You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
More than 300 priests
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has released a nearly 1,400-page grand jury report that listed more than 300 Catholic clergy accused of sex abuse and more than 1,000 child victims. It’s the most comprehensive investigation into Catholic Church sex abuse in the U.S. to date. [The Washington Post]
More than $12 million
It’s Wednesday, which means that another Tuesday, and another election day, is in the books. In Wisconsin, major GOP donors and their big money battled in the most expensive Senate primary of the year. More than $12 million in outside money was spent in the race between State Sen. Leah Vukmir — backed by the state party and the billionaire Diane Hendricks — and businessman Kevin Nicholson — backed by Republican “megadonor” Richard Uihlein. Vukmir won the nomination and will face Sen. Tammy Baldwin in November. [Politico]
$2 billion lawsuit
Some founders and executives of Tinder, the dating app, have filed a $2 billion lawsuit against Match Group, its owner. The suing Tinderites allege that Match manipulated data to deflate a valuation and stripped people of stock options, and that its CEO engaged in sexual harassment. Match said in a statement that the allegations are “meritless.” [TechCrunch]
15 endorsements, 15 wins
My colleagues, in partnership with ABC News and Ballotpedia, have been taking a close look at the data underlying the 2018 primary election season. Most recently, they explored hundreds of endorsements in Democratic races. As of Tuesday, two Democratic endorsers were batting a thousand: Joe Biden is 10 for 10, and Elizabeth Warren is five for five. [FiveThirtyEight]
0 witnesses
The attorneys for Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman who is on trial for tax evasion and fraudulently obtaining loans, rested their case Tuesday without calling any witnesses. His lawyers “do not believe that the government has met its burden of proof.” [The New York Times]
700 types of decay product
In the absence of any “new physics” beyond the standard model being discovered, it’s brute force time for physicists at the Large Hadron Collider. Colliding all those particles together generates rather a lot of data, and some researchers on the project are abandoning the heretofore favored “targeted” searches in favor of a “general” search, which may benefit from the assistance of advanced artificial intelligence. Previous studies at the collider have looked for just a few decay products of the high-speed particle collisions, while recent work looks for more than 700 products all at once. [Nature]
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