Category Archives: Journalism

Mistakes? What Were the Odds of That?

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What’s luck got to do with it? The maths of gambling

He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds.

“Beat the odds” isn’t quite as bad as “defies the laws of physics,” I think. But exploiting knowledge of the odds to win isn’t beating the odds. Beating the odds is winning when you shouldn’t — drawing to an inside straight and hitting it to win a hand is beating the odds. Exploiting the situation to make the odds go in your favor — making it so you should win more than you lose — is not.

A spin of the roulette wheel is just like the toss of a coin. Each spin is independent, with a 50:50 chance of the ball landing on black or red.

Well, no. A roulette wheel has 37 or 38 slots, depending on where you play, with 36 of them being black or red. The others are green — 0 and 00 (Europe has one, the US has both. Sort of.) That’s why the house makes profit offering “even money” on black or red bets on a US wheel; the probability of winning is slightly less than 50%. (They also make money on the single-number payouts, at 35:1) All of the bets on a 00 roulette wheel have a house advantage of at least 5.26%; single-0 wheels have a smaller house advantage but there also seems to be a correlation with higher-stakes limits. The previous link also presents a section on debunking the “doubling down” method for roulette. Winning at roulette is truly “beating the odds” since the house always has an advantage.

So please don’t follow the advice here. But note this:

For what it is worth, the sum of all the numbers in roulette is 666.

This is News?

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Tyrannosaurus rex ‘picked on baby dinosaurs and ate them whole’

Research into the predatory habits and diet of the biggest of the dinosaurs has concluded that T.rex and other members of its carnivorous theropod family preferred to dine on juveniles, preferably small enough to eat whole.

It shatters the notion that the giant battled with animals of a similar or even larger size, an image reinforced by its portrayal in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park.

Really? Jurassic Park, a work of fiction wherein the T. rex never battled anything of similar, much less larger, size? And why would anyone expect T. rex to behave any differently than modern carnivores, who prey on the young and weak? Certainly not the researchers:

Dr Hone, who works at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, said: “Modern predators mainly attack vulnerable, young animals as they are inexperienced in evading predators, and this was probably the same in dinosaurs. Young prey are easier to bring down and the risk of injury to the predator is much lower.

Cuuuut!

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“Filming in the lab” is the recent theme at PhD comics, and this one grabs the essence. (Or you can start at the beginning, if you’re one of the type that needs to do that.)

I’ve been filmed in the lab and interviewed on TV once, and I’ve observed my colleagues being filmed and interviewed. There’s a pattern to it. They sit you down in front of one of your impressive-looking pieces of lab apparatus and ask questions for a while. For every 15 minutes of interview, approximately 5 seconds will make it to air time in the final story (my data point, at least). Next, they will want some “action” shots of you, which for an atomic physics/optics lab usually means adjusting some mirrors or twiddling a knob on a piece of electronics and looking at an oscilloscope with a serious expression on your face. If there are two of you in the shot, one of you will need to be pointing at the oscilloscope, as if to say, “Here is where the WOW signal would be, if we had a signal. But we don’t, because we can’t run our experiment with these floodlights on.” Obviously “action shot” here does not the mean same thing as in an episode of some detective series — this is no Magnum, Principle Investigator. A third component that is sometimes used is of one of the interviewee walking down a corridor or sidewalk, so that the reporter can do a voice-over. Alternately they will just get shots of the equipment, especially if it whirs and moves about, for that segment.

Then they mash it all together and if you’re lucky they won’t have gotten the science horribly wrong.

Wrong! Or Maybe Not.

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Fingerprints and Grip – Wrong vs Incomplete

I saw the headline to one version of the linked story (Fingerprint grip theory rejected) a few days back. I didn’t delve too deeply into it, and this thought had not occurred to me:

What struck me, and what the article did not mention, is that glass is a very artificial material. It is unlikely that our ancestors would have encountered such smooth material often in their day-to-day lives. Therefore there would not have been much selective pressure to develop a good grip on glass or similarly smooth material. Tree branches, rocks, fur, bones, and other materials that might find their way into the grasp of a hominid or ape are much rougher than glass.

Clearly follow up research is needed. How do fingerprints behave when applied to other materials, and how does wetness affect their utility?

What did pique my interest was a different version of the story (or headline, at least): Urban Myth Disproved: Fingerprints Do Not Improve Grip Friction. I had not considered that this was an “urban myth.” If it hadn’t been tested, then it was an hypothesis, and in need of testing. I don’t really hang with the “what good are fingerprints” crowd, so I don’t really have a grip —ridge-augmented or not — on how this viewpoint was being advertised. In any case, though, I agree that the process has been mischaracterized — the media has sensationalized the discovery by casting the results as some sort of paradigm shift rather than an incremental additional of knowledge.

What interested me most about this story is how the media channels science news stories into a few themes with which they feel comfortable. Debunking a commonly held myth is one of those themes. While this story hold a kernel of that theme – it is more accurate to say, in my opinion, not that the grip hypothesis is wrong but that the story is more complex.

That is a much more useful theme for science reporting – because the story is almost always more complex – more complex than the typical publish understanding, and even of our previous scientific understanding.

Likewise, it is more meaningful in many cases to portray our prior models and theories not as “wrong” but as incomplete. Sometimes they are wrong, but that needs to be distinguished from ideas that are oversimplified and therefore incomplete, but not wrong.

Telling It Like it Is

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Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

[…]

Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….”

Finance reporting, I think is an especially egregious offense by reporters. Think about it — no matter what happens in the stock market, the reporters will have some cause ascribed to it. And they’re just making it up. Most days the stock market signal is just noise.

Honor thy Scientists?

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why you should honor thy scientists

[I]t’s not just zealots who will equate scientific methodology with theistic dogmatism. In an attempt to appear completely objective and beyond any charge of bias, some writers will give equal importance to every opinion with seemingly no regard for whether it’s right or wrong. They think that by giving a biologist who’s life was spent researching evolution and a random televangelist the same weight in their articles will make them insightful reporters who diligently consider every side of a story. But the truth is that not everything you hear is accurate and if you’re reporting an incorrect assumption without actually doing your homework and noting that it’s wrong, you’re not an objective reporter or analyst. You’re a scribe afraid of being called biased.

Going UP (Very Precisely)

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Via gg I see that there is a new vertex on the bologohedron, The X-Change Files

The X-Change Files explores the intersections of science and entertainment, regularly taking a look at the ways in which science is portrayed in film and television. Given that science is often the basis for provocative and compelling storylines, we’ll also highlight the latest scientific discoveries. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll examine the ways in which public opinion is shaped and behavior is changed by what people see on their television sets and in the movie theaters.

And it comes with an impressive list of contributors.

So I will welcome them, followed by picking some nits in the analysis of Pixar’s new movie, UP which they point out in the post Going UP! . They link to a WIRED story about the movie, which estimates the weight of the house needing to be lifted by helium-filled balloons as being 100,000 lbs.

One more simple calculation — 100,000 pounds divided by 0.067 pounds per cubic foot — and you’ve got that it would take 1,492,537 cubic feet of helium to lift the house.

Ignoring that we’re working in English units, which scientists don’t really do very much, the big thing that pops out to the budding, fully-bloomed, or dying scientist is the misuse of significant digits. Do we really believe the estimate of the house’s weight is exact? No, it’s probably good to 2 digits, at best — the house could easily weigh several thousand pounds more or less than the estimated value. So the answer is that it takes 1,500,000 cubic feet of Helium to fill the balloons. You can’t specify it any better than that. The same mistake propagates through the calculation of the number of balloons.

Now, let’s assume you’ve got a bunch of spherical balloons three feet in diameter. They’ve got a volume in 14.1 cubic feet, so you’d need 105,854 of them filled with helium to lift the house.

Same deal. Not only is the volume not precise, but the balloon diameter is an estimate as well. There is no way to make an exact count to the last balloon you would need. So while Pixar got the science right in estimating the number of balloons needed, and it’s great to be enthusiastic about that, it’s also important not to drop the ball when discussing how well they did.

(The most consistently egregious abuse of significant digits in the media (though not necessarily entertainment media) is when there is a conversion from one unit system to another. An approximation of “30 meters high” is converted using 3.28 feet per meter, so that this rough estimation is then given as 98.4 feet high, instead of 100 feet high, as it should be given.)

And, getting on to some more physics, I see that zapperz has taken a pass at analyzing the physics in this movie as well. The Physics in Disney/Pixar’s “Up” takes another look at the buoyancy issue, and points to what might be a little problem among the rest of the decent physics treatment of the buoyancy. Rhett also looks at this issue, as well as some other analysis.

Science v Politics, Round Whatever

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Obama’s green guru calls for white roofs

One of the many things about politics and political reporting that I find annoying is the eagerness with which the reporters will “interpret” what was said, and this story appears to be no exception. It’s hard to say for sure, because precious little of what Chu actually said is quoted, so one doesn’t know how much the reporter is making up. The other point that comes up here is how very different politics and science are.

What he is actually quoted as saying:

“If you look at all the buildings and if you make the roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour and if you do that uniformally, that would be the equivalent of… reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years – just taking them off the road for 11 years,” he said.

Now, what he didn’t say was that we are actually going to force people to do this — there’s no mention of a policy initiative, or a spending bill to hire TomSawyer Inc to whitewash everything (or, more specifically, to subcontract out the whitewashing to other companies at an enormous profit). It is, at its core, a statement of science that can be buttressed or argued on points of fact. People familiar with scientific analysis might recognize the physicist presenting the idealized case: how would reflection vs absorption change if we went from a black surface to a white surface, and what is the equivalent effect of doing that. The point of such an analysis is a first pass at deciding whether it’s a worthwhile endeavor, an attitude which the president has been trying to re-instill after an eight-year absence. Engaging in this kind of exercise indicates whether or not further action should be taken; if the numbers were different, one could come to a different conclusion about how worthwhile such an effort might be. Here is a distillation of what Secretary Chu said: the albedo of the earth is a large effect in the global warming picture. Here’s how big. There. That’s it. Now, start your engines and decide how one might go about leveraging this idea, or if it should be applied — that’s where politics comes in.

But this is not the direction the article takes, and furthermore, not what many comments attached to the article reflect (at least, as far as I got in reading them). It’s amazing, and not a little bit scary to me, that people feel free to criticize things they obviously don’t understand, the first of which is that science is not a democracy. The reflectivity of concrete as compared to blacktop is not a political question, and the answer does not depend on whether you are conservative or liberal. You are not entitled to have an opinion about factual things. “Blue is a nice color” is an opinion. “The sky scatters blue light” is not. When you exercise the right to make political decisions, you also have the responsibility to make sure that these are informed decisions.

So let’s look at a little physics that’s botched in the comments.

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