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By The Numbers

Niagara recalls bottled spring water

Tony Wagner Jun 23, 2015
14 brands

That’s how many brands had to issue a recall for bottled water sourced from Niagara Bottling. The reason? A spring contaminated with E. coli. And as NBC Philadelphia reports, while the contamination was discovered on June 10, the spring waited to notify the affected brands.

$1 billion

That’s how much Alibaba has sunk into its once dormant food-ordering app known as Koubei. It’s part of a move by the company to enter what is known as the O2O (online-to-offline) market of using apps to order goods and services. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, the company is attempting to compete with its rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. and its app, Ele.me

$150

That’s how much Gary Portnoy originally was paid for writing the “Cheers” theme at 25. But television royalties are structured so that one is paid every time the show airs, so although the initial payday might be small, songwriters can make millions from getting their work on a hit show. We looked into the world of TV themes for the latest installment of our series “I’ve Always Wondered.”

350 students

That’s about how many students have graduated from the BioTechnical Institute of Maryland since it was founded in 1998. BTI’s Lab Associates program offers job training to students looking to get into laboratory work — students like Jamond Turner who used to work as a security guard at Johns Hopkins University. The program started when Baltimore decided to use the $100 million it received as part of its designation as an Empowerment Zone to focus on job training and job creation. While the latter may have fallen off, the former seems to be one of the positive remnants of the program

$16.3 million

That was the average pay in the C-suite at the top 350 companies last year, on the rise since the Depression. Meanwhile, worker pay is remaining steady or even falling, according to the Economic Policy Institute study as reported by Mother Jones, meaning CEOs now make more than 300 times what workers in their respective fields earn. 

$236 billion

That’s how high Facebook’s market value reached during trading Monday, surpassing Walmart. Quartz notes that the shift points to technology’s increasing prominence in the economy, even if Walmart brings in hundreds of billions more in revenue.

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