TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
PROBLEM: "The New England Patriots might wish this entire business of under-inflated footballs would vanish in a puff of smoke, but it’s a boon for physics teachers who have found themselves suddenly relevant in the world of sports. Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a self-declared non-scientist, held a pre-Super Bowl news conference where he attempted to explain why a football inflated indoors would lose pressure after being used outside. ""When the footballs are delivered to the officials' locker room, the officials were asked to inflate them to 12.5 pounds per square inch. What exactly they did, I don’t know,"" Belichick said. ""When the footballs go out on to the field into game conditions ...  That’s where the measurements would be different than what they are, possibly different, than what they are in a controlled environment."" Belichick said when Patriot staffers tested this, they found that the balls ""were down approximately one-and-a-half pounds per square inch."" There are too many unknowns to resolve Deflategate, as this flap is called. But we couldn't help but give Belichick's main assertion the PunditFact treatment. The question in this case is what physics tells us about Belichick’s point. Could conditions outside (basically temperature and humidity) bring down the pressure of a football by about 1.5 pounds per square inch? A quick recap The Patriots advanced to the Super Bowl on Jan. 18, 2015, by defeating the Indianapolis Colts 45-7. But by the next day, the most interesting number wasn’t the point spread, but the inflation pressure of the Patriots’ footballs. Under NFL rules, each team provides 12 balls, and about two hours before the game, an official verifies that they are inflated to the regulation pressure range of 12.5 to 13.5 pounds per square inch. At half-time, the NFL re-checked the Patriots’ footballs -- reportedly at the request of the Colts but there’s a bit of conflicting information on this -- and found 11 of the 12 were under inflated. By how much? That’s unclear. Some reports say by 2 pounds per square inch. Others say while one ball might have measured that low, the rest were only about 1 pound under. One other essential variable: The temperature on game day was around 50 degrees. No one knows the exact inside temperature. Most people assume it was about 70 degrees. Doing the math After Belichick spoke, ABC News turned to Bill Nye, the popular explainer of all things scientific, to assess the coach’s claim. ABC played up Nye's verdict that Belichick's words ""didn’t make any sense,"" but from the video, it sounds as though Nye was talking about Belichick's claim that rubbing the footballs would change the pressure, not the impact of temperature. CBS Sports relayed a tweet from another science luminary, physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson who also expressed skepticism. ""For the Patriots to blame a change in temperature for 15 percent lower-pressures, requires balls to be inflated with 125-degree air,"" Tyson wrote. CBS reported that ""Every 10 degree drop in temperature (F) results in about .2 PSI loss in a football."" According to CBS, that meant the weather would account for just a 0.4 pound of pressure loss, and tied that conclusion, loosely, to an Ohio State University physicist. We’ll get back to that CBS story (and its flaws) in a bit. On the other side of the ledger, USA Today interviewed Bowdoin College physics professor Dale Syphers who declared that a drop from room temperature in the 70s down to 40 degrees would reduce the pressure in a football by 1.3 pounds per square inch. The Daily Beast turned to the chair of the Physics Department at Boston College who said that with a 30 degree drop in temperature -- 75 down to 45 degrees -- you would expect the ball pressure to fall by by 1.54 pounds per square inch. Finally, the world of physics is divided between the theoretical physicists and the experimentalists. The physicists cited in the news worked with formulas. HeadSmart Labs, a private firm in Pittsburgh, tested actual footballs. It found that footballs inflated at 75 degrees, then cooled to 50 degrees lost 1.1 pounds of pressure. The lab took one more step. Since it was raining on game day, the staff dampened the balls. This led to a drop of an additional 0.7 pounds of pressure for a total of at least 1.8 pounds per square inch. The physics teachers come off the bench Enter Robert Hilborn of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The Harvard-trained physicist showed in detail how a law of physics, the ideal gas law, applied to the Patriots’ footballs. When a gas cools, it contracts. The ideal gas law helps us put numbers to that relationship between pressure and temperature. Math alert: We’re going to show you pretty much everything, so you can do it yourself at home. ""As almost every chemistry and physics student knows, the ideal gas law tells us that Pf = Pi (Tf/Ti),"" Hilborn wrote. The final pressure Pf equals the initial pressure Pi times the final temperature divided by the initial temperature Tf/Ti. Plugging in the numbers is simple, so long as you keep two things in mind. First, the pressure isn’t the pressure you see on your pressure gauge. It’s that amount plus the pressure of the atmosphere that’s all around you. It might feel counterintuitive, but when a football comes off the assembly line, before it's ever pumped up, it actually has an internal pressure that you wouldn't notice because it's the same as the pressure we always ignore. That's the pressure that comes from all those miles of air in our atmosphere pushing down on us. That pressure averages around 14.7 pounds per square inch. When you pump air into the football, you are adding pressure on top of the 14.7 that are already there. In Hilborn's math, you'll see he's added in the atmospheric pressure. The other key step is to measure the temperature in Celsius and count from absolute zero. That’s the Kelvin scale. Hilborn used a starting temperature of 70 degrees and a final temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit and a starting pressure of 12.5 pounds per square inch. ""Those numbers give us 27.2 psi for Pi, 294 K for Ti, and 283 K for Tf resulting in Pf = 26.2 psi for the total pressure and a corresponding gauge pressure of 11.5 psi, about 1 psi below the NFL lower limit."" In short, taking the balls outside would bring the pressure down 1 pound per square inch. Hilborn then accounted for the rain that day. Cooling the moist air inside the footballs would shed another 0.2 pounds per square inch. ""Combining the air temperature change effect with that of water vapor gives us a total of 1.2 psi, not too far from the figure of 1.4 psi given in one of the early NFL statements,"" Hilborn wrote. Hilborn’s results are pure math, and they are largely in line with the test results from the lab in Pittsburgh. The results in other news reports We were troubled by the CBS item that came up with a much lower number of 0.4 pounds per square inch due to a lower outdoor temperature. But when we called Prof. Michael Lisa, the Ohio State University physicist quoted in the CBS article, Lisa said, ""CBS got it wrong."" Lisa sent us this chart that you can download showing that for each 10 degrees drop in temperature, pressure drops 0.5 pounds. (The chart’s different lines show that the higher the starting pressure, the greater the impact of falling temperature.) We found that news reports that undercut the Patriots’ explanation used a high number for the loss of pressure. CBS said the footballs lost 2 pounds of pressure. Ditto for a Toronto Sun article. If it turns out that there really was a loss that large, then those arguments hold up. For the moment, we are simply assessing whether the physics back up what Belichick said and he used the 1.5 pound figure. Lisa also affirmed Hilborn’s analysis. ""That AAPT guy did a nice job,"" Lisa said. Nevertheless, Hilborn himself said no one should rush to judgment. ""A conservative conclusion is that temperature changes alone can account for much of the under-inflation,"" Hilborn wrote. ""But until more accurate information is available about the preparation of and measurement of the footballs’ air pressure, we should not assert that conclusion with a great deal of certainty."" The NFL is investigating and at some point, all the numbers might be known. Or not. Hilborn told PunditFact that the accuracy of the pressure gauges is unclear. One number that will be of interest is the starting pressure for the Colts’ footballs. It's possible they may have deflated as well, but stayed within the legal limits. Our ruling Belichick said that moving the footballs from indoors to outdoors could explain the loss of about 1.5 pounds per square inch of pressure. Experimental and mathematical results are in that ballpark. Lab tests said air temperature alone could bring down the pressure by 1.1 pounds. The ideal gas law predicted a 1 pound loss. The rain that day would explain at least another 0.2 pound shift and possibly as much as 0.7. We lack firm numbers on the actual pressure drop in the Patriots footballs, as well as precise information on the starting and ending temperatures. Within the limits of what the physics alone can tell us at this point, the math gets us pretty close to what Belichick said. With allowances for the uncertain data."

SOLUTION: "Atmospheric conditions could push a football’s pressure ""down approximately one-and-a-half pounds per square inch."

PROBLEM: "CORRECTION, 5:22 p.m., Oct. 15, 2014: This story has been amended to remove the incorrect original declaration that the $250,000 donation was given before the suits were filed. According to copies of the filings provided by Zac Petkanas, a spokesman for Davis, one of several suits singled out by Davis as the basis of her ad was filed in January 2014, before the donation the next month. This change led us to change our rating of the statement from Half True. (See the original fact check here.) In a TV ad, Wendy Davis said Greg Abbott took a hefty campaign donation before siding with a hospital against patients injured and killed by a drug-taking surgeon. Davis, the Fort Worth state senator and Democratic gubernatorial nominee, consistently depicts Abbott, the state attorney general and Republican choice for governor, as an unethical insider beholden to powerful interests. The narrator of the ad, titled ""Operation,"" says: ""He was a Texas surgeon, performing operations while reportedly using cocaine. Two people died, others were paralyzed. Doctors spoke out,"" the narrator says, ""but the hospital did nothing to stop him. Families and victims sued the hospital. ""Then, weeks after accepting a quarter-million-dollar campaign contribution from the hospital's chairman, Greg Abbott got involved, using his office to go to court -- against the victims."" Abbott solicited and accepted the donation, we confirmed, and the state intervened in lawsuits pitting patients against the hospital, though he got involved to defend a state law. Senator’s backup By email, Davis spokesman Zac Petkanas said Davis based her claim in part on a July 30, 2014, news story in the Dallas Morning News stating that not long after the chairman of the board of the Baylor Health Care System, which owns the Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano, donated $250,000 to Abbott’s campaign, Abbott weighed in on federal lawsuits against the hospital where a neurosurgeon allegedly had done damage to patients. News report and interview of donor We confirmed from Abbott’s campaign finance filings with the state and an interview with the board chairman and donor, Temple businessman Drayton McLane, that McLane donated $250,000 to Abbott’s campaign in January 2014. That donation, the News story said, came after McLane gave the campaign $100,000 in 2013. Before the six-figure contributions, the story said, McLane’s biggest donation to Abbott had been $25,000. Abbott’s campaign recorded the $250,000 donation as arriving Jan. 23, 2014 -- the very date one of the relevant federal lawsuits were filed against the hospital. Then again, we realized with a nudge from Petkanas after this article initially appeared, one of the several lawsuits was filed Dec. 27, 2013, weeks prior to McLane's contribution. His $250,000 check, a photo of which McLane’s office emailed to us, was dated Jan. 21, 2014. The News story said Abbott and McLane had each told the paper the two had not discussed the lawsuits. McLane also said he didn’t know about the case before contributing the $250,000, the paper said, and he stressed he had no personal financial interest in the nonprofit hospital system; the chairman’s post is unpaid. By phone, McLane told us he’s known Abbott since before Abbott, originally a Houston lawyer, won election as a Harris County state district judge in 1992 and gave the $250,000 after Abbott asked him for a large contribution. McLane said he hadn’t spoken with the Republican nominee since. Asked what he expected for the eye-catching contribution, McLane said: ""I’m not expecting to get anything back. I believe in strong good government. Unfortunately, on both sides, there are heavy contributions."" On top of not knowing about the lawsuits described by Davis before making his donation, McLane said, he hadn’t long been chairman of Baylor Scott & White Health, which owns the Plano facility, having become chairman when healthcare systems merged in October 2013; McLane previously chaired Scott & White Healthcare. Abbott in court As noted in the News, the federal suits against the Baylor system and Plano hospital challenge the constitutionality of a state law requiring the plaintiffs to prove Baylor acted with actual intent to harm patients -- which the suing plaintiffs/families call an impossibly stiff burden. Petkanas of Davis’ campaign provided copies of several lawsuits filed on behalf of patients and families, each one alleging a neurosurgeon, Christopher Duntsch, was permitted by the Plano hospital to perform surgeries under the influence of illegal drugs and alcohol, causing harm. Those suits also challenge action by state lawmakers in 2003, while overhauling laws regulating lawsuits seeking damages,  to delete a definition of ""malice"" in the law, hence ""eliminating a common-law right arbitrarily in light of the purposes of the statute leaving only an impossible condition before liability will attach,"" the lawsuits say. A spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, Lauren Bean, emailed us the state’s nearly identical March 24, 2014, filings in three plaintiff challenges to the law. In the filings, the state said it has a statutory right to intervene in a case when the constitutionality of a state law is at issue. On March 31, 2014, a week after the state filed its request, U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis granted the request to intervene ""for the purpose of defending the constitutionality of Texas law,"" Solis wrote. His order said no parties to the litigation objected. It’s undisputed an attorney general may seek to get involved in a federal suit to defend a state law, but some lawyers told us it’s up to the official to do so -- or not. Attorney Kay Van Wey, who represents some plaintiffs in the suits against the hospital, said by email Abbott’s move was unusual and unreasonable, though she didn’t object, she said, because there is no legal way to do so; we didn’t divine what she meant by that. Van Wey further said Abbott ""is defending a law that essentially gives immunity to hospitals for credentialing dangerous physicians. The law, as it now stands, denies access to the courts for good, taxpaying Texas citizens, who through no fault of their own, were butchered by a highly dangerous surgeon. ""Even if we prove the hospitals were grossly negligent in hiring and retaining a dangerous surgeon,"" Van Wey said, ""...it isn't enough under the current state of the law. In Texas, we have to prove ‘malice,’ meaning we have to prove the hospital had a subjective intent to harm the patient. That is considered to be an impossible standard. It is clearly an erroneous and completely unfair law. He didn't have to intervene in our lawsuits. He chose to."" The News story quoted Bean saying McLane’s contributions played no role in his decision to intervene in the suits. Besides, Bean said, the ""state is not defending the hospital or the doctor in this case — or their alleged conduct. If the hospital or doctor have violated the law, then they will be held accountable, and nothing in the state’s court filings opposes the plaintiffs,"" patients and families, ""on that front,"" she said. Bean gave us the agency’s full response sent to the News. In it, Bean said the state ""will not be putting on any defense of any action by the hospital or any doctor. The state will not put on any evidence or make any argument whether the hospital’s actions or the doctor’s actions violate the law. The state does not condone, support or defend the actions of the hospital or doctor. The only thing the state will argue is that the law is not unconstitutional."" Outside lawyers An Austin lawyer who helped write the 2003 change told us he believes the attorney general was bound to defend the revised law as Abbott is doing. Michael Hull emailed: ""The AG intervention is consistent with federal and state law. The AG is defending the constitutionality of a statute. His office has not taken a position on the facts alleged in the petition nor has the AG chosen to defend the hospital or the doctor."" Hull later said such constitutional challenges are rare, ""but when challenges do occur, it is common for the AG to defend the constitutionality of the statute."" Hull and Michael Guajardo, the Dallas president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, each pointed out any litigant is required to notify the state of a federal challenge to a state law’s constitutionality We asked if that formal notice touched off Abbott’s intervention. Not so, Bean said, adding the attorney general’s office has no record of receiving the notice, which court filings say was sent by certified mail. Instead, Bean said, Jonathan Mitchell, the state solicitor general, learned of the suits from a March 10, 2014, news story in the Texas Lawyer magazine. Petkanas, told we hadn’t uncovered proof the McLane donation prompted Abbott to enter the lawsuits, said by email the ad didn’t assert a cause and effect -- only that McLane gave his campaign donation before Abbott intervened. Our ruling Davis said that weeks ""after accepting a quarter-million-dollar campaign contribution"" from a hospital board chairman, Greg Abbott went to court against victims of a drug-taking neurosurgeon. Davis’ statement needs clarification – that Abbott’s intervention was limited to defending the constitutionality of Texas’ tort-reform laws. That makes this statement . – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information."

SOLUTION: "Weeks after accepting a quarter-million-dollar campaign contribution"" from a hospital board chairman, Greg Abbott went to court against victims of a drug-taking neurosurgeon."

PROBLEM: "There are countries where the measures of well-being tell such a bleak story, you have to stop and verify them. South Sudan falls in that group. UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, marked the fifth year since this African nation separated from its northern neighbor with a photo essay about five children. One showed a little girl shyly smiling as she holds an oversized slate chalkboard bearing two perfectly legible number 5s. The caption read, ""Only about 10 percent of girls in South Sudan complete primary school, and the typical age of marriage in rural areas is rarely over 15. As a result, more teenage girls die in childbirth than finish high school."" South Sudan emerged as an independent country in 2011 after years of civil war. Its people barely had time to catch their collective breath before friction between two rival factions turned the country back into a battlefield again. The fighting has forced millions from their homes. Under these conditions, it’s plausible that more teenage girls dying in childbirth than graduate from high school, but every claim needs data behind it, and we went looking. Girls in South Sudan who finish high school Ongoing conflict has made education nearly impossible. A 2014 Brookings Institution article noted that ""approximately 50 percent of primary school-age children are currently not in school."" So how many girls finish high school? We can’t say for certain, but we know the number is quite low. The South Sudanese government reported that in 2013, just 730 girls were in the last year of secondary school out of a total population over 12 million. Girls in South Sudan who die in childbirth Finding a precise number of teenage girls in South Sudan who die during childbirth is more complicated because accurate data in a war zone is hard to come by. To get even a crude estimate, we had to rely on a couple of figures. First a 2008 survey of South Sudan found that about 10.3 percent of all women in the country were 15-19. That translates to about 610,000 teenage girls. A 2010 government health survey said that ""in South Sudan, one-third of the 15-19 year old women start childbearing."" That would mean about 207,000 young women are at risk of dying in childbirth. Based on UNICEF data, the nonprofit aid group International Medical Corps wrote that ""with 2,054 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, South Sudan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world."" When we apply that rate to the number of young women at risk, we get over 4,000 deaths. That’s nearly six times the maximum number of female high school graduates. What experts say People and groups with on-the-ground experience in South Sudan said they have no reason to doubt UNICEF’s comparison. Lydia Stone, now with the British aid organization Social Development Direct, told us that ""while there is a dearth of reliable, recent data in South Sudan, this UNICEF claim is almost certainly true."" Stone said that most girls ""are married around the age of 15-16 some even younger. Their bodies are not ready to bear children and - outside of aid agencies - the health system is virtually non-existent."" Canada is a major donor of relief services in South Sudan. Global Affairs Department spokeswoman Jessica Seguin said ""South Sudanese girls’ face significant inequalities in terms of access to education, and are at a high risk of early and forced child marriage, and accompanying obstetric health problems."" In a 2012 field report, Stone wrote that the society puts a premium on women having as many children as possible. During the first civil war, government leaders cast pregnancy as a patriotic duty. But Stone wrote that in interviews, many women embraced their role quite apart from any overt pressure. ""One woman said, ‘There is no limit; if I can have 15 or 20, then I will. It is for God to decide.’"" Our ruling UNICEF wrote that in South Sudan, ""more teenage girls die in childbirth than finish high school."" The claim is almost certainly correct, experts say. But there is no single data source that can verify the comparison."

SOLUTION:
"In South Sudan, ""more teenage girls die in childbirth than finish high school."