Brushing Up on Math

A number of websites like Factcheck.org, and Politifact claim to uncover the truth behind political claims. John Stewart recently discussed CNN’s decision to "fact check" a Saturday Night Live skit. The media regularly reports on the facts behind campaign claims.

So it’s curious that newsrooms didn’t check out the balloon boy story, given that scientific data might have cleared up the rampant speculation. Kenneth Chang explains in The New York Times that with a calculator, some basic scientific principles, and careful observation, someone might have questioned the possibility of the balloon’s lift capacity. Popular Science did its own balloon boy physics fact-checking.

This is only one example of questionable math in the news. Dartmouth College publishes ChanceWiki, devoted to examining probability in current events. The Cochrane Collaboration looks at health care facts. In The Wall Street Journal, Carl Bialek writes The Numbers Guy column, examining "the way numbers are used, and abused, in news, business, and politics." Wired's Steven Leckart reports that Stephen King has a personal science fact checker, New Hampshire resident Russ Dorr.

Don’t have a personal math guru? There are some great layman’s resources. I’m a big fan of Darrel Huff’s classic How to Lie With Statistics, and my brother says Inummeracy, by John Allen Paulos, is the most useful math book he’s ever read.

Brushing up on math doesn’t have to be painful. At my house, it’s not unusual to find Foxtrot comics taped to a wall with the mantra "Math is Life" neatly printed on the top edge. Happily, Bill Amend just released a new Foxtrot themed collection, Math, Science, and Unix Underpants.

(Photo by Phoney Nickle via Flickr/Creative Commons)