You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news. Today’s number is more than 233,000, for the number of students who have experienced gun violence since Columbine; two students were killed and three wounded in a shooting on Thursday at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California.
600 dentists
Los Algodones, in Mexico, isn’t very big. Just 14 miles from Yuma, Arizona, it has fewer than 5,000 permanent residents. But Los Algodones has approximately 600 dentists, and they do huge business each year serving thousands of Americans and Canadians looking to save 40 to 60 percent on dental services. American clients like 76-year-old Eugene Richardson and his wife, who drove 2,000 miles from Isle, Minnesota, to get extensive work done. The Richardsons, like 23 percent of Americans overall, don’t have dental insurance. [HuffPost]
5,000 kids charged as adults
A new report at Reveal News found that nearly 5,000 Mississippi children were charged as adults in the last 25 years, and that 75 percent of those kids were black. Among the girls who are also in the Mississippi court system, 60 percent are black. Analysis by reporters Ko Bragg and Melissa Lewis show that most of the charges involve drug use, burglary, larceny and armed robbery, but black children “serve significantly longer sentences than white children in the adult system.” And they trace this disparity to laws from the late 1800s [Reveal News]
50.2 percent
Through Week 10 of this season, NFL teams are going for it on 14.5 percent of all fourth downs, the highest rate in more than two decades. Which makes a ton of sense — the strategy worked last year. Running or passing on fourth down resulted in a first down (or touchdown) 59.4 percent of the time in games played during the 2018 season; as FiveThirtyEight’s Ty Schalter points out, this is the highest success rate since 1998. However, this year the success rate of fourth-down conversion attempts has fallen to 50.2 percent, which is below the 51.7 percent average of the last 10 seasons. [FiveThirtyEight]
800 million jobs
Automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence have already reduced the amount of human labor in specialty manufacturing, warehouse parcel delivery and resume screening. But a new report from analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimates the rise of automation could make up to 800 million jobs — nearly half of all jobs worldwide — obsolete by 2035. [Yahoo Finance]
5,136 votes
On Thursday, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin conceded to Attorney General (now Gov.-elect) Andy Beshear after a re-canvass of votes confirmed the margin of victory was still 5,136 votes out of more than 1.4 million cast in last week’s election for governor. Bevin, who had received the support of President Trump, had raised unspecified allegations of voter fraud but finally acknowledged Beshear’s victory in a brief speech. “We’re going to have a change in the governorship based on the vote of the people,” he said from a podium in front of the governor’s office. [New York Times]
40,000 transcribers
Freelance workers for Rev, a popular on-demand transcription service, recently alerted users that the company was significantly slashing their pay. Other freelancers are warning users that all of the company’s 40,000 transcribers have access to a database of customer information, including full names, business titles and audio and video files for jobs that have not yet been “claimed.” Rev advertises a “strict customer confidentiality policy” and more than 100,000 customers on its website, including major companies such as Google, Amazon and NBC. [OneZero]