News in Numbers
The amount of money that was lost last year due to a cybercrime called Business Email Compromise (BEC), which uses fake, but realistic, emails to trick employees into wiring money into the wrong account. This was three times the amount of money that was stolen through BEC in 2016. But BEC isn’t the only cybercrime on the rise; it was reported by the FBI that Americans lost $362 million in romance and confidence scams last year, an increase of nearly $150 million from the year prior.
The amount of money that New Jersey is requiring Uber to pay due to “years of unpaid employment taxes for its drivers.” The total comes partly from an audit that revealed $530 million in unpaid back taxes and an additional $119 million that the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development is tacking on in interest.
The proportion of the total Microsoft workforce that are women workers. While the Seattle-based company has been making concerted efforts to improve its gender, racial and pay discrepancies (three years ago Microsoft revealed that women earned 99.7 cents for every $1 that their male counterparts made), Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre thinks the software maker still has work to do: “If you look then at the representation throughout the organization we for sure have more work to do.”
The number of people who have retweeted a recent Twitter post by Joshua Maddux who identified a Facebook bug for iOS devices that opened the user’s iPhone camera and ran the app in the background. Facebook responded to the discovery, saying, “We have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug. We’re submitting the fix for this to Apple today.” This comes as yet another blow to Facebook as the company has been under severe scrutiny regarding privacy concerns.
The amount of voting systems in the United States that are provided by just three companies, according to a new report by The Brennan Center for Justice. These systems sometimes include voter registration databases and electronic pollbooks. Lawrence Norden, a co-author of the report, said “much of the focus within election security has been on the machines and how best to secure them but critical questions remain about how secure the vendors themselves are.”
The weight of each of the 60 mini satellites that SpaceX launched yesterday morning out of Cape Canaveral, Fla. This is the second set of satellites that have been launched — the first was launched in May, and there are an anticipated 22 more to go. SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk hopes to provide global Internet coverage through these satellites.
The amount of borrowing approved by Houston voters in Tuesday’s election referendum to improve bus and rail transit in the region. The measure passed with 68 percent of the vote.
The amount of money one L.A. firefighter received in overtime pay alone. According to an audit released on Wednesday, over 90 percent of L.A. police and fire employees received overtime pay last year, with the average being $27,737. Eighteen of those that earned overtime earned more than $200,000 in OT pay.
Including operational costs, this is the estimated cost for each flight of SpaceX’s Starship. When it comes to space flights, this is an extremely cheap price tag: SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk boasted “This is much less than even a tiny rocket.”
California law states that any language minority that makes up 3 percent of the voting-age population in that precinct must have ballot materials in those languages at polling places.
The amount of money that Apple has pledged to combat California’s growing housing crisis. Apple has partnered with the state with hopes of confronting the skyrocketing housing prices for both renters and homeowners. Some estimates say that California must build 3 million homes by 2025 to counterbalance the crisis.
The percentage of employees that are concerned that their jobs will be phased out or replaced by technological advancements, according to an August 2019 Gallup poll. This, among other data collected, reveals that U.S. workers are generally unworried about their job security.
The percentage of children in the United States who will own a smartphone by the age of 11. The study, by Common Sense Media, also says that teens spend more than 7 hours a day on their devices, with “only 3 percent of their [non-scholastic] screen time on creative pursuits like writing, or making art, or music.”
The number of people who plan to celebrate Halloween this year, either by way of buying costumes (67 percent of Halloween shoppers), candy (95 percent), decorations (72 percent) or greeting cards (34 percent). The average Halloween shopper is anticipated to spend $86.27 on the holiday, amounting to a total 2019 Halloween spending of $8.8 billion.
The number of firefighters battling the Kincade Fire in Northern California, which has increased in size to 75,415 acres burned as of Monday evening. California is borrowing firefighters from several other states and accepting help from law enforcement groups and the National Guard. The fire sits at only 15% contained with more looming forecasts of high winds in the coming days. Jonathan Cox, Cal Fire Division Chief, says “As containment goes up our confidence grows, but we are not out of the woods yet.”
Shares of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company rose more than 9% in an unusual initial public offering on Monday morning. In what amounted to a name change on the New York Stock Exchange, Virgin Atlantic began trading under the stock symbol (SPCE) previously used by minority investor Social Capital Hedosophia. Investment banker UBS estimates the space tourism business will be worth $3 billion within a decade. In a statement, CEO George Whitesides said, “Virgin Galactic is making history again today as it becomes the world’s first and only publicly traded commercial human spaceflight company.
The anticipated production rate at Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, a key component in the electric car maker's return to profitability.
The police department of Huntington Park, Calif., began patrolling a city part with a camera-laden droid dubbed Robocop in June. The Huntington Park PD says it could help lower crime rates while greeting passers-by with short phrases like, "Good day to you." It even has its own Twitter page — @HPRoboCop. The Jetsons-styled egg-shaped robot drew a decidedly dystopian reaction from Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who compared it on Twitter to another tech-heavy cop movie — Terminator.
Comparing the time it took to achieve a breakthrough in quantum computing to the length of the inaugural Wright Brothers flight, Google, in the scientific journal Nature, claims its experimental quantum processor has completed a calculation in just a few minutes that would take a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years. IBM researchers quibbled with Google’s claim, however, saying that Google underestimated IBM’s supercomputer and said it could actually do the calculation in 2.5 days.
More than half the world’s banks are too weak to survive a global recession, according to a new report from McKinsey and Company, A 58-page report from the consultancy says the banks are not making enough money to withstand the high costs of operating while competing against fintech startups and the long shadow of companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google poised to increase their presence in the financial services industry. McKinsey says banks have three choices to survive the stress — innovate their existing practices, buy innovation or merge together.
The continued slide of the United States in funding university research as a share of GDP. The top 12 governments on the list invest more than double that of the United States. Such investments have been credited for undergirding the U.S. technological dominance since
World War II.
The number of American states that use one or more election services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to a presentation seen by Reuters. “While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS … now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results.”
The number of electric vehicle charging stations that will constitute Ford-Amazon’s proposed network. The two companies teamed up to establish the largest charging station network in North American with 12,000 different locations.
Already, 320 people have paid the fee for a near-space-orbit trip aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, which comes with exclusive gold-lined space suits by Under Armour that were unveiled earlier this week. When asked where else she would wear it, one would-be space tourist said, “every Halloween for the rest of my life.”
The remaining number of founding members of Libra, the embattled Facebook-led cryptocurrency effort that now lacks many of the high-profile companies that originally voiced support for the effort. PayPal, an original signatory to the Libra Association charter, announced last week it was withdrawing its support. On Friday, payment giants Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and eBay announced they would no longer be associated with the project followed by the defection of Internet company Booking, which operates sites like Booking.com, OpenTable and Kayak.
The combined quarterly advertising revenues for Google and Facebook, among the few firm numbers available to estimate the value of the Internet. The question has renewed importance as policy-makers — including California Gov. Gavin Newsom — have “proposed creating a ‘data dividend’ that would require large tech companies to pay users for their data, which requires an understanding of how much the data is worth to companies such as Google and Facebook.”
A Dutch company, Urban Crossovers, is piloting an emissions-free aviation fuel. It is a kind of kerosene, made from passing electricity through a mixture of carbon dioxide and water taken from ambient air. Proponents call the potential “limitless” but concede that the capacity of the current plant’s output is only 1,000 liters of the new fuel a day — an amount a jet will consume in five minutes of flying. That in a world with 225,000 flights a day.
An annual car-tab fee that hybrid-vehicle owners in Washington state will begin paying this month to finance electric-car charging stations they will never use. Owners of plug-in electric cars already pay $150 into the state roads fund instead of gasoline taxes, will also pay the $75 electrification fee, for a total $225. The hybrid fee, awkwardly labelled labeled “Hybrid Vehicle Transportation Electrification” on bills from the state Department of Licensing (DOL) was part legislation passed in the last session “intended to promote electric vehicles and reduce carbon emissions.”
The number of daily users of Twitch, a streaming service owned by Amazon that is primarily used for video gaming and was used to live-stream a shooting in Germany on Wednesday.
The height of 500 new telephone poles that will be erected around Denver’s neighborhoods to upgrade the cellular network to 5G, renewing NIMBY concerns among neighbors as the infrastructure for the next generation of wireless services gets built out.
