Statistics

Gasoline prices are keeping up their record-setting ways. California drivers paid an average of $4.358 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up 6.6 cents from a week earlier, the Energy Department said Monday. That's a fresh record high for this time of year and is 48.4 cents above the year-earlier price. Nationally, the average rose 7.2 cents to $3.793, also a record for this week, according to Energy Department statistics. A year earlier, the average U.S. price was 27.3 cents lower.

American adolescents already carry a heavy burden of future heart disease risk, and while obesity has contributed mightily to their poorer health prospects, normal-weight kids are by no means off the hook, a study produced by the Centers for Disease Control says. In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics (read the full text here ), CDC researchers say that overweight and obesity among American adolescents -- those between 12 and 19 years old -- has pushed the  prevalence of pre-diabetes and Type-2 diabetes from 9% in 1999 to 23% in 2008.

IF it's been a year or two since you've shopped for a mattress, you're in for some surprises. That memory foam bed that once seemed so novel? It's now decidedly mainstream. Latex is the hot material of choice. And that's not all that's changed. Choices are multiplying -- especially on the luxury end -- and prices are too.

Emergency response times provided by Los Angeles fire officials to the public and City Hall leaders cannot be trusted because of problems with software used to prepare the numbers, according to a report by an expert assigned to audit the Fire Department's data analysis . The report called on the department to stop using the software until the problem is fixed and recommended an overhaul of the unit that analyzes statistics for Fire Chief...

Counting the days until summer vacation starts, students at Brea-Olinda High School who are hoping a job will fall into their laps may be in for a bit of a jolt. Normally, the Orange County school's job board is stocked with 25 to 30 notices from prospective employers this time of year. This spring, however, there are only half as many job offers on the board. "We haven't been getting a lot of calls from business people," said Jim McWilliam, the school's career guidance specialist.

LAFAYETTE, La. - Visitors to this oil town might be forgiven for wondering whether the BP oil spill and subsequent drilling moratorium ever happened. "Now hiring" signs are plastered on billboards around town, and hotels such as the Crowne Plaza are chock full of seminars training students to work on offshore rigs. Many offshore companies can't find enough workers for the jobs they're listing. This parish has the lowest unemployment rate in Louisiana, 4.8%. Such is the opportunity on the offshore rigs that Sheila Clark, whose husband, Donald, died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion two years ago, said her 22-year-old son recently asked her how she'd feel if he went to work on a rig. "I can't stop him," said Clark, who moved to Baton Rouge after her husband's death.

Ending months of speculation about its future, mortgage lending giant DiTech Funding Corp. of Irvine said Monday it agreed to be acquired by GMAC Mortgage Corp., a unit of General Motors Corp. Terms weren't disclosed. DiTech, one of the Southland's largest mortgage lenders and an aggressive marketer of higher-risk home-equity loans, shelved an initial public stock offering last fall. It had hoped the IPO would raise about $110 million for a minority stake in the company.

Orange County residents collectively use only about one-third as much water in their homes as people living in Los Angeles County-384,000 acre-feet versus 1.1 million. But the Orange County average use per residence is 21% higher than in Los Angeles. In 1990, Orange County households has an average consumption rate of 142,981 gallons per year according to Metropolitan Water District of Southern California projections; in Los Angeles County the comparable figure was 117,864.

Nearly half of the Latino and African American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education, according to a Harvard University report released Wednesday. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the situation was even worse, with just 39% of Latinos and 47% of African Americans graduating, compared with 67% of whites and 77% of Asians.

Members of the clergy are just as likely to get divorced as the men and women who stand before them at the altar and solemnly promise to stay together until death do them part. A national survey of Protestant clergy, conducted in 1993 and 1994 by the Hartford Seminary, found that 25% of clergywomen and 20% of clergymen have been divorced at least once.

An investigation has found that Claremont McKenna College's former vice president for admission and financial aid acted alone in exaggerating freshmen SAT scores and other statistics, which boosted the school's national rankings, according to a report released Tuesday. The probe, conducted by the O'Melveny & Myers law firm for the college, reported that no individual student's record was altered — only aggregate scores and other data were changed. It also showed that not only were test scores manipulated, as was previously announced, but that class ranking statistics and other information also appeared to have been altered in ways to make the college look better than it was. The former vice president, Richard Vos, contended that he acted in response to intense pressure from Claremont McKenna President Pamela Gann to become a more selective college, the report said.

After it happened, Megan Beza was consumed with figuring out why. Did her husband's struggle with painkillers play a role? His months of fruitless job-hunting? But with suicide, there are rarely tidy answers. What is known is that southern Nevada's unusually high suicide rate spiked with the recession, and Megan thinks that must explain, at least in part, what happened the morning of Oct. 25, 2010. John Beza had just returned from dropping off their 4-year-old son, Jacob, at preschool.

Horses died while racing at Santa Anita Park at more than double the rate of horses at the state's other three major thoroughbred tracks over the last fiscal year, according to state statistics. The fatality rate at Santa Anita, in Arcadia, rose significantly after a return to a dirt running surface in 2010 after three years of using a synthetic track, the data show. Track surfaces are one of several factors that experts say play a role in horses' deaths — a longtime bane of the racing industry.

The Los Angeles City Council made deep cuts to the Fire Department last year after being presented with data that overstated how quickly rescuers arrived at the scene of citizen calls for help. In presentations made by fire officials to council members as they considered reducing fire engines and ambulances at more than one-fifth of the city's stations, the department said first responders arrived at the scene of a medical emergency within five minutes nearly 80% of the time. Similar statistics were also included in a Fire Commission report to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Reporting from Phoenix — The Dodgers' position players don't have to report to spring training until next week, but Matt Kemp was already in camp Tuesday with the team's pitchers and catchers, talking about how he intends to follow up one of the best offensive seasons in franchise history. Kemp reiterated his previously stated goal of becoming the first player in major league history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season. He said he also wants to win the most-valuable-player award.

For a guy who changed his name to promote harmony, there's very little of it for Metta World Peace these days. The Lakers forward continued to struggle on offense Tuesday and claimed to be irritated by Coach Mike Brown's substitution patterns. " Phil [ Jackson ] had been here for 10 years, so his consistency was pretty easy. We've got new players and new coaches and it took a long time to build some consistency," World Peace said Tuesday before the Lakers played Atlanta.

Southern California is getting its population groove back, according to new U.S. census data. All six counties showed moderate population growth from 2008 to 2009, with all but San Diego County growing at a stronger rate than the year before. It's the latest sign that the region is recovering from the declines in population seen in the middle of the decade, some experts said. "Things aren't wonderful in Southern California, but you are seeing some industries that are growing or in the process of rebounding," said Jack Kyser, senior vice president and chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

This occasional column will evaluate funds that have stumbled and will consider the hardest question most investors face: whether to stay or go. * In the winter issue of its newsletter last year, the Lindner family of funds boasted: Lindner Dividend "Tops Morningstar National Rankings." "When Morningstar reported on the nation's highest . . . yielding hybrid funds as of November 30, 1998, the Lindner Dividend Fund led all funds in Morningstar's national database at 8.29%." True.

Throughout industrial history, managers have tried to use science to analyze, categorize and, occasionally, pulverize the human element in their ventures so they can direct it more easily to their ends. Charles Dickens memorably satirized this desire in the character of Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian educationalist in "Hard Times," who was determined to "teach these boys and girls nothing but facts" and "to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. " A new book, "Calculating Success: How the New Workplace Analytics Will Revitalize Your Organization," advocates a similarly fact-based approach to workplace challenges.

Diminishing returns The Angels, in signing Albert Pujols, now 32 years old, to the third-richest contract in baseball history — $240 million over 10 years — are taking a chance that a two-year slide in his offensive production isn't the start of a long-term trend. A look at some of his numbers the last three seasons: Year; Batting ave.; on-base %; slugging %; HR; RBI; BB; K 2009; .327; .443; .658; 47; 135; 115; 64 2010; .312; .414; .596; 42; 118; 103; 76 2011; .299*; .366*; .541*; 37; 99*; 61*; 58 *-career low.