bunnyjadwiga

Just so you all know: Vital Statistics when dealing with abortion: 2 statistics are often reported in ways that can be easily translated into percentages. One is the number of abortions performed divided by the number of women who are resident in the area-- fairly low: in 2006, 16.1 per 1000 women, i.e. 1.6% percent of the female population of the US between 15-44 had an abortion. That makes a useless statistic for politics, of course.

However, the most common statistics, the abortion ratio is
"number of abortions per 1,000 live births" -- that is, the number of abortions divided by the number of live births, times 1000.

What's wrong with this picture? It's usually reported in the news as "X percent of pregnancies" and the number seems to be the RATIO divided by 1000. Do the math.

Yup. By definition, the total number of *pregnancies* is going to be significantly larger than the number of live births-- it has to include live births, abortions, AND miscarriage. So, for instance, the 2009 abortion ratio for NYC would be 44%, as reported on the news, but when you correctly calculate what percentage of pregnancies in NYC end in abortions, it's 38%. (BTW, the number of miscarriages in NYC is also twice that of any other part of the state...)

In 2006, the CDC numbered 846,181 abortions in the US. I can't find a statistic for total pregnancies from the CDC, only teen pregnancies (and remember, the rate of teen pregnancies has *not* been 'skyrocketing' in recent years: CDC says "The US teen birth rate fell by more than one-third from 1991 through 2005, but then increased by 5 percent over two consecutive years. Data for 2008 and 2009, however, indicate that the long-term downward trend has resumed.")

if rather long.
A Precise and Accurate History of Monday, Eleven Years Later
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/8/aprecise.html
(_Good Omens_ fanfic)

Details under the cut:
( Read more... )

In a world where most people have a invisible, unsensible 'fairy', which gives good luck in a particular thing, not all fairies are created equal; and some can be downright difficult. Our heroine, attending a high school for sports stars, finds her parking fairy especially difficult to live with, and so she's taking steps-- by never riding in cars or other transport, she hopes to starve away her fairy. The unintended consequences of her plan tangle her up with a fairy expert, a girl with a boy-crazy fairy, and some difficult choices.

This is a fun, funny, teenage angst novel with magic-like elements, which is why our 11-year-old picked it up and enjoyed it. While there's some moral in here (our heroine finds out first hand why having a boy-crazy fairy isn't a good thing, and why the owner of such a fairy has social troubles, not to mention that her big, famous hometown might be just a *little* parochial), there's no heavy-handedness here. This is a fun read, and at least to me, reads true to teen thought processes. Adults may be concerned about some remarkably stupid choices of some of the characters, but again, that's true to life too-- even if it merits a family discussion among the readers.

Will Manley, in booklist, Jan 1&15, 2010:

"It’s been blissful. For about the last 10 years, the number of “libraries are dead” articles appearing in professional journals has greatly diminished. But now that we are in the middle of the Great Recession, the gloom-and-doom articles are back. There is a big irony here. While more and more commentators have proclaimed the death of—take your pick—libraries, books, or reading, the number of patrons using libraries has been on the rise.
Is there another profession in the world that is as self-abusive as librarianship? Do other professionals beat themselves up as much as librarians? Do plumbers hold conferences about the future of plumbing? Do janitors fret about the development of robotic vacuum cleaners? Do taxi drivers whine that light-rail lines will put them out of business? Why are librarians so pessimistic when their libraries have never been more popular with the public?"

http://www.booklistonline.com/ProductInfo.aspx?pid=3946011

Reading "The Pastons and their England" makes someone's comment yesterday about 'bucolic peace' in period even funnier.

Karin Margarita Frei, Ina Vanden Berghe, Robert Frei, Ulla Mannering, Henriette Lyngstrom, "Removal of natural organic dyes from wool-implications for ancient textile provenance studies," Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 37, Issue 9, September 2010, Pages 2136-2145, ISSN 0305-4403, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2010.02.012.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WH8-4YH4R61-3/2/4a75969b69c21e553abce4e4cf47e593)
Keywords: Ancient textiles; Organic dyestuff; Strontium isotopes; Wool; Provenance

Abstract

Ancient wool textiles recovered from archaeological sites are in many cases originally dyed with natural organic dyestuffs from vegetable sources. These include among others woad (Isatis tinctoria L.), weld (Reseda luteola L.), and madder (Rubia tinctorum L.). These dyestuffs could be a threat to the use of the strontium isotopic system as a tracer for provenance studies of ancient wool, because they could potentially contaminate the signature of the textile's raw material. We present a novel method which allows for efficient removal of organic dyestuffs in wool prior to strontium isotopic analysis. Our method is based on an oxidative release of the dyestuff constituents by ammonium peroxodisulfate [(NH4)2S2O8] solution, combined with hydrofluoric acid (HF) that has shown to effectively remove/dissolve adhering dust micro-particles. Our multi-analytical results show that such a pretreatment is capable of removing >98% of the originally present organic dyestuffs without significantly destroying the wool structure. The strontium isotopic ratios of the residual wool fraction after the application of the pretreatment are sensitive to the origin and, therefore, can be used as tracers for the provenance of the raw material. We propose to apply this method to ancient wool textiles in which positive identification of organic dyestuff constituents by High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) was made.

Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit In- When to Worry and When Not to Worry

I picked this up hoping for some insights into a bright, sociable girl who, approaching adolescence, is suddenly struggling with fitting in and social skills.
Unfortunately for me, "quirky" here is really a way of saying "possibly hovering at the edge of the autism spectrum". I didn't finish it, but it could very well be useful for those working with kids displaying such tendencies.