Numbers in context

I’ll be writing about the City Council meeting tomorrow, in case any one was wondering.   But in the meantime, I wanted to talk about yet another post from Denise Lai’s Raising Hell for Good.   I had made a promise to myself that I would be leaving that site alone for a while, but one of last week’s posts had bothered me all weekend that I felt as though I need to clear up some of the information that was presented as “facts” in the actual piece.

So, first she kicks off the post with a premise glommed from Alameda County Food Bank’s website that, generally speaking, one in six people rely on food banks and of that number half are children.   She then goes through the process of calculating how that would relate in Alameda city numbers:

1/6 x 70,000 = 11,800, 11,800/2 = 5,900, and 5,900 = 38% of the 15,576 children in our city.

And surmising that:

Extrapolating for our city, likely conservative numbers for the West End, we are looking at a full 38% of our children relying on the food bank for survival.

Hodgepodge

When I was young I was a big fan of Jeopardy, their Hodgepodge category was always a mystery because it always seemed to have a lot of misc “Potent Potables” answers in it every time I watched.

Here is a hodgepodge of Alameda related items.  

First off, good news for beach goers, the group Heal the Bay has done its annual study of California beaches and there few worries for Alameda beaches.   Check out the scores:

Beach	AB411 (April – Oct.)	Dry Year-round	Wet Year-round
Alameda Point North	A	A	A+
Alameda Point South	A	A	A+
Crown Beach Bath House	A	C	A+
Crown Beach Windsurfer Corner	A	A	A+
Crown Beach Sunset Rd.	A+	A	A
Crown Beach 2001 Shoreline Dr.	A	A	A+
Crown Beach Bird Sanctuary	A	A	B