Significant Digits For Tuesday, April 3, 2018


You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

5.1 percent

Tesla has had a rough few days. On Friday, the company acknowledged that its self-driving mode was engaged during a recent fatal crash involving one of the company’s Model X vehicles. On Sunday, a government board said Tesla mishandled the resulting investigation. Also on Sunday, Elon Musk tweeted some dumb stuff. Finally, on Monday, Wall Street rewarded the company with a 5.1 percent decline in its stock price. [CNN]


99.8 percent

Every single county in the U.S. registered an increase in drug-related mortality between 1980 and 2014. And that rise was statistically significant in 99.8 percent of counties. [FiveThirtyEight]


21,000 refugees

Number of refugees the U.S. is on track to accept this year, the lowest since the law establishing the modern resettlement system went into effect in 1980. A year ago, 47 percent of refugees settled in the U.S. were Muslim, many from nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This year, about 15 percent are. [Idaho Statesman]


85,000 visas

The H-1B visa lottery began yesterday, with processing centers in California and Vermont beginning the process of going through tens of thousands of applications. After paring that down, 85,000 people will be chosen at random to get a visa. [San Francisco Chronicle]


More than 3.6 million people

Number of daily active users on Grindr, a gay hookup app. Buzzfeed reported on Monday that a researcher had found that the tech company was sharing users’ medical information, including HIV status, with two other companies. After the Buzzfeed story broke, though, Grindr’s head of security announced that the company will stop sharing the data. [BuzzFeed, Axios]


330 million users

Reddit is the “front page of the internet” for a lot of people; it has about 330 million users globally — mainly folks who (in my experience) link to rewrites and aggregations of FiveThirtyEight culture articles, thus depriving me of traffic that would make me look good in front of the bosses. Anyway, the site is about to unleash a long-in-the-works redesign, which will give the text-heavy site its first visual makeover in more than a decade. [Wired]


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