Statistics on Motorcycle Accidents and Links for Accident Research
A foot was severed on impact during this motorcycle accident which occurred at an intersection. Photo Credit: Chris Yarzab. Creative Commons License 2.0. |
Just a blog from a writer with some statistics to share
A foot was severed on impact during this motorcycle accident which occurred at an intersection. Photo Credit: Chris Yarzab. Creative Commons License 2.0. |
Posted by Statistics to Share at 11:24 AM 1 comments
(Photo Credit: Simon_Sees. Creative Commons License 2.0.) |
Posted by Statistics to Share at 3:03 PM 0 comments
Labels: 777, Accidents, Airline, Airplanes, Aviation, Boeing, Crashes, Data, Debris, Environment, Government, Graphs and Charts, International, Malaysia, Ocean, Plane Crash, Research, Statistics
"Teacher Quality" reports and statistics I find relate teacher quality to student test scores. (Heck, hand kids the answers and you'll be a brilliant teacher.) That gives these so called "Teacher Quality" reports a failing grade in my eyes - with or without the numerous "value-added" qualities incorporated into the results. And guess why NY went from a "D" to a "C" in the latest Teacher Quality reports? Because they tied teacher/student testing more closely together.
We've lost education inside of institutionalism. Using standardized testing to judge a child's knowledge is archaic and detrimental to true education. Using standardized testing to test teachers is just a continuation of taking the easy way out instead of being innovative. But, regardless of my opinion, robot-like testing isn't going away, and teacher quality is a highly controversial and hot political issue. I glaze over these reports because I think they're a farce, but I think many of you would be interested in knowing where to find the actual studies on "Quality Teaching" that are running amuck in the headlines.
When a new study comes out, the source, or some relationship to the source, is usually quoted in the article. Sometimes the source is vague, such as "a study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." Gee thanks. Do you KNOW how many different studies they've funded? I don't know either, but all their financial reports are online if you want to dig through. While you're at it, you can do a search for "teacher quality" on their website and get some useful reports. However, their pet MET (Methods of Effective Teaching) project is intertwined with recent teacher quality reports.
At least the Washington Examiner in their "Teacher Quality Study Ranks NY 13th Among States" article was nice enough to lead readers to the National Council of Teacher Quality website with a link at the end of the article. However, as an article in the magazine Governing points out, data is too often collected, but not shared.
Let's start with the National Council of Teacher Quality. Their purpose is to increase the number of effective teachers, and they are "committed to lending transparency and increasing public awareness about the four sets of institutions that have the greatest impact on teacher quality: states, teacher preparation programs, school districts and teachers unions" without partisanship getting in the way. There's about 50 different agencies that fund the Council. This is the organization that the press is getting data from.
The 2011 State Teacher Policy Yearbook has all the juicy data on why NY is 13th and how states have failed to make much progress. The National Council of Teachers seem to like the letter "C." It's safe. It's average. It's the grade most states (teachers) got. I bet Tennessee is loving the fact its at the top of the list and New York isn't. This Yearbook report is the report that all the Teacher Quality bashing articles floating around this mid-January 2012 are referring to. My beef? (Sorry vegetarian daughters.) My beef is that this report is on teacher quality inclusive of school and state policy changes, yet the headlines floating around tout teacher quality, with little or no mention of the extreme impact that school policies have on the final grade for teacher quality. Kids get misjudged by things that aren't seen all the time too, so I do feel for the teachers and states. And that is why it is so important that we know WHERE these "grades" for teacher quality are coming from when we start reading headlines about teacher quality. At least then you're armed with information on why these headlines and studies are a farce.
A very helpful tool on the Teacher Quality Council website is a place where You can build a custom report based on state, district, poverty levels, unions and bargaining, tenure, and all kinds of neat little variables.
Now let's look at the Data Quality Campaign and see what they have to offer for Teacher Quality statistics. Their purpose is to use the data to promote student achievement, and they have a strong focus on longitudinal studies. Their list of funding sources isn't as long as the Council on Teacher Quality, but Pew Research and the Gates are involved. You'll find charts that show which states are using the data they have, and which aren't and lots of suggestions on how data can and should be used. If you're interested in data implementation, data warehouses, and data coordinating efforts, then you'll be interested in the Data Quality Campaign website. But, if you just want straight-forward teacher quality information, you can skip the Quality Campaign website. Going to the Gates' foundation College Ready Education topic page gives you links to more useful teacher quality articles pdf style.
If you're bored, you can always sift through Ed.gov's website results for "teacher quality", or the results from the search engine on this blog (which I'm currently updating). The National Education Association has almost 30,000 results for teacher quality, but Ed Week had a sparse showing of articles in a search for teacher quality, the articles were even sparser for the search term at the Association for American Educators' website.
The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality reports itself as a national resource for data with a goal to help the schools with the highest poverty rates and lowest performance rate. They have a database on State Teacher Evaluation Policies ,a bunch of interactive tools for evaluation that some of you might find useful, and what looks like to be a nice research library for data and research.
Of course, all this data and research is for the grants. It's always nice to read an article about small-town grant winners from Teacher Quality programs like those in Cleveland, TN who can now forge ahead in biotech. But more common are the articles bemoaning teacher quality. NBC's article on New York's faring in the quality test states that no state got an A. Doesn't that say something about the teacher?
Posted by Statistics to Share at 11:37 AM 1 comments
Labels: Data, Education, Graphs and Charts, New York, Reports, Research, States, Statistics, Students, Teachers, Tennessee
Suicide. Fortunately, what prompted me to write this post is not a family suicide, nor the fact that I haven't written on this blog in a couple years, but rather my daughter's venting about her suicide training during Resident Assistant training at college. (We were laughing at instances of being trained to do the obvious. For instance, call 911 if you see someone unconscious on the floor. Really? And I thought they were supposed to hide the body under the bed.)
Suicide training started with the 2004 Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act which is again facing Congress. This is the government's attempt to to support and enhance suicide prevention efforts in colleges and universities. We all know how the government works. Hence, the increase in suicides. Northwest Missouri University has an older paper addressing suicide training, and it's worth reading if you're delving into suicide research.
Regardless of our jokes about suicide training and training programs in general, my daughter and I have both known people who have tried to kill themselves, and we've known people who have committed suicide. I was going to do a post on suicide statistics - way too much information. Thought I'd narrow down the topic to suicide statistics in the US and then do another post about international statistics. Way too much information. Seeing as I had one son graduate from college this year, another daughter start college this year, and my daughter who was suicidal about her suicide training is a junior this year, it's appropriate to narrow it down to suicide and college kids, or teens, or whatever this evolves into.
If you need quick International Statistics, the 2011 US Census Report has 2006 suicide statistics on this pdf file - Korea and Hungary have the highest rates (much higher for men in both countries), and Greece has the lowest. In the US, more women commit suicide than men, and statistically speaking the US is somewhere in the middle. (Technical huh?) There's a multitude of more indepth statistics out there - you can use the search engine on my blog to search World Health Organization and all those great places. Everyone else can continue reading.
Back to the US. The (one of many) Official 2007 Statistics on Mortality is on the National Vital Statistics Report of 2007, Volume 58, Number 19. If you're looking for any statistics on death, this report is a good place to look. Suicide is listed as the 11th most common cause of death. (Technically, it's "intentional self-harm" - although I've read that intentional self-harm without death is technically not considered a suicide attempt. Wonder if the Emo generation changed that.)
Here's an interesting statistic - according to the above report, there are more suicides then there are murders. Homicide comes in at number 15. That does surprise me. When you bring race into the death rates, it turns out that blacks are far more likely to die from homicide, but whites are far more likely than blacks to die from suicide (If you're white, your chance of dying from suicide is twice as high as it would be if you were black.)
So what about guns? Here's what the report says:
Firearm suicide at 55.6 percent and homicide at 40.5 percent were the two major component causes of all firearm injury deaths in 2007.
The death rate for suicide has decreased slightly from a high of 13.7 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 1977 to a low of 10.4 in 2000.
Since 2000, the age adjusted death rate for suicide has increased by 8.7 percent [emphasis added].
The official decline in the suicide rate between 1987 and 2000 may have been a partial artifact of misclassification of non-elderly suicides within unintentional poisoning mortality. We recommend in-depth national, regional, and local population-based research investigations of the poisoning-suicide nexus, and endorse calls for widening the scope of the definition of suicide and evaluation of its risk factors.
In 2004, hanging/suffocation was the most common method among females in all three age groups, accounting for 71.4% of suicides in the group aged 10--14 years, 49% in the group aged 15--19 years, and 34.2% in the group aged 20--24 years.
In addition, from 2003 to 2004, hanging/suffocation suicide rates among females aged 10--14 and 15--19 years increased by 119.4% (from 0.31 to 0.68 per 100,000 persons) and 43.5% (from 1.24 to 1.78), respectively [emphasis added].
Among young adults ages 15 to 24 years old, there are approximately 100-200 attempts for every completed suicide.
Posted by Statistics to Share at 9:04 PM 0 comments
Labels: College, deaths, Government, Graphs and Charts, States, Statistics, Students, Suicide, Teens, US, Vital Statistics
Though I wasn't planning on doing another post on asbestos statistics, a writer named Taylor Dardan asked me to do a guest post on mesothelioma. Taylor made the interesting correlation in the essay between America's success in keeping mesothelioma cancer rates down by regulating asbestos, and the domino effect of lowering public recognition of this asbestos-related disease. If America's awareness is lowered, it follows that international awareness of the correlation between asbestos and health will suffer as well. Canada is considering reopening a mine over one of the world's largest known asbestos deposits. Canada exports to India - where mesothelioma cancer rates are inordinately high. We live in a global world, and as Americans, we can make our fellow citizens and international friends aware that asbestos is deadly.
Alarming Statistics on Asbestos Exposure
by Taylor Darden
In America, people are used to seeing eye-popping statistics on the number of cancer diagnoses for the more "popular" cancers. For example, most people are at least vaguely aware that about one in eight women (12%) will develop invasive breast cancer. They may be aware that over one-hundred and fifty thousand people died of lung cancer in 2007 (the most recent year the numbers were available). Or, that more people died of lung cancer in America than any other cancer. However the statistics on supposedly rare cancers like mesothelioma have far less recognition by the general public.
Partially, this is because American statistics on mesothelioma are not considerably shocking. Only about three thousand cases are diagnosed each year. The majority of those cases occur in people between the ages of fifty and seventy, and nearly a third occur in veterans. Because it is rare, it is often overlooked or ignored. In terms of statistical awareness, mesothelioma is a forgotten cancer.
However, the statistics on worldwide mesothelioma cancer rates paints a strikingly different picture. The number of mesothelioma diagnoses sky rockets to over one-hundred thousand a year. As most of these cases are diagnosed in third-world countries, it’s likely the figures are highly understated. Combined with the extremely low mesothelioma survival rate (most patients survive only twelve to fourteen months after their initial diagnosis), it’s clear that mesothelioma deserves far more attention than it currently receives.
But even these statistics understate the truly alarming statistics about mesothelioma. The fact is, mesothelioma could be far lower. Mesothelimoa is a result of asbestos exposure. In fact, the rate of mesothelioma diagnosis in America is so low because asbestos use is heavily regulated, as it is throughout most developed countries. However, even developed countries such as Canada continue to export thousands of tons of asbestos - despite knowing the deadly consequences.
Canada exports nearly two-hundred thousand tons of asbestos a year to third-world countries such as India, where health and safety regulations are lax, and a staggering portion of the mesothelioma diagnoses are made each year. Even worse, Canadians plan on reopening the Jeffrey Mine, which sits atop the world’s largest deposit of asbestos, and has already produced over one-hundred and fifty thousand tons of asbestos since 2006 by itself. The Canadian government is currently debating propping up the Jeffrey Mine, which sits atop the world’s largest asbestos deposit, with a $58 million dollar loan that should allow it to export over two-hundred tons of asbestos each day at the request of the mine’s owner G. Bernard Coulombe.
Coulombe’s strategy is to reinvent the small Quebec town Asbestos, named after the mineral during its boom days in the mid 20th century, where the Jeffrey Mine is located by reopening the mine and selling the deadly material to India, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Quebec, which is part of the mineral’s part of its mining history still advocated its use and insists, against the words of the WHO and all international experts, that asbestos is safe. Despite this, asbestos use is heavily regulated in Quebec, as well as the rest of Canada.
The wide gap in the statistics between mesothelioma occurrences in America and worldwide demonstrate our ability to effectively prevent the cancer- but it requires far more attention and awareness than it is currently receiving. Ironically the mundane quality of the statistics in America may to be blame for this, even as they provide a textbook case for why the worldwide numbers are so alarming.
Posted by Statistics to Share at 10:09 AM 0 comments
Labels: Asbestos, Cancer, deaths, India, International, Medical and Health, Mesothelioma, Statistics, US
Teenage pregnancy statistics seem to be in demand according to my blog stats. By looking at my teens' friends' profiles, I can see that teenage pregnancies are no longer an uncommon occurrence, and hearing that a teen friend is pregnant is no longer shocking news.
I've been wanting to post some recent statistics on teenage pregnancy since I wrote my short blog post on Sex and the City and Teen Pregnancies but got sidetracked by life (certainly not by sex or TV). I recalled reading that teen pregnancies were on a steady decline, yet over the last year it seemed as if my teens had more friends than usual displaying pregnant teenage bellies on MySpace or Facebook. Both of my teen daughters' cell phones have adorable pictures of newborn babies sent to them from a new teen mom, and it isn't highly unusual for a group of teens to have a sleepover at a hospital to support a teenage laboring (or false-laboring) friend. My kids tell me who's been pregnant, who's had an abortion (or two or three) and have pretty much informed me that they are the only virgins in the world.
When my 20-somethings were in high school, there were teen pregnancies here and there, but it certainly seems as if I hear more about them now. Are more teens having babies or is the world of social media just increasing awareness? Statistics show that more teens are having babies, but they still aren't at the percentages of live births that prevailed in the 90's . From 1991 to 2005, teen pregnancies were consistently declining. A large Center for Disease Control report shows that abortion rates overall were declining, however teenage abortion statistics fluctuated.
Then came the news - 2006 and 2007 statistics showing that teenage pregnancies and live births were on the rise.
Childtrends.org has an easy to read 2008 pdf file with statistics and tables on teen births by year, state and even city. Although the recent small increases are relighting a fire underneath sex education, as Childtrends.org explains:
Despite the recent increase, the overall 2006 teen birth rate was 32% lower than the recent peak rate of 61.8 in 1991 and 12% lower than the 2000 rate of 47.7.
...between 2000 and 2006, the annual number of births to teen females has declined by 7%.
Year % Births to Under 20 years of age
1993 12.8
1994 13.1
1995 13.1
1996 12.9
1997 12.7
1998 12.5
1999 12.3
2000 11.8
2001 11.3
2002 10.8
2003 10.3
2004 10.3
2005 10.2
2006 10.4
Teen pregnancy rates in the United States are higher than most of the industrialized world with 31% of all teenage girls getting pregnant at least once before they reach age 20. This results in 750,000 teen pregnancies a year. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, between 2005 and 2006, births to teens rose by 20,834 for a total of 435,427 live births to children and teens between the ages 10 and 19 years of age - the first increase in 15 years.
About 760,000 teens become pregnant each year; 80% of those pregnancies are unintended and nearly one-third end in abortions.
According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the preliminary birth rate for U.S. teenagers 15–19 years rose 3 percent between 2005 and 2006, the first increase reported since 1991. Three in ten teen girls become pregnant by age 20 and most of these pregnancies are unintended. Additionally one-quarter of teen parents have a second child before they turn 20.
After increasing 23% overall from 1986 to a peak in 1991 and then decreasing 34% by 2005, the birth rate for teens aged 15--19 years increased 5% from 2005 to 2007. Most of this increase occurred in 2006. Increases in birth rates from 2005 to 2007 for teens aged 18--19 years were slightly larger than the increases for teens aged 15--17 years.
The birth rate for U.S. teenagers 15–19 years rose again in 2007 by about 1 percent, to 42.5 births per 1,000. The birth rate for teenagers 15–17 and 18–19 years each increased by 1 percent in 2007, to 22.2 and 73.9 per 1,000, respectively. The rate for the youngest group, 10–14 years, was unchanged. Birth rates also increased for women in their twenties, thirties, and early forties between 2006 and 2007. The 2007 total fertility rate increased to 2,122.5 births per 1,000 women. All measures of childbearing by unmarried women rose to historic levels in 2007, with the number of births, birth rate, and proportion of births to unmarried women increasing 3 to 5 percent.
Between 1990 and 2002 almost 137,000 of these young mothers delivered a live birth. This number has declined steadily from a peak of 12,901 in 1994, to the current low of 7,315. If the 1990 rate had held through 2002, there would have been 34,336 additional births to the youngest teens. The 43 percent decline in the number of births occurred despite the 16 percent rise in the female population aged 10-14 years.
About two-fifths of the pregnancies among 10–14 year olds in 2000 ended in a live birth, two-fifths ended in induced abortion, and about one in six ended in a fetal loss (28). These proportions have been fairly stable since 1976, when this series of national pregnancy estimates was inaugurated.
Among teenagers (under 20 years), only the rate for the youngest group, 10–14 years, was unchanged, at 0.6 births per 1,000. The number of births to this age group fell 3 percent, reflecting the declining number of females aged 10–14 years.
In 2005, 820,151 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. This total represents a 2.3% decrease from the 839,226 abortions reported for 2004. The abortion ratio for 2005 decreased since 2004. The ratio was 233 legal induced abortions per 1,000 live births in 2005. In 2005, the abortion rate was 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years of age, the same since 2000. For the same 46 reporting areas, the abortion rate remained relatively constant during 1998–2005.Their 36 page pdf report, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Abortion Surveillance United States 2005, published in November 2008, reports as follows:
A total of 820,151 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC for 2005 from 49 reporting areas, the abortion ratio (number of abortions per 1,000 live births) was 233, and the abortion rate was 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years. For the 46 reporting areas that have consistently reported since 1995, the abortion rate declined during 1995–2000 but has remained unchanged since 2000..
For 2005, the highest percentages of reported abortions were for women who were known to be unmarried (81%), white (53%), and aged 25 years (50%).
For the 46 reporting areas that have consistently reported since 1995, the number of abortions has steadily declined over the previous 10 years. The abortion rate declined from 1995 to 2000, but remained unchanged since 2000. In 2004, as in the previous years, deaths related to legal induced abortions occurred rarely.
The abortion ratios by state or area of occurrence ranged from 48 per 1,000 live births in Idaho to 756 per 1,000 in NYC. Among women aged 15–44 years, rates by occurrence ranged from four per 1,000 women in Idaho to 30 per 1,000 in New York State.
Women known to be aged 20–24 years obtained 33% of all abortions for which age was adequately reported. Adolescents aged under 15 years obtained less than 1.0% of all abortions in the 48 areas that reported age.
Statistics on Legal Abortions:(Ugh, tables aren't working...)
Year Total Abortions % under 19 years old
1995 1210883 20.1
1996 1225937 20.3
1997 1186039 20.1
1998 884273 19.8
1999 861789 19.2
2000 857475 18.8
2001 853485 18.1
2002 854122 17.5
2003 848163 17.4
2004 839226 17.4
2005 820151 17.1
Posted by Statistics to Share at 1:05 PM 2 comments
Car accident statistics seemed like a good topic to post since my two teens are in the midst of getting their driver's licenses and their first (very used) cars. On top of that, my latest writing assignment was coincidentally on car insurance - just as I was panicking over how high my car insurance rates will rise once they're both on my policy. Fortunately, I have stayed alive to write this post even through their first bout of city driving.
Just to warn everyone - there's going to be a couple more women drivers on the road. Statistically speaking, despite slanderous jargon about women drivers (mostly from my father), people should be grateful that these two new drivers are women and not men. Even recent 2007 fatality statistics by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows that men are the drivers in the high majority of fatal accidents. The Institute's 2007 Fact Sheet has charts demonstrating fatal accident and gender statistics from 1975 to 2007.
Of course, the Center for Disease Control's Teen Driver Fact Sheet's mention of car accidents being the number one reason for teenage deaths in the US doesn't help me sleep well at night when my teens are out with their friends. But within these teenage statistics from the CDC is the data that teen female drivers between the ages of 16 and 19 are far less likely to die than their male friends. The CDC looks like they also have some interactive statistics and mapping toys that can be used to investigate car accident statistics.
Personally, if I were to compare my older boys with my two teen girls and their driving style, I have one in each gender that is very cautious and rule abiding, and I also have on in each gender that is over-confident about their driving abilities. Over-confidence can be a killer, but it is probably not as deadly as alcohol. (However, that's debatable. We haven't mastered measuring car accidents due to over-confidence yet.)
Men are responsible for the majority of alcohol realted deaths. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in their gender report states the difference:
From 1982 to 2007, the proportion of fatally injured passenger vehicle drivers with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) at or above 0.08 percent declined by 29 percent among males and 37 percent among females. Since 1985 the percentage of fatally injured male drivers with high BACs has been about twice that of female drivers.
Posted by Statistics to Share at 6:11 PM 7 comments
Labels: Accidents, Africa, Car, China, Collisions, Crashes, Crime, Data, deaths, Europe, Government, Graphs and Charts, International, Legal, Medical and Health, New York, Research, Road, Safety, States, Statistics, Swivel, Teens, Traffic, Transportation, Travel, UK, US, Vital Statistics
Foreclosure news is getting tiring, but since I'm joining the ranks of people with their houses in foreclosure and I haven't written in a while, I thought I'd throw up a post on foreclosure statistics to help those who are looking to find the latest foreclosure statistics. Personally, I'm just sick of reading about and dealing with foreclosure news and information. On top of my own foreclosure, I've had a few assignments writing articles on foreclosure and bankruptcy. No pity for me though, I'm looking forward to moving, my house is falling apart, and the house is in my ex-husband's name whom I haven't seen in four years. It'll be a weather shock though - we're planning on moving from NY to the Tri-cities area in TN. I'll be positioned right in the middle of my kids in PA, VA and NC. I'm tired of fighting winter and I have a low-tolerance for the cold, so I'll appreciate the above-zero no-shoveling-or-getting-stuck-in-the-driveway winters.
If you're looking for NY courts, forms and regulations, try the New York State Unified Court System website, and their page with a couple new 2008 foreclosure regulations. You can also find lots of court forms needed for foreclosure proceedings at the NY Bar Association website. A NY Times May 2009 article stated foreclosures are happening now more than ever in NY, so I don't feel all alone. The article has some easy to refer to charts and statistics as well. CNN reported that California is suffering from the most foreclosures, and also brought to light that the children suffer as a result of unexpected and financially difficult moves. Even as a mother of six, I hadn't given thought to the great impact foreclosure has on young children. Perhaps because my kids are going off to college anyhow (4 down, 2 to go), and the remaining two and I are looking forward to moving. I do think the effects of foreclosure on children is a topic that definitely deserves more attention, and likely more study.
Statehealth.org has foreclosure ranks and percentage changes by state. Virginia University has a 2009 report ccomparing foreclosure and housing statistics between states and metro areas. The Center for Housing Policy, a partner of the National Housing Conference, has a comprehensive state and metro comparison, drop down search option for statistics by metro area on their "Paycheck to Paycheck" analysis, and a list of housing and foreclosure reports.
If you need Federal data and statistics on foreclosure, the Federal Reserve Board has foreclosure maps and foreclosure trends, as well as a dedicated area for foreclosure resources. Docuticker is a "ticker" website of updated government news, and has updates of the latest foreclosure news from government agencies. You can always review the latest foreclosure search results from the White House website, or US Treasury search results on foreclosure,. The FDIC has some random foreclosure statistics, and if you want to browse through some 2009 foreclosure statistics in pdf files you can take a look at the FDIC's foreclosure search results. If you're looking for information on the banking industry, the FDIC also has links to banking data and statistics (obviously). The FDIC has a quarterly report in pdf form that you can view for 2009 statistics.
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) gets quoted a lot in the news, but they don't have a lot of free statistics on their website. However, the Research Institute of Housing America (RIHA) is a trust 501(c) under the Mortgage Bankers Association, and is a good source for mortgage and housing data. You can also find the latest foreclosure statistics in news articles from websites like Market Watch.
Having a blog post on foreclosure statistics would be incomplete without mentioning HUD. First of all, they have datasets from the oft-referred to yearly American Housing Survey. HUD also has a research link with some housing data and statistics, and an "online library" to pursue HUD related topics a little further.
If you've gone to Realty Trac, take a look at this recent article examining the accuracy of foreclosure statistics reported by Realty Trac. I just found the Foreclosure Industry website, and it looks like it's keeping up with current foreclosure statistics, and the "Loan Audit" blog that is keeping up with mortgage and housing news.
You'll also find more data and recent news on foreclosure from a search result at the search engine in my blog.
For anyone wanting some legal resources on affirmative defenses to foreclosure, or just general legal information on foreclosure, I found the "Foreclosure Defense Group" website helpful, and I believe I used information from the Patriot's War website (although it was on their old website, they have a lot of info on their new one). NOLO is a publisher of legal books and their website is to promote their products, but they have a lot of links to free information, and I've often found their website very helpful in the beginning stages of research. They also have a useful page dedicated to foreclosure information and proceedings. You can also take a look at Kenneth M DeLashmutt's very nice article which includes easy to understand steps and defenses as well as a few case citations and useful foreclosure links. The Preventing Foreclosure blog has useful information, foreclosure defenses, and forms. If you haven't paid a visit to Scribd, they have tons of documents that people have uploaded to search. Try the search results for foreclosure or foreclosure affirmative defenses. There's also the Foreclosure Defense Nationwide blog with case citations and quotes from court foreclosure filings.
Above all, if you know someone who has received a Summons and Complaint for a foreclosure, make sure they serve their legal Answer within 20 days, even if it's "pro se." It will stall the foreclosure for months, and they'll have time to either get an attorney, look into loan modification, arbitration and settlement opportunities, deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, short sales, bankruptcy, and other prevention strategies and foreclosure options, or even wait for upcoming help for homeowners. There's a lot out there, and if you serve an Answer in time, you'll have time to review those options. Shoot me an email at getanswerserved at gmail dot com if you need some help typing up an answer to serve "pro se" and can't afford an attorney.
Well, I'm still sick of reading about foreclosure but they're not going away any time soon. I know there are thousands of other resources out there, unfortunately I wasn't able to pinpoint them all. I'll keep updating my blog's search engine so you can always check for more foreclosure statistics.
It's time for me to pack up now (pathetic pun intended)...happy statistics hunting or happy house hunting!
P.S. How could I forget my dear friend Swivel? Don't forget to check out foreclosure statistics, graphs and charts created by the Swivel community!
Posted by Statistics to Share at 1:17 PM 2 comments
Labels: Community, Data, Economic, Foreclosure, Government, Graphs and Charts, Legal, New York, Research, State, Statistics, Swivel, US
I'm back from my four week hiatus away from civilization. My satellite contract had to be renewed, and to make a long story short, I evaluated other Internet options, none of which were financially feasible, then the satellite dish had to be repositioned to find reception amongst towering trees. It took a few days on the phone (being transferred a zillion times) to a tech person in India (who didn't quite understand how tall the trees actually were) to get the job done. (I thought my addiction to coffee was bad...try not having information at your fingertips for a month!) Well now that I've vented...how about that 2009 OECD report?
Couldn't help but click on the Yahoo news feature comparing the eating and sleeping habits between US and France. Live Science had their take on the international OECD report as well, and included a chart with comparisons of sleeping habits between the 18 countries included in the report.
This not-talked-about-enough report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had a lot more information than just sleeping and eating habits. It stated some common knowledge, like the fact that men have more leisure time than women. (Women certainly don't need statistics to prove it!) But aside from eating, sleeping and leisure time, you'll find data on unemployment, poverty, social and health issues, inequality, demographics and work and life.
These sleeping, eating, and men-have-more-fun-than women statistics came from the OECD's "Society at a Glance 2009 - OECD Social Indicators" report. They have a link for the data and indicators included in this report, but they do indicate there is some privileged information for accredited journalists. (C'mon hackers - help us bloggers out!) I don't know why us lowly bloggers aren't good enough to accumulate a little extra knowledge ($$ comes to mind), but I have to admit there are a lot of nice free statistics in this progress report. They do come in the awkward form of .pdf and .xls files for separate chapters, but the data is useful nonetheless. The data and indicators included are divided into data groups as follows:
1. Headline Social Indicators
2. Measuring Leisure in OECD Countries
3. Interpreting OECD Social Indicators
4. General Context Indicators
Net national income per capita
Fertility rates
Migration
Marriage and divorce
5. Self-sufficiency Indicators
Employment
Unemployment
Childcare
Student performance
Not in employment, education or training
Age of labour force exit
Spending on education
6. Equity Indicators:
Income inequality
Poverty
Poverty among children
Adequacy of benefits of last resort
Public social spending
Total social spending
7. Health Indicators
Life expectancy
Perceived health status
Infant health
Obesity
Height
Mental health
Long-term care recipients
Health care expenditure
8. Social Cohesion Indicators
Life satisfaction
Work satisfaction
Crime victimisation
Suicides
Bullying
Risky behaviour
Posted by Statistics to Share at 7:43 PM 1 comments
Labels: Africa, China, Data, Economic, Education, Europe, Food, France, International, Medical and Health, Poverty, Research, Statistics, Sweden, TV, US
Planes flying over our house are suddenly becoming eerie. Two months ago I did a post on plane crash statistics because my eight year old had a fear of a plane falling on our house. (We get a lot of small town planes flying overhead.) I felt lucky because a month went by without a single night of her praying that a plane didn't crash on our house.
Then we had a wind storm. Electric went out. Kids didn't have school because there was no electricity. She prayed that night for a plane not to crash on our house. It gave me the chills too because it was horribly windy outside. The next night, I'm writing away and get a CNN alert that a plane crashed in Buffalo - a mile from my dad's house. The Buffalo plane crash of Continental Flight 3407 was little too close for comfort. I was shocked as I followed the story on CNN and couldn't pull myself away.
Turns out one of the girls on the Buffalo Plane that crashed, 19 year old Beth Kushner on Flight 3407, went to school with my son in Eden, New York, and Joe and Beth both used to live in Angola, NY. He has a beautiful picture of her on his blog. Just looking at this smiling picture of this promising young happy girl and imagining what she went through, and what her relatives must be going through makes me want to cry. My son nor I knew Beth. I can only imagine the sorrow her family must feel. What if it was my daughter flying home from college? What if that was my 19 year old son? What if the plane had gone a mile further and landed on my father's house? And then there's always the question - how could God let this happen?
I reason that he doesn't. It's man's plane. Man's mechanics. We are not puppets. So where are the angels and where are the miracles? I just hope that the crash had such a great impact that none of them experienced any pain. I've been unconscious before, and I know when you're out - you're out. You feel nothing. I hope that's what they felt. People burning in Australian wildfires and burning planes are too much to bear thinking about.
Does anyone else find it ironic that Continental's airline magazine has this quote on the airline magazine's front page (advertising Manhattan):
"All free, all moments that stick in the memory, and all in New York"
The crew of the Bombardier Q400 that crashed in Buffalo on Thursday got a stall warning and the stick pusher engaged but still the aircraft pitched upward 31 degrees before turning almost 180 degrees and dropping onto a house in the Buffalo suburb of Clarence Center, near the outer marker for Buffalo Niagara International Airport. The sequence of events, which included a 45-degree dive with a 106-degree right bank ended 26 seconds later in the fireball on the ground, killing 49 people on the plane and one on the ground, the owner of the house. Although icing continues as a theme in the investigation, reporters were told at an NTSB press briefing on Sunday that the aircraft's anti-icing system had been on for most of the flight and, while both pilots discussed the "significant" icing their aircraft was experiencing, at no time did they use the "severe icing" descriptor that is the official notification of flight-threatening buildup. "We don't know that it was severe icing," NTSB member Steve Chealander told reporters. "They [the crew] didn't say that it was severe icing....The weatherman didn't say that it was severe icing."
Posted by Statistics to Share at 6:29 PM 3 comments
Labels: Accidents, Airplane Magazines, Airplanes, Aviation, Buffalo, Collisions, Continental, Crashes, Data, deaths, Disasters, Government, History, International, Medical and Health, Musicians, New York, Plane, Research, Sports, Traffic, Transportation, Travel
© Blogger template 'Tranquility' by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP