Skip to main content
ABC News
Significant Digits For Friday, April 3, 2015

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. To receive this as an email newsletter, please subscribe.

1 appearance

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who will reportedly announce a bid for the Republican nomination in mid-April, has been a ghost in Iowa. Despite being an active surrogate for the Joni Ernst Senate campaign during October, the senator has only appeared once in the Hawkeye State since then. [Buzzfeed]

4 for-profit colleges

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs is investigating Berkeley College, Mandl School, New York Career Institute and Technical Career Institute because of high dropout and loan default rates. [The New York Times]


7’5″

The Sacramento Kings signed the first player of Indian descent in NBA history, the 7’5″ Sim Bhullar. [ESPN]

66 days at sea

Louis Jordan was recovered by a German cargo ship 200 miles off the coast of North Carolina after his sailboat was disabled in a storm 66 days ago. Jordan survived by rationing food, catching fish and collecting water from rain, presumably inspired to survive by the prospect of an inevitable and highly lucrative book deal. [NBC News]


100 hours of community service

Vanilla Ice will do 100 hours of community service in a plea agreement over charges he burglarized a foreclosed home. One day we will get justice for that time Vanilla Ice totally burglarized Queen & David Bowie, but today is not that day. [The Palm Beach Post]

About 1,000 listings

Only 4 percent of homes in Cuba have internet access. Nonetheless Airbnb, an app that allows people to sublet rooms to guests, has opened in the Cuban market with roughly 1,000 listings. [Bloomberg Business]

$50,000 relocation package

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff has been one of the prominent opponents of a controversial Indiana law that gay rights advocates say is discriminatory against gay people. Benioff said he has already given an employee who asked to leave Indianapolis due to the law a relocation package worth $50,000. [The Huffington Post]

$2.4 million

One trader made $2.4 million in less than a half hour with two well-timed options transactions Friday. The individual bought $110,530 worth of options on Altera on tweeted news Intel was considering buying the company. As the rest of the market caught on to the news, the value of those options increased 2,200 percent. [CNBC]


13 million tourists

Croatia is seeing a bump in tourism, perhaps thanks to HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” which films its King’s Landing scenes there. There were 13 million visitors last year, up 6 percent over the previous year. The small European nation is hoping to see a similar effect to what New Zealand enjoyed thanks to Peter Jackson’s successful “Lord of the Rings” and godawful “Hobbit” films. [Bloomberg Business]


$1 billion lawsuit

Johns Hopkins University is being sued by over 780 people over human experimentation conducted on over 5,500 Guatemalans in the 1940s. Per Buzzfeed, the lawsuit claims that Johns Hopkins “infected over a thousand Guatemalans with syphilis and other STDS without their knowledge or consent.” [Buzzfeed]


If you haven’t already, you really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter — be the first to learn about the numbers behind the news.

And, as always, if you see a significant digit in the wild, tweet it to me @WaltHickey.

Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

Comments