Misleading language, again

Bob Herbert's op-ed in today's New York Times, Cracks in the Future, is all about the damage being done to California's public universities, Berkeley in particular, by the chaotic state budgeting system. He says (emphasis mine):

More of Berkeley’s undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.’s than those at any other university in the country.

which comes straight off a UC Berkeley website, A Legacy of Excellence.
This is a great example of the sort of language I want my students to learn to look out for. Berkeley's got about 25,000 undergraduates; Harvard's has 8,000. It's not particularly impressive to point out that "more" Berkeley students get Ph.D.'s. Plenty of state schools are larger than Berkeley, but almost every major private university is much smaller.

This is more for someone who teaches physics, as opposed to math and stats, but the New York Times yesterday ran an article about the potential for long-term risks of dementia in high school football players. The article contained the following quote:

At all levels, helmets are safer, rule adjustments have made the game less vicious, and awareness of the hidden dangers of football head trauma — among both medical personnel and the players — has greatly improved. The pressure to perform, however, has never been higher for teams and their players, whose ever-rising bulk and speed collide head-on with immovable physics.

“I go back to Einstein and E = mc2,” said Julian Bailes, a former Pittsburgh Steelers neurosurgeon and one of the leading researchers in the neurological effects of football concussions. “The players are definitely much more massive and that’s one factor. But you have 300-pound linemen running 4.3s — and that factor is squared. The impacts that players face today, not just the big ones that everyone sees but the routine ones in the trenches, is what really worries me.”

It looks like Julian Bailes is mis-remembering the actually relevant equation for kinetic energy=1/2mv², and confusing it with Einstein's famous but enrtirely irrelevant formula.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

According to the UN factsheet on persons with disabilities:

Around 10 per cent of the world’s population, or 650 million people, live with a disability. They are the world’s largest minority.

Huh?

"Exponentially"" actually means something, you know

From an article in today's New York Times about irregularities in the voting for American Idol:

Representatives of AT&T helped fans of Mr. Allen at the two Arkansas events by providing instructions on how to send 10 or more text messages at the press of a single button, known as power texts. Power texts have an exponentially greater effect on voting than do single text messages or calls to the show’s toll-free phone lines.

No, multiplying by 10 is not an exponential operation...

Abuse of percentages

From an article at the New York Times, about the persistent racial gap in high school test scores:

Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of America’s 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970’s. This was due largely to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.

I do not think that first percentage means what the journalist thinks it does...

Budget numbers

I've been wondering for a while what Obama meant when he said he was going to raise taxes on families making over $250,000, mostly because that's not a tax-bracket cut off. According to the New York Times summary, His proposal includes undoing the Bush tax cut at the top, apparently creating a new bracket at $250,000 and raising the marginal rate to 36% from 33% for incomes under $370,000, and raising it to 39.6% from 35% for incomes above that.

More interesting to me, though, is his plan to limit the value of tax deductions. I teach my students about the basic structure of the tax plan, and they're always surprised to see the implications. Right now, every $100 that I donate to charity (or spend as interest onmy mortgage) costs me $67, because I get $33 back in taxes. Someone poorer would only get $25 back in taxes; someone richer would get $35 back.

Under the Obama proposal, tax deductions would be capped at 28% (I think this is true even for people currently in the 33% bracket, but under the $250,000 limit). I think that proposal is politically brilliant. "Why should the rich get more help paying their mortgage than the middle class?"

And just in case you thought that budget projections were even remotely credible, the New York Times has a graphic for you:
Obama's projections are, unsurprisingly, on the rosy side, predicting GDP growth in the coming years that's higher than what many economists expect.

Joy of Cooking over time

How do modern home-cooking recipes compare to older ones? Many more calories per serving, according to one study.

Brian Wansink, from Cornell University, directed a study which looked at recipes from the many editions of the Joy of Cooking, first published in 1936. Over the years, eighteen dishes have appeared in every edition, including chili con carne, chicken gumbo, beef stroganoff, macaroni and cheese, brownies, waffles, sugar cookies, and apple pie. The average number of calories per serving went up 63% between 1936 and 2006. (Chili con carne apparently hasn't changed at all, but all the other saw an increase.)

Calories went up for two reasons. First, and most obvious to people eating the food, servings got much larger. The basic waffle recipe used to make 12 waffles; it now makes 6, with the same ingredients. Brownies? Used to make 30, now only 16.

But then there's the caloric density -- more meat instead of beans, more butter, more sugar, so even the same quantity of food has more calories. For fourteen of the 18 dishes, the total recipe has changed significantly, with has an average of 928 more calories, or 44% more. Chicken gumbo now serves 10 people, instead of 14 in 1936, but each serving has 576 calories instead of the old 228. As recently as 1997, the beef stroganoff recipe called for 3 tablespoons of sour cream; the 2006 version calls for a cup. I'd like to take a look at the actual recipes, but as the director of the study says: "That (calorie increases) is more insidious because that's the sort if thing the average person wouldn't notice, wouldn't even think would have happened over the years."

The research was published as a letter in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which means there isn't even an abstract available.

Fuel use per passenger

GOOD magazine has a nice chart answering a questions I've wondered before: what uses more fuel per person, cars or airplanes? (The main chart assumes that a car is only carrying the driver.)
Picked up from FlowingData.

Teens less interested in business careers?

An organization called Junior Achievement, whose goal is to "educate students about workplace readiness," has been polling teens for several years about their ideal job. This year's poll, publicized with the headline "NATIONAL POLL: TEENS' RANKING OF CAREER AS "BUSINESS PERSON" FALLS FROM FIRST TO FIFTH PLACE," showed some major changes from previous years:
"Business person" is down, and "Science/Engineering" and "Doctor" are way up as desired careers. Looks like the economic upheaval has made a huge impact on teens, right?

Not so fast. There's some fine print at the bottom that's important to read:

The 2009 Junior Achievement Kids and Careers Poll was conducted by Opinion Research the week of January 12, 2009, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percent. In previous years, the survey's methodology differed, and was conducted using an online survey tool.

I can't find details on their 2007 and 2008 careers polls, but they had many other polls conducted by Harris Interactive, an organization which asks volunteers to agree to be emailed about polls, and then selects a random sample from that pool. (Harris Interactive offers points for agreeing to be surveyed, which you can save towards prizes.) The sample is not remotely random, and the methodology is entirely different -- the poll is online, as opposed to by telephone. Drawing any conclusion by comparing these two older polls with the new random-sample based poll is impossible, because the differences in sample selection and methodology are just too large.

Google insight for search

I've been playing around with the Google Insights for Search tool, and found some really pretty graphs. Here's the popularity of chocolate, as a food and drink related search over time, complete with a big bump each Christmas and a somewhat smaller bump each Valentine's day:

On the dessert theme, we can also see the seasonal rise and fall of cookies, pies, and cakes:

There's a Mason-Dixon line for interest in cookies:
with cake interest centered in the South East:
Finally, Facebook is clearly the new MySpace: