Chance News 51

Quotation

Passion is invrsely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Gregory Benford, Timescape, 1980

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Re the “attitudes and prejudices of the famous philosophers” in Chance News 49, a 1924 Virginia sterilization law (repealed in 1976) was uphold by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. writing the majority opinion.

“This woman [Carrie Bell] got railroaded. And one of the giants of the Supreme Court was driving the train.”

Paul Lombardo, quoted in “Terrible legacy of U.S. eugenics” , USA TODAY, June 24, 2009

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Credit utilization ratio

“Is Your Credit Too Good? Why lenders are punishing those who borrow too little and always pay on time”, by Cybele Weisser, TIME, June 22, 2009

[T]he formula for determining credit scores … looks at something called your “utilization ratio,” the total amount of credit you use vs. the amount you have available. If you have $25,000 worth of available credit and you put $5,000 on your cards every month, your utilization ratio is a healthy … 20%. But cut down that credit line to $10,000 and suddenly your ratio jumps to 50%, making you look pretty overextended.

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Measuring excess risk

“EPA study: 2.2M live in areas where air poses cancer risk”
by Brad Heath and Blake Morrison, USA TODAY, June 24, 2009

This article gives a brief report about the National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment for 2002 , an EPA study of excess cancer risks from breathing 181 air toxics over an assumed lifetime of 70 years. The EPA updates information about air toxics emissions every three years, after which it conducts an analysis which is reviewed by the states, evaluated for accuracy, and released - apparently a long process.
According to the EPA, the study found 2 million people with an increased cancer risk of greater than 100 in 1 million.
According to the article, the study found air pollution to be a health threat “around major cities … although some of the counties where the air was even worse were in rural areas ….” The worst neighborhood was outside Los Angeles, where the estimated excess cancer risk was “more than 1,200 in 1 million, 34 times the national average.” The article provided no information about rural areas; however, the EPA provides a map (scroll to bottom of web page).

[1] Discussion
1. How might one measure cancer risk?
2. What does it mean to measure excess, or increased, cancer risk?
3. Why does the EPA measure excess risk over a lifetime? How do you think they identified people who had lived in a region over a lifetime? Would the fact that air pollution levels might change over a lifetime affect any aspect of the study?
4. Estimate the national average excess cancer risk. Is it higher or lower than the EPA’s ceiling of 100 in 1 million? Do you think it makes sense to refer to a national average of excess cancer risk?
5. See the map of county data. Are you surprised about any locales? If so, can you find any potential reason for excess cancer risk in those locales?
Submitted by Margaret Cibes

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