Week 8- H2Oh-No!
Hi friends!
I hope you’ve been having a wonderful week! It’s been another very productive week, and I can’t wait to share my updates with you!
Since the last time I gave you an update on the independent portion of my project, I’ve made a lot of progress! I completed getting all the demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Arizona Demographics by Cubit, and the AZ Commerce Authority. However, I did run into one small problem. For one of the affected zip code regions, I haven’t been able to find any demographic data for it from any of the databases above. And even when I’ve tried to find other ways to get data for that zip code, my searches come up empty. It’s almost as if it exists but doesn’t exist at the same time? So now I have to figure out if there is any possible way I can find this data, or if I will just have to exclude this zip code from my independent data collection. Other than that, I’ve made a lot of progress on my AP Research academic paper and have continued to work on my AP Research Final Presentation. I hope to finish these up by next week, especially the presentation as I will be presenting that soon!
On the site placement side of things, I have another visit to the WEST Center and the University of Arizona in the works! As of right now, it is scheduled for April 8th, so hopefully I will be able to do more in the PFAS lab and tell you all about it next week!
That’s all for now, but I’ll be back soon with more updates!!
Now for this week’s Not-so-Fun Fact: According to the University of San Francisco, in 2004, the EPA finally fined DuPont for not disclosing their findings on the toxicity of PFOA (aka perfluorooctanoic acid, a synthetic chemical which belongs to the group of PFAS). The 16.45 million dollar settlement was the largest civil penalty obtained under U.S. environmental statutes at the time. However, this amount was only a fraction of Dupont’s annual revenue for 2005, which was around $1 billion.
If you want to learn more information on this, I have linked the UCSF article here: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever-chemicals-covered-dangers
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