Showing posts with label math-mistakes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label math-mistakes. Show all posts

Sunday, July 28, 2013

More math mistakes

According to a picture that is making the rounds on Facebook, Halliburton will make enough money to pay off a $200,000 fine in "just 23 seconds".

$200,000 per 23 seconds is $274 billion per year. The "23 seconds" number appears to come from an article in the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/halliburton-fine_n_3659293.html

This article claimed it uses the 2012 revenue numbers. However, Halliburton's revenues are actually only about $28.5 billion per year:

http://www.halliburton.com/public/news/pubsdata/press_release/2013/Q412_Earnings_Release.pdf

Saturday, May 5, 2012

More bad math in the news

Ann Coulter on immigration:

Nearly three times as many Americans support reducing immigration as want it to stay the same, according to Gallup polls. A grand total of 5 percent of the population want to increase legal immigration -- 10 times less than want to decrease it.

 In other words, 50 percent of Americans want to decrease immigration, 17 percent of people want immigration to say the same, and 5 percent of people want to increase immigration. What about the other 28 percent?

Monday, April 4, 2011

In an email from Maryland PIRG

Maryland PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is a student advocacy organization that I somehow got on the mailing list of at Maryland and they still send me stuff. Their most recent email included the following:

"Some proposals in Congress would significantly cut student aid - the U.S. House voted to slash Pell Grant funding by $5.7 billion – cutting, on average, $785 in financial aid for over 9 million students."

"over 9 million" * $785 is over $7 billion, not $5.7 billion. (On the other hand, this may make sense if the $785 number is the median, and not the mean.)

Monday, March 28, 2011

From USA Today

A recent article in USA Today discussed standardized testing in D.C. public schools. It mentioned that some high-performing schools have very high numbers of answers erased on tests (when you erase an answer on the Scantron sheet and put in a new one, the machine can detect the residue). The article claimed that this could be possible evidence that teachers tampered with the tests prior to submitting them for grading.

The following quote appeared:

"Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools."

This statement is not too surprising. If the distribution of erasure rates were symmetrical, then in any given year half of them will be above average. Since the schools above average will change from year to year (if only due to random variation), then over a 3-year period more than half of the schools will be above average in at least one of those years. (For instance, if the erasure rates are random and independent, then each year each school will have a 1/2 probability of being above average, so each school will have a 7/8 probability of being above average in at least one year.)

Aside from this sentence, the rest of the article was actually fairly good statistically. It mentioned that this particular school hasd erasure rates so far higher that it wasn't due to chance, and included a lengthy discussion of possible alternative explanations for the data.

Friday, January 14, 2011

This was in the paper yesterday

"Even with a 2 percent a year spending cap written into the bill, Rep. Roger Eddy, R-Hutsonville, said state spending would be able to grow 17.5 percent over four years."

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Math and Gaming Superstitions

Even though you would expect that gamers would tend to be rational and good at math, I have noticed that gamers have a lot of superstitions and misunderstandings of probability.

For example, the sheer variety of dice-related superstitions is legendary. Frequently gamers will refer to some dice as being "lucky" or "unlucky." This in itself may sometimes make sense because it is possible that a die might be defective and so produce uneven results, but there are lots of superstitions that can't be explained that way. For example, one gamer told me that his group didn't want him to touch their dice because any dice he touched would suddenly "have their luck drained" and "roll horribly for months." And if you do a google search for "dice superstitions" you will find a whole lot more, like people who put dice that roll poorly in a freezer to "teach them a lesson."

Another common category of misunderstandings is not understanding independence of events. Frequently when someone gets a very good roll on something unimportant he will express regret at "wasting" a good roll. Of course getting this roll in no way impacts any future rolls. Last night I was playing Magic: The Gathering. It was a "draft" format which means you pass booster packs around, "drafting" cards out of the packs, and making a deck with the cards you draft. My opponent had a "Tome Scour" card in his deck that "mills"a target player five cards - i.e. makes him put five cards from the top of his library (draw pile) into his graveyard (discard pile). The main use of this type of card is in "mill decks" that try to win by emptying out the opponent's library (because if you have no cards to draw at the start of your turn you lose.) My opponent didn't have kind of deck but did say that he liked that card because "in the last game, I milled out lots of really good cards." Of course, milling out cards does not affect the average quality of the cards coming up - it's just as likely you will mill out poor cards and leave the opponent with the good ones.

Of course, sometimes the players aren't the ones that get the probability messed up - sometimes the players know more about probability than the game designers. My problem from a while ago, "Mathematically Challenged," is based on the actual skill challenge system in D+D 4th edition. If you didn't allow the "aid another" trick described in the problem (and the rules actually said you weren't supposed to allow that trick) I think the calculation was something like the characters had about a 7% chance of succeeding at an average difficulty skill challenge. After this was discovered, they released errata* that changed all the difficulty levels and challenge rules so that instead of it being a 7% chance of success, it was more like a 99.7% chance.

*There are currently over 100 pages of errata to D+D 4th edition, most of them to fix things which proved to be too powerful or easy to abuse. One recent example was Wormhole Plunge, a power that creates a one-square zone where whenever an enemy is in that zone, you can teleport him three squares. The trick was to teleport him three squares straight up, so he falls down and takes falling damage. After this he is then in the same square as before, so you can repeat the process. And the teleport is a free action, so you can do it as many times as you want in one turn, so you can keep going until the monster is dead, no matter how tough the monster is. And this is a power you can get at level 1. The fix was to make it so you can only do the teleport once per round.