Month: February 2015

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Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Chart of science-public split on science-related issues (from fivethirtyeight.com)
Science-public split on science-related issues (from fivethirtyeight.com)

The headline from stats web site, http://fivethirtyeight.com/, says Americans And Scientists Agree More On Vaccines Than On Other Hot Button Issues while the headline from Mother Jones, reporting on the same data, says, This Chart Shows That Americans Are Way Out of Step With Scientists on Pretty Much Everything. You wouldn’t know from the headlines that they were reporting from the same data.

If you ignore the text and just look at the data in each chart, while the chart from http://fivethirtyeight.com/ breaks the data out by political-party affiliation, the numbers do appear to be the same (or the same enough). The rhetoric and visualizations, however, are quite different.

Things that make you go, “hmmmm…..”

Or, another way to look at it is that it always pays to go to the source data.

Chart showing opinion differences between public and scientists from Mother Jones
Opinion differences between public and scientists from Mother Jones
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A great tutorial saved my glasses

Last night, in an attempt to fix a loose temple on my glasses, I found myself in a pickle. As is often the case, it was much easier to take my glasses apart than it was to reassemble them.

I’d taken the temple off my glasses frame to tighten a loose hinge. However, I realized (after dis-assembly, of course) that the spring tensioner in the temple made it impossible to replace the screw that holds it to the frame. Of course, I tried (stubbornly) for about 30 minutes to figure out how to reassemble my glasses. Alas, to no avail.

Eventually, I asked YouTube and found this video.

In less than two-and-a-half minutes, the video producer demonstrated the problem, the tools needed for the repair, showed how the method worked, and then the final outcome—a textbook-perfect tutorial. No fluff, just useful information. Five minutes later, I had my glasses reassembled and back in business.

Thanks danliv99!