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Significant Digits For Friday, May 17, 2019

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


150 colleges

The College Board will give students who take the SAT “adversity scores” based on factors that measure their neighborhood, family and high school environments, including crime rate, median income and free lunch rate. The students themselves won’t see the scores, but colleges will when reviewing students’ applications. Fifty colleges participated in a test last year, and 150 will participate this fall before a broader expansion of the program. [The Wall Street Journal]


23rd Democrat

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is running for president, he announced Wednesday, becoming the 23rd Democratic candidate running for the office. “I’m a New Yorker. I’ve known Trump’s a bully for a long time,” he said in his announcement video. On Twitter, President Trump called de Blasio “a JOKE” and said he was “considered the worst mayor in the U.S.” [The New York Times]


$91 million

A 3-foot-high stainless steel rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons sold for more than $91 million at auction earlier this week at Christie’s. It’s a record price for a work by a living artist. I am now deeply bitter that my high school career counselor did not urge me more forcefully to consider a career making 3-foot-high stainless steel rabbits. [CNN]


70 affiliates

The Chinese telecom company Huawei, along with 70 affiliates, has been placed on the U.S. Commerce Department’s “Entity List,” meaning that the company cannot buy parts from U.S. suppliers without U.S. government approval. Because of Huawei’s reliance on such suppliers, American officials told Reuters that the move would “make it difficult if not impossible” for the largest telecommunications equipment producer in the world to sell some of its products. [Reuters]


23 times

A 49-year-old Sherpa named Kami Rita has now climbed Mount Everest 23 times, breaking the record he set last year. He first climbed the mountain in 1994. Rita’s two closest competitors have climbed it 21 times, but they have both retired. [The Associated Press]


485,000 fans

Some 485,000 “Game of Thrones” fans as of Wednesday afternoon have signed a petition urging HBO to remake the show’s eighth and final season with a new team of writers. The petition’s creator wrote that the showrunners of the series “have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on.” [USA Today]


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Oliver Roeder was a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied game theory and political competition.

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