Danagerous Percentages
A person has sent in some common sense
Am I the only person who is worried by the BBC and others lack of understanding of maths. They talk about the stock market having lost 40% of its value and then being happy with the fact that a 10% gain meaning it is 25% of the way back to where it was. (OK I am rounding numbers for simplicity) Please can people deal in real numbers as the 10% gain in reality is only 15% of the original level recovered. Is this another case of the media stirring things up?
October 14th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Ah yes, the use and abuse of numbers. I could rant about it, or I could point you towards Ben Goldacre’s book on ‘bad science’ that has a great chapter on uses and abuses of percentages. Any fan of common sense should own a copy:http://www.badscience.net/buy-the-book.
Or I could lend my copy, providing this act of lending did not breach any of the appropriate copyright laws.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
and it is not just percentages that can annoy. The use of made up units such as 4 times the length of a blue whale rather than 120m annoys me. I found this one recently “Four new windfarms that will produce enough electricity to power 230,000 homes, equivalent to a city more than four times the size of Norwich, started development today.” Why not just find a city that is the required size or even just state the MW capacity!