News in Numbers
The proportion of households nationwide that will be receiving paper copies of the 2020 Census by mid-March. As the Census shifts toward a primarily online platform, many counties, especially those in rural areas, are concerned about residents’ accessibility to participate. Some companies are even installing free Internet connections to ensure participation.
The value of sales purchased via smartphone on Black Friday, the most ever. The total amount spent online during Black Friday this year amounted to $7.4 billion.
The increase in crypto theft between 2018 ($1.7 billion) and the first nine months of 2019 ($4.4 billion). Most crimes that amount to less than $5 million are often underreported and officials are seeing fewer attacks with “bigger wheelbarrows of cash.”
The number of on-street parking spaces in New York City, almost one for every three people, of which 95 percent are free. A transportation panel in Manhattan has floated the idea of eliminating free street parking entirely.
The amount of U.S. adults who believe “it is not possible to go through daily life without companies collecting data about them.” The Pew Research Center, which conducted the study, also reported that 63 percent of the same surveyed group believe it is not possible to go through daily life without the government collecting data about them, revealing a large feeling of privacy mistrust.
The percentage of Oracle board and leadership members who are African American or Asian American. A group of House Democrats sent a letter on Friday to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reprimanding the company’s lack of diversity on their board. The six members requested a response from the computer technology company in the form of an executive-level briefing.
The number of workers that will be laid off by the shared workspaces company, WeWork. The company released a statement on Thursday explaining that the layoffs, which will release nearly 20 percent of the company’s staff, are “to create a more efficient organization.” WeWork has been struggling to keep afloat as it has undergone several large losses in the previous months.
The size of the new, $1 billion Apple Campus that will be constructed in Austin, Texas, next to the existing facility that produces MacBook Pro laptops. There are currently 7,000 Apple employees working in Austin, but the new campus plans to host 5,000 new employees with capacity to grow the staff to 15,000. The Austin Campus is projected to open in 2022.
The value of Uber shares sold by company co-founder Travis Kalanick in the last two weeks.
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.
