More collected tweeterage and other social media detritus.
MSNBC doesn't care about getting numbers right
And water is wet and fire burns... Okay, this one is particularly egregious. It starts on twitter, with a person who doesn't understand the difference between millions and trillions:
But then, Brian Williams and NYT Editorial Board member Mara Gay put it up in a discussion of Bloomberg's failed presidential bid, and agree with it (video here):
The problem here isn't so much that anchors and producers at MSNBC can't do this basic math, it's that they don't care enough about getting the numbers right to ask a fact-checker to check them. Note that they had the graphic made in advance, and this was a scripted segment, so they didn't just extemporize and made an error. They didn't care enough about the numbers to check them.
And, given their response, they still don't care. This is sad.
A puzzle that's going around, solved correctly
Saw this on Twitter, and a lot of snark with it:
Apparently some people have difficulty with this puzzle, drawing a line in B that's parallel to the bottom of the bottle (perhaps they think the water is frozen?). But many of the people who mock those who draw that parallel line draw a horizontal line that is too low, creating a triangle.
Here's the correct solution:
As with all math problems, even very simple ones like this, the right approach is to do the math, not to try to guess and hand-wave your way to a probably-wrong solution.
In their haste to badmouth Millennials, finance researchers misstate their results
I saw this "Millennials are bad with money" article on Yahoo Finance, got the original report (PDF), and found a glaring problem with their data. (The table notes make it clear they're saying a conjunction, 'AND,' not a 'GIVEN THAT' conditional.)
My guess is that despite the table notes and the 'AND,' what they're measuring is the proportion of people who answered the three questions correctly GIVEN THAT they self-described as having high finance literacy, I.O.W. that's 19% of the 62%, not 19% of the 9041 Millennials. That would make the population in the conjunction 1065, whereas the number of people who got the three right answers is 1447; so about 4% of Millennials are money-smart[ish] but think they aren't.
But if you're going to get snarky about other people's issues with money, maybe write your tables and table notes a bit more carefully…
About the financial literacy of Millennials, these were the three multiple-choice questions:
Suppose you had $\$100$ in a savings account, and the interest rate was 2% per year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow? Answers: a) More than $\$102$; b) Exactly $\$102$; c) Less than $\$102$; d) Do not know; e) Refuse to answer.
Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1% per year and inflation was 2% per year. After 1 year, how much would you be able to buy with the money in this account? Answers: a) More than today; b) Exactly the same; c) Less than today; d) Do not know; e) Refuse to answer.
Please tell me whether this statement is true or false. “Buying a single company’s stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.” Answers: a) True; b) False; c) Do not know; d) Refuse to answer.These questions are extremely simple, which makes the low incidence of correct answers troubling.
Science illustration lie factor: 71 million
How bad can science illustrations get? Let's ask the Daily Express from the UK:
We don't need to calculate to see that that meteor is much larger than 4.1 km, but if we do calculate (I did), we realize they exaggerated the volume of that meteor by just a hair under SEVENTY-ONE MILLION-FOLD:
To put that lie factor into perspective, here's the Harvester Mothership from Independence Day: Resurgence, which has only a lie factor of 50 (linear, because that's the dimensionality of the problem here):
Fun with our brains: the Stroop interference test
To measure cognitive executive function they use a Stroop interference test, which is a fun example of our brains' limitations, so here's an example:
The test compares the speed with which participants can state the colors of the words in the columns inside the box: on the left the color and the word are congruent (the word is the name of the color of the text for that word), on the right the color and the word are incongruent (the word is the name of a color, but not the color of the text for that word).
Other than color-blind people, almost everyone takes less time and makes fewer mistakes with the congruent than the incongruent column. That's because the brain CEO (executive function) has to stop the reading and process color in the case of incongruent. This is easy to see if one compares the test with the two extras: speed of the incongruent is about the same as that of reading the words in Extra 1 column, while the speed of stating the colors of the Extra 2 column is much faster (and less error-prone) than that of the incongruent column.
(The paper also measures BDNF, the chemical usually associated with better executive function, directly, by drawing blood and doing an ELISA test; but it's interesting to know that diet and exercise may make you a more disciplined thinker and to see that in the numbers for an actual executive function test, not just the serum levels.)
But I've never seen that $\$$11.99 'regular' price for this coffee, which would make it the only coffee in the entire aisle not to have a regular price of $\$$9.99. All the other sale signs say 'Save $\$$2,' for what it's worth…
Technically, Target isn't lying, it's 4 dollars off
But I've never seen that $\$$11.99 'regular' price for this coffee, which would make it the only coffee in the entire aisle not to have a regular price of $\$$9.99. All the other sale signs say 'Save $\$$2,' for what it's worth…
Destin 'Smarter Every Day' Sandlin visits a ULA rocket factory
And, on twitter, ULA CEO Tory Bruno gets a dig into SpaceX's Texas operations:
Live long and prosper!
