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: “They are heroic, I think there is no other way to describe what they are doing at this moment,” said Howard Catton, a British nurse who is the ICN’s chief executive officer. Infection rates of 9% and 12-14% have been reported among health workers in Italy and Spain, respectively, and deaths among nurses there and in Iran and Indonesia, he said. “We have no doubt that the rate of infections is related in part to the lack of PPE - personal protective equipment,” he told Reuters at the ICN offices along Lake Geneva. “There is a global shortage and nurses obviously are at a higher risk given the people that they are caring for.”  The federation represents 130 national associations and more than 20 million registered nurses. The World Health Organization has called repeatedly for countries and manufacturers to step up production of masks, gloves, gowns and other equipment for vulnerable health workers amidst critical shortages. Nearly 700,000 people have been infected worldwide in the outbreak that began last December in China and has claimed more than 33,000 lives, according to the WHO. Catton said there had been problems with supply chains in hard-hit Italy and Spain, describing their health systems as “very close to being overwhelmed”. Nurses worldwide take samples from COVID-19 patients, give them medicines and oxygen, and help incubate those in serious condition. “They are working under intense pressure, often long hours, some working back-to-back shifts for days on end, even sleeping over in the hospital, the facility, in which they work.”  Some nurses have been forced to re-use their gear or make their own masks and gowns, he added. “Wearing personal protective equipment when it is available is not easy either...Simple things like going to the loo and eating are of course much more difficult,” he said. Nurses across Africa and South Asia could be at greater risk as the virus moves to poorer settings. “We are very concerned that those countries that have weaker, more fragile health care systems could very quickly become overwhelmed by this virus if it takes hold in their countries,” Catton said. Nurses in Zimbabwe, fearing for their own safety, have been on strike due to a lack of information and protective gear, he said.

SOLUTION: Heroic nurses need full protection against coronavirus, association says.

PROBLEM: "Amid ongoing protests in Ferguson, Mo., the national conversation about racial justice and police force has ignored a critical point that needs to be discussed, said Fox News pundit Juan Williams Civil rights activists and black leaders have failed to address the very thing that’s fueling conservative, white backlash — the high crime rate among the black community, particularly among young black men, Williams said on Aug. 24th’s Fox News Sunday. ""I think there’s fear of intimidation, harassment being legitimized by the fact that there is a high rate of crime, especially among young black men,"" Williams said. ""No. 1 cause of death, young black men 15 to 34 — murder. Who’s committing the murder? Not police. Other black men."" Last year, PolitiFact found that 93 percent of murder victims were killed by someone who shares their race. This time, we want to check out Williams’ claim that homicide is the No. 1 cause of death for black men 15-34 years old. Unnatural causes We looked at numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which lists the leading causes of death across all demographics. Experts said that CDC data, compiled from coroner reports, are in line with FBI numbers, sourced from police reports. The CDC does not distinguish between the types of homicide (criminal, justified, etc.) or the types of accidents (auto accidents, falls, firearm discharge, etc.). The numbers for 2011, the most recent CDC findings, are consistent with data from previous years. According to the CDC, homicide was indeed the No. 1 killer of black men between the ages of 15 and 34 in 2011. Accidents ranked second in causes of death, and suicide claimed the third amount of black male lives between 15 and 24 years old, while heart disease ranked third for men 24-34. Leading causes of death among black males 1st 2nd 3rd All ages Diseases of the heart Malignant neoplasms Accidents 1-4 Accidents Homicide Congenital malformations 5-14 Accidents Malignant neoplasms Homicide 15-24 Homicide Accidents Suicide 25-34 Homicide Accidents Diseases of the heart 35-44 Diseases of the heart Accidents Homicide 45-54 Diseases of the heart Malignant neoplasms Accidents 55-84 Malignant neoplasms Diseases of the heart Cerebrovascular diseases 84-older Diseases of the heart Malignant neoplasms Cerebrovascular diseases Source: CDC Compared to other ethnicities, the numbers really stand out. Forty percent of African-American males 15-34 who died were murdered, according to the CDC, compared to just 3.8 percent of white males who died. Overall, 14 percent of all men 15-34 who died in 2011 were murdered. In 2011, black males 15-34 were 10 times more likely to die of murder than whites of the same age group. Sources: CDC, PunditFact calculations For men of all ages, homicide was ranked fifth in leading causes of deaths for blacks (4.6 percent), seventh for Hispanics (2.8 percent), and ninth for American Indians (2.3 percent). Homicide was not one of the top 15 causes of death for whites 15-34. Color lines Why are so many young black males dying from homicide? As the laws of aging go, younger men are less prone to fall victim to natural causes of death, so they are more likely to die of unnatural causes. And the racial disparity between those causes has partially to do with the likelihood of getting into car-related accidents, said James Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University. ""Suburban whites drive more than urban blacks, and putting in more miles on highways —  that’s important because not a lot of people are going to get killed in fender benders in neighborhood streets,"" Fox said. ""There are relatively few auto-accidents in black urban areas."" Beyond driving habits, the criminal homicide rate among young black males is significantly higher than other groups. This, experts agreed, has to do with poverty and geography. The difference in social structures, access to jobs, educational opportunities, and many other factors between impoverished black neighborhoods and others is often a matter of life and death, according to Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. ""The (homicide) numbers highlight the condition in minority areas, where a lot of violence occurs and the whole way of life is further intensified because police surveillance is always trying to track down people,"" he said. ""People have heightened survival instincts, will do anything to survive, and they’ll seek retribution for anything...because they don’t trust law enforcement."" Though it is tempting to pinpoint one cause as more impactful than others, Silverman cautions against singling out poverty or drugs or any other factor as the cause, because all of them intermix and interact. Our ruling Williams said that the No. 1 cause of death for black men 15-34 years old is murder. CDC data supports the claim. Out of all causes of death, homicide claimed about 40 percent of black lives between 15 and 34 years. This was significantly higher than the national average for males of that age group, and all other racial groups."

SOLUTION:
The No. 1 cause of death for African-American males 15-34 is murder.