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Significant Digits
Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017
By Walt Hickey
5 to 6 points
Three new polls out this week show that Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate linked to allegations of child molestation and sexual misconduct, is up 5 to 6 points with just a few weeks to go in the election. [FiveThirtyEight]
9 body parts no longer considered to be from yetis
A study of nine samples — hair and teeth mainly — that were said to be from yetis has shown that most of them were from bears, instead. Only one sample wasn’t — but that was from a dog. Honestly it must have been an impressive canine specimen if the pup was confused with at best an abominable snowman and at worst a dang bear. [The Guardian]
57 percent
That’s the percentage of submitted net-neutrality feedback to the FCC that contained false, duplicate or temporary email addresses, casting doubt on their credibility. Moreover, on 9 different occasions, over 75,000 comments were sent to the FCC all at once. Most of them were highly similar or identical. The seven most-submitted comments made up a whopping 38 percent of submissions, and six of them were anti-net neutrality. Gosh, getting a real inkling that some of those letters may not be bona fide. [Pew Research Center]
15,000 flights
A scheduling error that allowed too many American Airlines pilots to take a late December vacation means that over 15,000 flights in late December do not have sufficient crew to fly. American is trying to pay time and a half to convince pilots to come into work during their vacation so that they don’t have to scrub flights during the holiday travel season. [Bloomberg]
$1.25 billion
Firing Matt Lauer from “Today” after allegations of harassment shakes up the largest franchise in American morning TV. “Today,” “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” brought in $1.25 billion in 2016 in advertising revenue. “Today” is especially big business. It made around $508.8 million in its first two hours alone. [Variety]
$3.1 billion
Electronic Arts botched the rollout of its new game, “Star Wars Battlefront II,” by overloading it with pay-to-play features. This has angered nerds, and Wall Street took notice, sending its stock down 8.5 percent in November through Tuesday. Screwing up a Star Wars game wiped out $3.1 billion in shareholder value, which is frankly impressive, especially given that the whole of Lucasfilm sold to Disney for about $4 billion. [CNBC]