volunteers “were quite young, average age 25, suggesting that it is not necessary to wear heels for a long time, meaning decades, before adaptations start to occur.”

Dr. Galinsky and his colleague Hajo Adam conducted three experiments in which the clothes did not vary but their symbolic meaning was manipulated.

In the first, 58 undergraduates were randomly assigned to wear a white lab coat or street clothes. Then they were given a test for selective attention based on their ability to notice incongruities, as when the word “red” appears in the color green. Those who wore the white lab coats made about half as many errors on incongruent trials as those who wore regular clothes.

In the second experiment, 74 students were randomly assigned to one of three options: wearing a doctor’s coat, wearing a painter’s coat or seeing a doctor’s coat. Then they were given a test for sustained attention. They had to look at two very similar pictures side by side on a screen and spot four minor differences, writing them down as quickly as possible.

Those who wore the doctor’s coat, which was identical to the painter’s coat, found more differences. They had acquired heightened attention. Those who wore the painter’s coat or were primed with merely seeing the doctor’s coat found fewer differences between the images.

The third experiment explored this priming effect more thoroughly. Does simply seeing a physical item, like the coat, affect behavior? Students either wore a doctor’s coat or a painter’s coat, or were told to notice a doctor’s lab coat displayed on the desk in front of them for a long period of time. All three groups wrote essays about their thoughts on the coats. Then they were tested for sustained attention.

Again, the group that wore the doctor’s coat showed the greatest improvement in attention. You have to wear the coat, see it on your body and feel it on your skin for it to influence your psychological processes, Dr. Galinsky said.

Clothes invade the body and brain, putting the wearer into a different psychological state, he said. He described his own experience from last Halloween (or maybe it should be called National Enclothed Cognition Day).

Nearly four decades after the United States government mandated the use of the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” to categorize Americans who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking countries, a new nationwide survey of Hispanic adults finds that these terms still haven’t been fully embraced by Hispanics themselves. A majority (51%) say they most often identify themselves by their family’s country of origin; just 24% say they prefer a pan-ethnic label.

Moreover, by a ratio of more than two-to-one (69% versus 29%), survey respondents say that the more than 50 million Latinos in the U.S. have many different cultures rather than a common culture. Respondents do, however, express a strong, shared connection to the Spanish language. More than eight-in-ten (82%) Latino adults say they speak Spanish, and nearly all (95%) say it is important for future generations to continue to do so.

Hispanics are also divided over how much of a common identity they share with other Americans. About half (47%) say they consider themselves to be very different from the typical American. And just one-in-five (21%) say they use the term “American” most often to describe their identity. On these two measures, U.S.-born Hispanics (who now make up 48% of Hispanic adults in the country) express a stronger sense of affinity with other Americans and America than do immigrant Hispanics.

The survey finds that, regardless of where they were born, large majorities of Latinos say that life in the U.S. is better than in their family’s country of origin. Also, nearly nine-in-ten (87%) say it is important for immigrant Hispanics to learn English in order to succeed in the U.S.

This report explores Latinos’ attitudes about their identity; their language usage patterns; their core values; and their views about the U.S. and their families’ country of origin. It is based on findings from a national bilingual survey of 1,220 Hispanic adults conducted Nov. 9 through Dec. 7, 2011, by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

One of the topics that was brought up at a panel discussion I attended earlier this week was about the problems of publishing catalogue raisonnes. If the catalogue is a of living artist, it becomes outdated the moment that artist creates new work. And even for artists like Picasso, every time one of his works changes hands the catalogue has to be updated. It's a publishing nightmare. Now Art.sy, a new online platform, could make those heavy and constantly out of date printed catalogue raisonnes a thing of the past. Art.sy is still in its beta phase, but I recently got the chance to explore its massive resources. It's powered by the Arts Genome Project, an open source platform that tracks and catalogues every artist, arts organization and every performance, exhibition and event in real time (i.e. no more trips to the printer).

Art.sy expands on the concept by making all that information searchable across more than 800 "genes—such as art-historical movements, subject matter and formal qualities." Feel like looking at blue, medium-sized installations? How about James Turrell's Untitled (19NSB)? Or maybe you want something big and pink? You've now got ten pieces to browse through. You can also choose to only look at works that are for sale or, sift through them by subject matter like "Fantastic Environments," "Text" or "Culture Critique."

Daniel Kruger and Susan Hughes, evolutionary psychologists at the University of Michigan and Albright College in Pennsylvania who have been working on uncovering the secrets of post-sex behavior. “There is so much attention, in the popular literature in psychology and even in evolutionary research, looking at everything leading up to the act of sex,” said Kruger. “But then there isn’t anything about what happens after.  It’s as if the attitude is, ‘oh, of course sex is the end goal, right?’ We’re making the point that the time that couples spend together after sex is an important part of healthy sexual relationships.”

Counter to popular opinion, a dated study, and the great wisdom of many lady mags, researchers have not found that men fall asleep faster than women after sex. In fact, according to a recent study of heterosexual pairings by Kruger and Hughes, a woman is just as likely as a man to be out first. But — and here’s the interesting part — regardless of gender, the partner who stayed awake longer reported that they weren’t getting enough post-sex hugging, kissing or talking – what evolutionary psychologists call “pair bonding” activities. (Somehow, Marie Claire got this exactly, 100 percent wrong.)

Both Kruger and Hughes are interested in what the post-sex sleep study says about male behavior. “This shows that men are concerned about partner bonding too,” said Kruger. “Human males are notable among primates for their high levels of paternal investment, so men may have a lot to lose as well if their partner leaves them.”

And what about the other activities people move on to after sex, like hanging out in bed, ordering Chinese food, or smoking a cigarette? Earlier in 2011 Kruger and Hughes published a report in the Journal of Sex Research, considering a wider range of after-sex impulses. In that case they found that our post-coital behaviors – again considering only heterosexual sex – tend to split along gender lines. Eating, fixing yourself a drink, smoking and asking your partner for favors – all activities that sound pretty good to me – were more likely to be taken on by the men. The women, in this case, placed greater importance on behaviors related to intimacy, like cuddling and “professing their love.”

The researchers interpret these results as related to the women’s need for “pair bonding.” Men in the survey were said to be more interested in gaining “extrinsic rewards” after sex – getting a new high from food, alcohol, cigarettes or some other non-sexual activity – or, in trying to have more sex.

EFF identifies serious security holes and counter-intuitive privacy settings that could expose daters' private information. For example, your dating profile – including your photo – can hang around long after you think you've taken yourself off the market. Some sites are also sucking up the vast quantity of data their users share and selling it to online marketers. If you aren't careful, your profile can also be indexed by Google, perhaps popping up in search results if you have an unusual nickname or other unique ways of describing yourself.

More than 25 separate studies in the past two decades find that marital quality takes a dive with a baby's birth: babies raise stress, reduce happiness and otherwise upset the household, experts say. The movie, out Friday, points to that in a tagline: "Love. Happiness. Kids. Pick two."
"Kids do lower marital satisfaction and there's not much we seem to be able to do to prevent it," says Brian Doss, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. He is among researchers whose intervention studies haven't succeeded in stopping sharp declines in relationship satisfaction. "The fact that we've been largely unsuccessful may suggest it's a really difficult and tough experience and it's not necessarily a deficit in these couples' relationships or how they're approaching it."
Ninety percent of the 218 couples in an eight-year study Doss co-authored experienced a decline in satisfaction, he says.

The increasing popularity of intermarriage. About 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, more than double the share in 1980 (6.7%). Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married out. Looking at all married couples in 2010, regardless of when they married, the share of intermarriages reached an all-time high of 8.4%. In 1980, that share was just 3.2%.
Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. About 24% of all black male newlyweds in 2010 married outside their race, compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. About 36% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2010, compared with just 17% of Asian male newlyweds. Intermarriage rates among white and Hispanic newlyweds do not vary by gender.
At first glance, recent newlyweds who “married out” and those who “married in” have similar characteristics. In 2008-2010, the median combined annual earnings of both groups are similar—$56,711 for newlyweds who married out versus $55,000 for those who married in. In about one-in-five marriages of each group, both the husband and wife are college graduates. Spouses in the two groups also marry at similar ages (with a two- to three-year age gap between husband and wife), and an equal share are marrying for the first time.
However, these overall similarities mask sharp differences that emerge when the analysis looks in more detail at pairings by race and ethnicity. Some of these differences appear to reflect the overall characteristics of different groups in society at large, and some may be a result of a selection process. For example, white/Asian newlyweds of 2008 through 2010 have significantly higher median combined annual earnings ($70,952) than do any other pairing, including both white/white ($60,000) and Asian/Asian ($62,000). When it comes to educational characteristics, more than half of white newlyweds who marry Asians have a college degree, compared with roughly a third of white newlyweds who married whites. Among Hispanics and blacks, newlyweds who married whites tend to have higher educational attainment than do those who married within their own racial or ethnic group.
Intermarriage and earnings. Couples formed between an Asian husband and a white wife topped the median earning list among all newlyweds in 2008-2010 ($71,800). During this period, white male newlyweds who married Asian, Hispanic or black spouses had higher combined earnings than did white male newlyweds who married a white spouse. As for white female newlyweds, those who married a Hispanic or black husband had somewhat lower combined earnings than those who “married in,” while those who married an Asian husband had significantly higher combined earnings.
Regional differences. Intermarriage in the United States tilts West. About one-in-five (22%) of all newlyweds in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, compared with 14% in the South, 13% in the Northeast and 11% in the Midwest. At the state level, more than four-in-ten (42%) newlyweds in Hawaii between 2008 and 2010 were intermarried; the other states with an intermarriage rate of 20% or more are all west of the Mississippi River. (For rates of intermarriage as well as intra-marriage in all 50 states, see Appendix 2.)
Is more intermarriage good for society? More than four-in-ten Americans (43%) say that more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while 11% say it has been a change for the worse and 44% say it has made no difference. Minorities, younger adults, the college-educated, those who describe themselves as liberal and those who live in the Northeast or the West are more disposed than others to see intermarriage in a positive light.
Public’s acceptance of intermarriage. More than one-third of Americans (35%) say that a member of their immediate family or a close relative is currently married to someone of a different race. Also, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) say it “would be fine” with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group. In 1986, the public was divided about this. Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) said people of different races marrying each other was not acceptable for anyone, and an additional 37% said this may be acceptable for others, but not for themselves. Only one-third of the public (33%) viewed intermarriage as acceptable for everyone.
Divorce. Several studies using government data have found that overall divorce rates are higher for couples who married out than for those who married in – but here, too, the patterns vary by the racial and gender characteristics of the couples. These findings are based on scholarly analysis of government data on marriage and divorce collected over the past two decades.

When Google adopts a new universal privacy policy on March 1, you’ll still have control over targeted web ads, but you can’t opt out of the inter-service data sharing. So when when you search for “refurbished iPads,” then “Apple refurbished iPad,” then “used iPad warranty,” don’t be surprised to one day see iPad videos at YouTube, Maps links to nearby Apple resellers, and Google News results about iPad sell-backs.
In all its posts and video explainers and public responses, Google emphasizes that the move to clarify a single collection point is meant to improve the experience in Google products, to give users more of what they want without having to ask for it. But most everyone watching closely notes that it also opens Google up to a wider stream of advertising cash. “What it comes down to, bottom line, is ad revenue,” said Ashley L. Pohdradsky, assistant professor of computing and security technology at Drexel University and a digital forensics expert. "(Google) has removed many of the legal hoops they have to jump through to share personal information between programs … like the kind (of information) consumers give to Facebook on a daily basis. That data is gold, because you can target ads more accurately."
Then again, you, too, benefit from reaching the right people more effectively. If you write, design, or contribute to things that appear on the web, you can claim authorship, via a linked Google profile.

With OutWit Hub, you will find, grab and organize all kinds of data and media from online sources. It will automatically explore series of Web pages or search engine results for you and extract contacts, links, images, data, news, etc.

OutWit Hub dissects Web pages into their different elements. As the program knows how to navigate from page to page in sequences of results, it can automatically extract quantities of information objects and organize them into usable collections.

• Most American families want two children. To achieve this, the average woman spends about five years pregnant, postpartum or trying to become pregnant, and three decades—more than three-quarters of her reproductive life—trying to avoid an unintended pregnancy.[1]
• Most individuals and couples want to plan the timing and spacing of their childbearing and to avoid unintended pregnancies, for a range of social and economic reasons. In addition, untended pregnancy has a public health impact: Births resulting from unintended or closely spaced pregnancies are associated with adverse maternal and child health outcomes, such as delayed prenatal care, premature birth and negative physical and mental health effects for children. [2,3,4]
• For these reasons, reducing the unintended pregnancy rate is a national public health goal. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2020 campaign aims to reduce unintended pregnancy by 10%, from 49% of pregnancies to 44% of pregnancies, over the next 10 years.[5]
• About half (49%) of the 6.7 million pregnancies in the United States each year (3.2 million) are unintended (see box).[6]

Plexus Engine is an app and data platform that discovers emerging topical information.

ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures all your activity on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application.

We thought we knew what it meant to be male and good, and we have now found out the exact opposite is true.
What really fucking pisses us off isn’t the badness itself; as part of the great wave of men buying pornography and sex overtakes our country, we have been perfectly willing to look the other way as sex crimes accelerate.
The truth is that sex crimes are dramatically decreasing. In his sensational new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker makes the compelling, data-driven case that we live in a less bloody – and less brutally transgressive – world than ever before. As the Huffington Post reported in their review of his book, rapes in the USA have declined by a staggering 80% since 1973. Though we are far more aware of the danger of sex crimes against children than we were when Tom and I were boys, there is no clear evidence that molestations are on the rise.
It’s easy to confuse a greater awareness of sexual abuse with an assumption that the cases of such abuse are on the rise. The widespread belief that internet pornography has led to an increase in sexual violence simply isn’t supported by the evidence. While I’m not prepared to go to the opposite extreme, and declare that cybererotica is making the world safer, there’s a growing body of research that suggests just that. (See The Sunny Side of Smut from this past summer’s Scientific American.) If there is a “great wave” of men buying sex and pornography, it’s just not clear that this sexual tsunami constitutes the social disaster that many fear.

369,629 people died on America's roads between 2001 and 2009. Following its analysis of UK casualties last week, transport data mapping experts ITO World have taken the official data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration - and produced this powerful map using OpenStreetMap. You can zoom around the map using the controls on the left or search for your town using the box on the right - and the key is on the top left. Each dot represents a life

Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.

In recent years, doctors and policy makers have grown concerned about high rates of overall psychiatric drug use in the foster care system, the government-financed program that provides temporary living arrangements for 400,000 to 500,000 children and adolescents. Previous studies have found that children in foster care receive psychiatric medications at about twice the rate among children outside the system.

The new study focused on one of the most powerful classes of drugs, antipsychotics. It found that about 2 percent of foster children took at least one such drug, even though schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for which the drugs are approved, are extremely rare in young children.

In the study, mental health researchers analyzed 2003 Medicaid records of 637,924 minors from an unidentified mid-Atlantic state who were either in foster care, getting disability benefits for a diagnosis like severe autism or bipolar disorder, or in a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All of these programs draw on Medicaid financing. The investigators found that 16,969, or about 3 percent of the total, had received at least one prescription for an antipsychotic drug.

Yet among these, it was the foster children who most often got more than one such prescription at the same time: 9.2 percent, versus 6.8 percent among the children on disability, and just 2.5 percent of those in the needy families program.

Data from national cause-of-death files plus census surveys were examined for the study, released online today in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. Reports contained information on more than 200,000 suicides and 130,000 homicides for people who turned 18 between 1967 and 1989. During those years, drinking ages in the U.S. were changing, from under age 21 to 21 and older.

Among men and women, researchers saw no link between minimum drinking age laws and the rates of suicide and homicide. However, when broken down by gender, women who were exposed to those laws had a 12% greater risk of suicide and a 15% greater risk of homicide.

"For homicide, females are victimized by acquaintances in 92% of the cases," study co-author Richard Grucza said in a news release. Grucza, an epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine, added: "If lower drinking ages result in elevated rates of alcohol problems, this could contribute to alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Alcohol use by both women and their partners could contribute to domestic-violence situations. For suicide, it may be that alcohol contributes to the severity of suicide attempts."

U.S. births hit an all-time high in 2007, at more than 4.3 million. Over the next two years, the number dropped to about 4.2 million and then about 4.1 million.

Last year, it was down to just over 4 million, according to the new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For teens, birth rates dropped 9 percent from 2009. For women in their early 20s, they fell 6 percent. For unmarried mothers, the drop was 4 percent.

Experts believe the downward trend is tied to the economy, which officially was in a recession from December 2007 until June 2009 and remains weak. The theory is that women with money worries — especially younger women — feel they can’t afford to start a family or add to it.

Gerald Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted research involving more than one million online dating profiles, and was partly financed by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

About 81 per cent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles, according to a study led by Catalina Toma, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who wanted to learn more about how people pres-ent themselves and how they judge misrepresentation. On the bright side: People tend to tell small lies because, after all, they may eventually meet in person.

On average, the women described themselves as 8.5 pounds thinner in their profiles than they really were. Men fibbed by two pounds, though they lied by a greater magnitude than women about their height, rounding up a half inch (apparently every bit counts).

Research on a major dating site between February 2009 and February 2010 by Mendelsohn and his colleagues shows that more than 80 per cent of the contacts initiated by white members were to other white members, and only three per cent to black members. Black members were less rigid: They were 10 times more likely to contact whites than whites were to contact blacks.

Of the romantic partnerships formed in the U.S. between 2007 and 2009, 21 per cent of heterosexual couples and 61 per cent of samesex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford. (Scholars said that most studies using online dating data are about heterosexuals, because they make up more of the population.)

Dating sites and academics have got cosy before; the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers, for example, is Chemistry.com's chief scientific adviser, and she helped develop the site, a sister site to Match. com.

This time around we surveyed 4000 parents with children aged 10-13. Those parents admitted that 58% of their kids had access to a ‘mainstream’ social network, such as Facebook or Twitter, or regional specific sites like the Spanish Tuenti.

In Spain and Italy most are on at age 10, in the US, US, UK, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand it is 11, while in Germany most ‘graduate’ to these sites at 12 years old.

Remember that we asked parents, so they are fully aware that their kids’ are on these sites.

So what are they doing to monitor their children’s behavior on there?  Well 60% are looking at their PCs. Two-thirds of parents claim to know their kids’ passwords and 6/10 access their children’s computers while they are not on them.

However, this still leaves 40% of parents who are not checking their kids’ behavior at all and how effective is monitoring activity on a PC anyway. Our fourth Digital Diaries study also shows that kids are increasingly able to circumvent parental supervision.

A majority of 10-13 year old kids in every country except New Zealand and (significantly) Japan have their own PC. In the UK, most 10-13 year olds have the PC in the privacy of their own bedroom, so away from parental eyes. Australia is the one country where it is more likely to be in the living room.

Not only do many 10-13 year olds go online in their bedrooms, a significant number are using social media on their phones – often outside of the family home.  44% of 10-13 year olds access social networks from their phones.   In the United States, the figure is 56%.

For the six-month period ending June 30, 2011, Google received approximately 1,000 requests to remove approximately 8,400 pieces of content (it doesn’t give exact numbers for some countries), and it complied with 64 percent of them. In the United States, Google received 92 requests requesting the removal of 757 items total, and it complied with 63 percent of them. According to Google, the number of U.S. requests increased 70 percent over the previous six-month period, while U.K. requests increased by 71 percent.

Worldwide, the majority of requests were based on claims of defamation, privacy and security, or “other.” YouTube content was targeted by more requests than that of any other Google service, followed by Blogger and web search. AdWords, however, was the largest target in terms the sheer volume of content requested to be removed.

One in five Native American children in Multnomah County is placed in foster care, often with non-Native American guardians, one of the highest rates in the country, according to a densely-detailed profile of the county's Native population released today.

That compares to one in 63 for Native children across the country and one in 18 for those in Oregon, says the 113-page report, "An Unsettling Profile," produced by the Coalition of Communities of Color, Portland State University and the Native community.

The high rate of foster care for Native children in Multnomah County reflects poverty, unemployment, school failure, health problems, crime, trauma and other disadvantages, says Terry Cross, executive director of the non-profit, Portland-based National Indian Child Welfare Association.

The youngest teenagers are less avid: 45% of online 12-year-olds use these sites. That figure nearly doubles between the ages of 12 and 13, with 82% of 13-year-olds saying that they are social network site users.

In contrast to social network sites, Twitter use among teens is marked by much more variation between groups. Specifically, girls are twice as likely to use Twitter as boys (22% of online girls use Twitter, compared with 10% of online boys), and black teens are three times as likely to be Twitter users than either white or Latino teens (34% of online black teens use Twitter). Twitter adoption is especially low among younger boys, as just 2% of online boys ages 12-13 are Twitter users.

7 billion people and you: What's your number?

Portland

Many studies have found a link between how well men do economically and their height. A recent German study, for example, found that for each additional standard deviation in height (an increase of about 7 cm) West German men are paid a 4% wage premium. So for example, a man who is less than 165 cm  (5’5”) tall is, on average, paid 562€ less per month than a man who is between 185 and 195 cm (6’1” to 6’5”). Other studies that look at data from countries throughout the developed world have found very similar results – taller men do better on average in the labor market.

There are several reasons why this relationship exists beyond simple workplace discrimination, not the least of which being that adult height is related to socio-economic status in childhood. But it isn’t just income that is causing short men to fair worse on the marriage market; even when we control for income women prefer taller men.

from @pbpjane

Our expanding Archive of Americana—a fully searchable online family of historical materials printed in America between 1639 and 1994—features more than 2,000 newspapers, landmark collections of government publications and more than 100,000 books, broadsides and ephemera.

Our acclaimed digital edition of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports offers online access to the U.S. government's fundamental record of political and historical open source intelligence between 1941 and 1996.

Created in partnership with the Center for Research Libraries, our World Newspaper Archive will include historical newspapers published in Africa, Latin America, Slavic and East Europe, South Asia and other regions.

Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized)   2002
Digital C-prints.
Ed. 5 + 2 APs. 60" x 29.5".
From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

Tech notes on the amalgamation body of work:

Most of the early amalgamation print work (Playboy, Class, Homes, 76BJs) was made with code I wrote in C on Unix-based SGIs using Paul Haeberli's SGI file format.

Later amalgamation work (Decades, Late Night, Special Moments) was done in C/C++ on Windows boxes with the ImageMagick C++ libraries. I did The Song of the Century manually with PC audio software (I honestly cannot remember what software, but I did download a few of the cover songs with the original Napster)

For the City and Loop pieces, we actually modelled much of Chicago's Loop as semi-transparent, textured rectangles and rendered this "city" from typical tourist vantage points. All of this was done in Maya. The Portrait pieces were done with Processing.

"Smokers are less likely to be obese. And the declining use of cigarettes across the country — due to both tightening pocketbooks and new laws (thanks, Mayor Bloomberg) — accounts for a bigger increase in the obesity rate in the U.S. than any other factor, according to paper authors Charles L. Baum and Shin-Yi Chou, who have both written with some frequency on the economics of obesity."

And when it comes to the latest economic data on women, the news is even worse than most people seem to realize. But you couldn’t learn that by reading The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, neither of which even mentioned women in their front-page stories about the rise in the poverty rate, which has soared to its highest level since 1993.

When it comes to discovering what that means for the majority of the American population, one had to look elsewhere. For the news the big guys didn’t see fit to print, we can thank the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that focuses on women’s economic security and legal rights.

When the NWLC crunched the latest numbers from the Census Bureau, the results showed that record numbers of women are living in poverty. And in news that should surprise no one, the findings reveal that millions of those women do not have health insurance.


Spencer Platt / Getty Images

The poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent last year, up from 13.9 percent in 2009—the highest rate in 17 years. The “extreme poverty rate” among women was the highest ever recorded, climbing to 6.3 percent in 2010 from 5.9 percent in 2009.

“Extreme poverty” means that your income is below half of the federal poverty line—and by 2010, more than 7.5 million women had fallen into that dire category.

What all those statistics add up to is that more than 17 million women were living in poverty last year, compared with 12.6 million men. As usual, things were worse for older women; twice as many women over 65 were living in poverty, compared with men.

And those numbers just represented the population-wide average. For Hispanic and black women, the poverty rate increased even faster and rose higher—to 25 percent for Hispanic women and to 25.6 percent for black women.

As usual, single mothers are having the hardest time of all. More than 40 percent of women who head families are now living in poverty. With more than half of poor children living in female-headed families in 2010, the child poverty rate jumped to 22 percent.

Cyclists of both genders are less likely than average to have sex on a first date, according to survey by a dating website. The finding stands out because elsewhere in the survey, conducted by FreeDating.co.uk among 10,000 of its members, clear divisions are found between men and women.

In terms of body shape, for example, overweight women are more likely than those described as slim or simply large to finish the evening in bed with a new partner, while among men, it is those described as being of athletic build.

Women who said they are interested in cars and spend time in bars were also more likely to say that they would have sex on a first date, while in terms of level of education, it is better educated men but less well educated women who do so.

Married men who are members of the site were also more keen on getting into bed on the first date than single ones – a bit of a no-brainer, we imagine, since you they’re unlikely to have joined up with thoughts of bigamy on their mind.

Unsurprisingly, the survey doesn’t record whether they are up front with their prospective partners beforehand, nor what their wives think of their behaviour. The website itself says that it “actively discourages” married people from signing up, and asks those that do to at least be honest about their status in their profile.

And as for cyclists – well, respondents who said they have an interest in cycling, across both genders, were less likely than average to put out on a first date, putting them alongside those in their 40s and above, as well as non-drinkers, as groups where being male or female made no difference to the response.

A post featuring 8 different Tube maps since 1908 had me wondering what else was out there on the evolution of the London Underground map. There is quite a bit. This is less a reflection on Harry Beck, etc, and more a collection of what can be found.

Sources: Robert B. Reich, University of California, Berkeley; "The State of Working America" by the Economic Policy Institute; Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics, and Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley; Census Bureau; Bureau of Labor Statistics; Federal Reserve

Drawing on a telephone survey of 1,500 youth, Janis Wolak and colleagues present some data giving us a clue.  They find that less than half (42%) of 10- to 17-year-old internet users had seen online pornography in the last year.  Most of them that had, further, had not sought it out.  The majority (66%) had come across the pornography by accident (e.g., they had entered a porn site without meaning to, been emailed an explicit image, or seen a pop up).

The image below shows unwanted and wanted exposure to pornography for boys as they age.  Only 1% of the boys 10- to 11-years-old had sought out pornography, by 12-13 about one in ten have done so, and by 16-17 over 1/3rd have (38%).  Unwanted pornography is a problem for boys of all ages. Seventeen percent of boys 10-11 encountered unwanted porn and this number increased as the boys aged.


Few girls seek out pornography: 2% of 10- 11-year-olds had sought out pornography, rising to 8% by 16-17. Girls have the same problem with unwanted exposure to pornography; it happens about as frequently as it does for boys among 10- 13-year-olds and even more often among 14- 17-year-olds.

Obese men with Diabetes 2 can enhance erectile function and decrease urinary tract symptoms along with increased sexual desire by losing weight, a new study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine shows.

Australian researchers placed 31 obese men with type 2 diabetes on either a meal replacement-based low-calorie diet or a low-fat, high-protein, reduced-carbohydrate diet meant to decrease calorie intake by 600 calories a day.

Problems with urinary tract function also improved, the team added.

Gary Wittert M.D., a professor at the University of Adelaide, studied the weight of each man with diabetes type 2 over eight weeks while on the low calorie diet. The overweight men lost five percent in weight and their sexual and urinary problems improved within eight weeks as improvements continued for months.

Recent work on the Neandertal genome has raised the possibility of admixture between Neandertals and the expanding population of Homo sapiens who left Africa between 80 and 50 Kya (thousand years ago) to colonize the rest of the world. Here, we provide evidence of a notable presence (9% overall) of a Neandertal-derived X chromosome segment among all contemporary human populations outside Africa. Our analysis of 6,092 X-chromosomes from all inhabited continents supports earlier contentions that a mosaic of lineages of different time depths and different geographic provenance could have contributed to the genetic constitution of modern humans. It indicates a very early admixture between expanding African migrants and Neandertals prior to or very early on the route of the out-of-Africa expansion that led to the successful colonization of the planet.

Neanderthals, one of the last extant hominid species other than our own, left Africa somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago and settled mostly in Europe until they went extinct 30,000 years ago. Early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, meaning they overlapped with Neanderthals in time and place for at least 20,000 years. On an evolutionary time scale, that's not a ton of time, but could it be enough to leave lasting evidence of human/Neanderthal interbreeding?

According to Dr. Labuda, the answer is an emphatic "yes." Back in the early '00s, he and his team had identified a particular piece of DNA in the human X chromosome that seemed out of place with everything else, and they wondered whether it might have originated from a non-human source.

That answer came with the first sequencing of the Neanderthal genome last year. Dr. Labuda compared 6,000 chromosomes from all over the world to the corresponding part of the Neanderthal sequence. With the exception of people from sub-Saharan Africa - whose ancestors would have been unlikely to come into contact with Neanderthals, since their territories didn't overlap - every chromosome featured evidence of the Neanderthal sequence.

That even includes particularly far-flung groups of humans like native Australians, who are thought to have reached the island continent by as far back as 40,000 years ago. For that sequence to show up even in such geographically isolated groups, it suggests that there was a lot of interbreeding between the two hominid species, and that pretty much all ancient humans that left Africa passed through Neanderthal territory and had close interaction (read: a ton of sex) with their evolutionary cousins.

how alcohol affects people is highly individual, with a number of factors in the mix.

Quick shots of liquor hit the bloodstream faster than slow sips of wine. Drinking on an empty stomach impairs reflexes more than consuming alcohol with food. And women and older drinkers generally hit legal intoxication levels sooner than men and younger people.

Carbonated beverages raise alcohol levels faster, because the gas irritates the stomach lining, causing alcohol to be absorbed faster. (Sweet or caffeinated alcoholic drinks aren't absorbed any faster, it just seems that way because people often consume more of them than they realize.)

Many Asians have a genetic variation that gives them a flush and a very rapid heartbeat from even a small amount of alcohol.

And factors like fatigue, stress, illness and depression can magnify alcohol's impact.

Our friends at iStrategyLabs have cooked up this juicy infographic about what the average college student “Likes” on Faecbook. While they’re all likely fueled by energy drinks, pizza, gadgets, and partying — which brands do they actually prefer?  iStrategyLabs dug into what the 4 million+ college students on Facebook “Like” across various categories.  As brands pour more and more money into social ads — this provides a snapshot of what’s working and what’s not. Cheers to Corona and Chipotle for taking the lead!

In this funny (and actually poignant) 3-minute talk, social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world -- where the experience we're having right now is less interesting than what we'll tweet about it later.

Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable. You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning.

As you may know, the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. Users can also log nutrition, weight, additional activities (including sexual activity) and other health information on the site in order to gain a complete picture of their health.

So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? It’s not really Fitbit’s fault. When you create a profile, the default privacy setting allows profiles to be found in search results (Google, Bing, etc). If you don’t unclick this setting, it will obviously make your profile public for anyone to find.

So these users may be unwittingly sharing their most intimate details (i.e. kissing, hugging and more) when recording their sexual activity to calculate how many calories they have burned in a given period of time.

Of course, sex does count as exercise, but you might want to think twice before recording it on Fitbit and making your profile open to the public (TMI, anyone?). And to mitigate this issue, perhaps Fitbit should change its privacy defaults.

Girls in Tech will be at OSCON 2011 as they kick off the inaugural GIT Mentorship Pilot Programs globally (everyone is welcome). Learn more about the mentorship programs(for k-12, colleges/universities, working professionals), get involved and participate,  and how you could help spread the word. If you are attending Oscon 2011, don’t forget to join us on Thursday on July 28th 1-2pm in room #D134.  http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/21239

This is a time of great change. There is enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all levels and in many countries. This gathering tide of open data and content is the creator and driver of massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how can we connect it together, how can we use it to collaborate and share our work? We will explore these issues, and more, at OKCon 2011 in Berlin.

What kind of topics will be covered?

We welcome proposals on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing content or data that is open in accordance with http://opendefinition.org. Potential topic areas include, but aren’t limited to:

Open Data Technology
Open Science and Open Data in Academic Research
Open Law, Society, and Democracy
Open Culture, Education, and Commons Research

The Federal Trade Commission has approved a controversial firm which scours social media sites to check on job applicants.

It means anything you've ever said in public on sites including Facebook, Twitter and even Craigslist could be seen by your would-be employer.

The Washington-based commission has ruled the firm, Social Intelligence Corporation, complies with the Fair Credit Reporting Act - even though it keeps the results of its searches on file for seven years.

U.S. babies are dying at an increased rate. While the United States spends billions on medical care, as of 2006, the US ranked 28th in the world in infant mortality, more than twice that of the lowest ranked countries.  (DHHS, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics.  Health United States 2010, Table 20, p. 131, February 2011.)

The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
10 weeks ending May 28, 2011  - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant.   Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.  In 2001 the infant mortality was 6.834 per 1000 live births, increasing to 6.845 in 2007. All years from 2002 to 2007 were higher than the 2001 rate.

Spewing from the Fukushima reactor are radioactive isotopes including those of iodine (I-131), strontium (Sr-90) and cesium (Cs-134 and Cs-137) all of which are taken up in food and water.  Iodine is concentrated in the thyroid, Sr-90 in bones and teeth and Cs-134 and Cs-137 in soft tissues, including the heart.  The unborn and babies are more vulnerable because the cells are rapidly dividing and the delivered dose is proportionally larger than that delivered to an adult.

Data from Chernobyl, which exploded 25 years ago, clearly shows increased numbers of sick and weak newborns and increased numbers of deaths in the unborn and newborns, especially soon after the meltdown.  These occurred in Europe as well as the former Soviet Union. Similar findings are also seen in wildlife living in areas with increased radioactive fallout levels.

A quick note that I’m presenting today at UC-San Diego at Designing Geopolitics. I’m giving a talk called “Intelligence in Search of A Body” on Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group as a part of the session titled, “Data as World, World-Image, World-Making,” with along with two people I admire greatly: Lev Manovich and Kelly Gates. Thank you,  Benjamin Bratton, for having me.

An earlier article posted to the NTEN blog did a great job covering data visualization generally, but what about data and places? More specifically, what about mapped data?

Creating display maps – in print or as digital images – is easier than ever before, and interactive, web-based mapping is all over the place, so to speak. We've re-discovered geography as a means of understanding our world, big time.

But, while some of us may "ooh" and "ahh" over a particularly cool-looking map, most people have a hard time actually reading and understanding maps. Some of this is a general cognitive truth, but a good part of that comes from poorly designed maps.

If our data is that important – and it is – we have to create visual design that delivers our messages to people.

22 free data visualization and analysis tools

Riksförbundet för Sexuell Upplysning (the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education) – RFSU in 1933. The right to an abortion and contraception, sex education in schools and the decriminalisation of homosexuality were some of the issues that “Ottar” and her colleagues campaigned for. In order to get the money for these controversial activities, they started selling condoms – and that’s still the case today, after more than 75 years. Initially, RFSU ran its campaign for education, justice and change in the face of strong opposition, but gradually the work led to major changes, and even legislative changes.

The mythical status of the hymen has caused far too much harm for far too long. Last spring, RFSU published an information booklet in Swedish intended to dispel some of the myths surrounding the hymen and virginity.

The new term for the hymen in Arabic is تاج{اكليل}المهبل،,

The new term in English is vaginal corona

The booklet describes what the female genitals look like and what the vaginal corona actually is. It also dispels many of the myths surrounding female sexuality and the misconceptions concerning the hymen and virginity. Etymologically, the term hymen comes from the Greek word for membrane. In Swedish, the hymen used to be called mödomshinna, which translates literally as “virginity membrane.” In fact, there is no brittle membrane, but rather multiple folds of mucous membrane. A vaginal corona, in other words.

Yes! RT @nylorac15: This is a super righteous rant. Required viewing, peeps!

Accurate data is vital to enlightened research and policymaking, particularly publicly available data that are redacted to protect the identity of individuals. Legal academics, however, are campaigning against data anonymization as a means to protect privacy, contending that wealth of information available on the Internet enables malfeasors to reverse-engineer the data and identify individuals within them. Privacy scholars advocate for new legal restrictions on the collection and dissemination of research data. This Article challenges the dominant wisdom, arguing that properly de-identified data is not only safe, but of extraordinary social utility. It makes three core claims. First, legal scholars have misinterpreted the relevant literature from computer science and statistics, and thus have significantly overstated the futility of anonymizing data. Second, the available evidence demonstrates that the risks from anonymized data are theoretical - they rarely, if ever, materialize. Finally, anonymized data is crucial to beneficial social research, and constitutes a public resource - a commons - under threat of depletion. The Article concludes with a radical proposal: since current privacy policies overtax valuable research without reducing any realistic risks, law should provide a safe harbor for the dissemination of research data.

RECAP is a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts. It:
Helps you give back: Contributes to a public archive hosted by the Internet Archive
Saves you money: Shows you when free documents are available
Keeps you organized: Gives you better filenames, enables useful headers

Keisling, who was speaking to students who attended the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference, shared many somber statistics from the NCTE's survey on transgender discrimination, which was released in February and was also created with the help of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The survey is the largest ever conducted of transgender individuals, and it takes a frightening snapshot of the difficulties faced by nearly 6500 transgender people in the U.S. "We tried to find bigger studies," Keisling said. "This is the biggest study."

The survey results show that transgender individuals face serious barriers to meeting their basic needs, starting with employment. Ninety percent of survey respondents reported being harassed, mistreated or discriminated against on the job. Another 47 percent reported being fired, not hired or denied a promotion. These workplace struggles mean that transgender individuals are four times more likely to live in poverty (less than $10,000 a year) than the general population.

They're also twice as likely to be homeless as the general population. And of the survey respondents who had experienced homelessness, more than half had been turned away from a shelter.

The first set of 2010 Census Demographic Profiles are ready for viewing.  These profiles provide details about race and Hispanic groups, age, sex and housing status. The profiles will be released on a state-by-state basis for each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

In the mid-1960s, President Johnson saw the need for independent nonpartisan analysis of the problems facing America's cities and their residents. The President created a blue-ribbon commission of civic leaders who recommended chartering a center to do that work. In 1968, the Urban Institute became that center.
Today, we analyze policies, evaluate programs, and inform community development to improve social, civic, and economic well-being. We work in all 50 states and abroad in over 28 countries, and we share our research findings with policymakers, program administrators, business, academics, and the public online and through reports and scholarly books

At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, professor Marina Adshade teaches a popular undergraduate course called "Economics of Sex and Love," in which students apply the analytical and statistical tools available to economists to examine human sexuality. Topics in the course—which Marina will explore in this blog, too—include dating and marriage, promiscuity, infidelity, risky sexual behavior, the relation between sex and happiness, and markets for sex such as prostitution, pornography, and lap dancing.Economic theory suggests that sex makes people happy. Marina finds that economics plus sex is also very satisfying.  May this blog be as good for you as it is for her.

I am the Chief Research Officer of Conversition Strategies, a social media research company built by researchers for researchers.

The one you don’t hear much about in journalism school: interviewing data.

To be fair, you really don’t hear all that much about the craft of interviewing people at journalism school, either. There is the occasional class, but the way that most people I know get better at it is simply by doing. When people ask me how I can approach complete strangers and ask them detailed and occasionally personal questions, I’m quick to reply that I spent four summers delivering breakfast in bed to newlyweds in the Poconos. When you’ve had a naked man answer the door at 8 a.m. and tell you to put the trays down next to the tripod-mounted video camera, talking to evenly partially-clothed strangers gets pretty easy.

Interviewing data takes practice, too, although I can’t really find a parallel from my days waiting tables. Both kinds of interviewing have much in common: you want to be as prepared as possible so as to better evaluate the results and be able to adapt your questions to the situation. Both require you to place a solid block of skepticism, even suspicion, on your shoulders as you embark. And both, if done well, can result in an unexpected admission – something even the subject of the interview didn’t really “know”.

This is why I continue to teach spreadsheets in classes, because they make for excellent initial interview tools. Looking at some data in a spreadsheet, you can easily size it up with basic sorting and filtering. That’s kind of the “getting-to-know-you” phase of the data interview. What are the ranges of this data? What looks unusual?

Questions like: “How old are you?”, “Where were you born?”, “Who do you report to?” work for both people and data (although I suppose “made” is a better word than “born”). And then, once you’ve got a solid foundation, you ask the trickier questions, the ones that you need to really think about. The ones that, when you’re planning a big interview with the subject of your investigation, you game-plan and write out as if they were lines in a soap opera.

And that’s where the big difference is: with data, you can ask a lot of potentially embarrassing questions, and the data won’t complain, walk out or threaten to sue. You can ask variations of the same question 20 times and the data won’t mind. When I say that I prefer interviewing data to people, this is why. Data will only lie to you if it’s just bad data or if you misunderstand the question. Unfortunately, almost every data set is “bad” in some way. But once you find that out, you usually can deal with it.

The FBI’s definition of “forcible rape” in their Uniform Crime Report (UCR): “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” [PDF]
What that definition leaves out: anal, oral and statutory rape; incest; rape with an object, finger or fist; rape of men
Number of men raped in any year, according to the UCR: 0 [PDF]
Estimated number of men actually raped each year, according to the Dept. of Justice: 93,000 [PDF]
Number of women raped in 2007 under the UCR definition: 91,874
Number of sexual assaults in 2007–which includes rapes the FBI leaves out–according to the National Crime Victimization Survey: 248,300
Dept. of Justice estimate of how many women are actually raped each year: 300,000 [PDF]
Number of arrests for rape in 2007 (UCR): 23,307
Percentage of rapes that result in incarceration: 0.35 percent [PDF]
Number of murders/manslaughters in 2007 (UCR): 17,157
Number of arrests for murder/manslaughter in 2007 (UCR): 13,480
Percentage of murders that result in incarceration: 20 percent or more [PDF]
Average number of rapes to every murder committed annually: 5 to 1
Two of the top five cities in the U.S. with the most “unfounded” (i.e., falsely reported, according to police) rapes: New Orleans and Baltimore
Percentage of rape reports deemed “unfounded” by New Orleans police in 2008: 60 percent
Percentage of rape reports deemed “unfounded” by Baltimore police in 2009: 32 percent
Percentage of actual estimated false rape reports in any given year according to research studies: 2-8 percent
Percentage of rape reports deemed “unfounded” by the FBI in 2006: 5 percent
How Baltimore police once explained their “unfounded” rape rate: “One of the things we know is that victims do lie.”
Percentage of rape reports deemed “unfounded” (i.e. falsely reported) by Philadelphia police in 1983: 52 percent
The year Philadelphia was forced to clean up its rape reporting practices: 1999
Percentage of rape reports deemed unfounded in Philadelphia in 2007: 10 percent
What a Philadelphia police officer once called his city’s sex crimes unit: “The lying bitches unit.”
“Reasons” women lie about rape, according to Philadelphia’s police department in 1984: revenge; free abortion; covering up truancy, pregnancy, infidelity, lost money, sexual precocity.
Number of people who have signed a letter urging the FBI to change its definition of rape: 2,019 (and counting)

research shows that the average height of women in 14 African countries is shrinking. And that spells bad news for the future health of those nations.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health looked at the heights of women ages 25 to 49 in 54 countries who had been measured between 1994 and 2008, and compared that to the heights of women in 1945.

They found that women in 14 African countries lost stature, while women in 21 countries stayed the same. In 19 other nations, including Bangladesh and Kazakhstan, women gained stature. The results were reported in the online journal PLosONE.


The changes in average height were almost always associated with income: Poor women lost height, while more affluent women grew taller. The women in the top 20 percent in income gained height in all countries, and were almost 2 centimeters taller on average than the poorest women in their countries. Women in Guatemala showed the biggest height difference between rich and poor, with an almost 8-centimeter gap.

Even though there's been a big drop in infant mortality in the time covered by this survey, the stagnation and decline in height "suggest little improvement, and perhaps deterioration, in early childhood living conditions," according to the study authors.

That's true not just in Africa.

Through most of American history, Americans have been the tallest people on the planet. Credit that to abundant food and fewer diseases than in the crowded cities of Europe. But Americans' height plateaued in the 1960s; the Dutch are now the tallest population on Earth. And a 2010 study by economist John Komlos found that African-American women in the United States have actually lost height, starting with those born in 1975.