12-12-2016, 01:40 PM
Quote:In September of 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed showed up to his high school with a clock he’d made himself. A science nerd who loved to tinker, he brought in the clock and got some praise from his engineering teacher. But later that day, when the clock beeped in English class, school officials thought it was a bomb and called police, who arrested him. It seemed clear that Ahmed, who is Muslim and whose father immigrated to the US from Sudan, was being targeted for his ethnicity or religion—hard to imagine teachers responding to a homemade electronic device with such panic if the boy who brought it in was named Tommy instead of Ahmed. By now, that story of Ahmed and his clock is famous. In a photo that went immediately viral, Ahmed looks the consummate geek, a skinny kid in glasses and NASA t-shirt—but he is also scared and handcuffed.Who Gets to Be a Science Nerd? | New Republic
Quote:The figure below shows just how dramatic these changes have been. In 1970, the US had 52,000 fatalities compared to 102,000 in 16 other peer countries that, collectively, had a combined population 70 percent higher than that of the US. By 2012, the number of fatalities in the USA had fallen to 33,500, largely due to improvements in health care, emergency response, and vehicle technology. In comparison, the total in those same 16 countries fell to just 24,500.Why America’s roads are so much more dangerous than Europe's - Vox
As a result, we now have traffic fatality rates per person that are three to four times greater than those in the best-performing peer countries — including Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands.