Pete Reum on the Web

Everyone is selling — are you buying?  Using a Generation Kill‘ism – respect the math.  Learn to think for yourself and ask critical questions. I just heard and ad on tv saying – 70% cleaner – cleaner than what?  Ask the questions.  Enable yourself to find the answers.  Don’t depend on others or believe others all the time.

I have my degree in Applied Mathematics.  I do love math for many reasons.  It is a true international language.  You can model things in math, display data in or with math and our world is just full of math.  You can even go to the moon and beyond!

Now I do have issues with math.  Not so much with the science as with the application.  I like to look at data with a critical eye.  To do that, you need to have the underlying data somewhat exposed.  A quick example would be that the murder rate in a city is up 100% over last year.  In a city the size of New York that would be quite a few people according to wikipedia: “there were 2,245 murders in 1990″.  Now compare that with a town that had 1 murder in 1990.  100% increase in New York would mean that there would have been 4,490 murders vs. 2 in our “other town”.  The underlying data does matter.

So here is where my issue is with this example.  If you want to get a good sound bite you use the 100% increase without exposing the underlying data.  However if you use another math concept, murder per 100,000 or some other metric, might that not give you a better idea of the change?  Back to wikipedia for this data from 1963: ” there were 539 murders that year, for a murder rate of 6.58 per 100,000 people”.  While this is again very useful information you would need to do some math to figure out how many people were in New York during this time.  Here is one of those word problems.  rate = (murders /population) * 100,000.  Plug in the values and you get the population of New York in 1990 was 8,191,489.  This compares with 7,322,564 as stated here.  Close yes, but the numbers are not the same.  So who do you believe.  I think you need to question what is given to you and learn how to do your own math to keep others honest.  And alway try to figure out the data.

We should all try to use our skills, and not just believe.  Please do us all a favor and learn how to critically think about things.  Maybe not everything, but do question what others are telling you.  I think this is especially true when you do not agree with the information that is presented to you.  Don’t just throw it out, discount it with your own fact checking.  The internet has made this a much easier task.

Do you like to question facts?