A million here, a million there ...

Yes, I'd say that at 48 kilometers, "towering" barely begins to do it justice:
 

YUMA, Ariz. — On a dirt road past rows of date trees, just feet from a dry section of Colorado River, a small construction crew is putting up a towering border wall that the government hopes will reduce — for good — the flow of immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

Cicadas buzz and heavy equipment rumbles and beeps before it lowers 30-foot-tall (48-kilometer-tall) sections of fence into the dirt. “Ahí está!” — “There it is!” — a Spanish-speaking member of the crew says as the men straighten the sections into the ground. Nearby, workers pull dates from palm trees, not far from the cotton fields that cars pass on the drive to the border.

True it is that everybody's going to count the toes and forget to divide by 10 at some point; the AP isn't the first to get its zeroes and decimal points crossed up in those pesky metric conversions. The more likely sign of the apocalypse is that nothing's built into the system any longer to catch a wire blunder before publication. (The screen grab is from the AP's own site; the text from Military Times.)

Four shalt thou not count

Dear CNN: Do you suppose arithmetic ought to be one of those Five Things "you need to know to Get Up to Speed and Out the Door"?

If you're on the edge of your seat with the home version of our game there, yes. There is a Door No. 5:

Not that I'd mind if it was getting harder, but no, it doesn't feel like that, and if it did, it probably would be my imagination (though the water did show up straw-free at the local last week, huzzah). I'm not in Seattle, and it isn't 2020. This, kids, is why we try to avoid addressing the reader directly.

And this one is kind of the last straw, though it's actually the first, being why I clicked on the damn story in the first place:

See, in the old days, once you got to five or six or seven things you had to know to get out the door that day, you drew them on a "dummy" and called it the "front page." Do you sort of see how that might be an improvement?

Bet he didn't

OK. You change the batteries in your calculator every few months because if your mom says she loves you, you need to know if she means at p < .05 or if her love merely approaches statistical significance and she probably prefers your little brother. And, of course, for this:

During a prayer meeting-Bible study in the First Baptist sanctuary, 30 or so members prayed for Trump after one of them brought up a report that Trump had recently become a “born-again” Christian. The source of the story was Dobson, who has since dubbed Trump a “baby Christian.”

.... Among those praying: Your Name Here, 97, of Charlotte, a First Baptist member since 1942 who said he voted for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas – the top choice of evangelicals – in North Carolina’s GOP primary.

So naturally it's time for a telling detail:

But now Here, who cast his first vote for president in 1936, is ready to go with Trump. “He’s probably a blowhard, but I think he has some good ideas,” Here said. “He is saying what I think a majority of people want to hear ... and I think he would do a good job picking judges.”

If he was born in late July 1918, then yes -- he would have turned 18 in time for the 1936 election. And would have turned 21 in plenty of time to vote in 1940.  When you have a chance to talk politics with folks that age, it's rude to be too skeptical, but you're not excused from doing the math.

In general, it'd be nice if stories of this sort were more inquisitive -- if sources who express concern about "Clinton’s record on Benghazi" had a chance to explain how that record differed from Fox News's, for example. Big details build on small ones, and the election is actually approaching.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article87136047.html#storylink=cpy

 

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article87136047.html#storylink

A million here, a million there ...

How are things going with those metric conversion charts, Nation's Newspaper of Record?
 
Also because of an editing error, the obituary referred incorrectly in some copies to the height of an architectural project, devised by Mr. Parent and Mr. Virilio, that is suspended 10 meters in the air. That equals about 33 feet, not 330 feet.

Do the math. Think of the children!

Having spent most of last week hanging around with 500-odd* editors at the ACES conference, I suppose it's nice to find the local frontpage still turning out classroom-ready material regularly.

There's a reason we teach the difference between "1 percent" and "1 percentage point." They're both correct things you can say about taxes, but they aren't the same correct thing. This proposal would take the sales tax up a point, from 6 to 7 percent, but that's an increase of about 17 percent. Put that way, the already ungainly -- and, it seems, wildly unpopular -- plan loses a few more moving parts.

The Freep, it's worth noting, has supported the proposal. I have no reason to think that has anything to do with the error at hand, but if a caller asks whether we lowballed the tax increase because we're biased or because we're clueless, I'd rather not be in the position of having to say "Clueless, but thanks for asking!"

And yes, "results" in the first clause needs a plural verb. How the poll managed to become a "huge pothole" I don't know, but that's writering, not grammaring or mathing.

* Go on, lose the hyphen You know you want to!

With a load of iron ore ...

Should we start a pool for when or whether we see a correction on this one?

It began in 1879 with the discovery of massive iron deposits that were big enough to merit giving the name Iron Mountain to the town that grew above it, and vast enough to bring more than 28 million pounds of iron to the surface before it closed in 1934 after the Great Depression hit.

Copy editors aren't supposed to be impressed by numbers; they're supposed to be polite but skeptical. Is that a lot? Compared to what? If at this point they're humming along with Gordon Lightfoot, that's a good start, because the next step is figuring out how many pounds in "26,000 tons more* than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty." That's a lot of iron ore, and you don't need a calculator to get 52 million pounds** from it.

That's iron ore, not iron itself, so while you're asking how much ore it takes to produce a pound of iron, you could amuse yourself with a few more questions: how long the Edmund Fitzgerald plied the lakes (17 years), whether it made only one trip a year (no), how much iron ore the US produces these days (52 million tonnes in 2013, according to the Wikipedias), and so on. I'd kind of like to know.

Should we expect reporters to be perfect? No. We should expect them to be busy -- and human. They're entitled, in turn, to expect their employers to keep enough editors on hand to help mitigate those conditions.

* No Michigan newspaper would ever say "26 tons," would it?
** Apparently Gordon meant long tons, or 58.5 million pounds.

Editing basics: Let me be your salty dog

 How salty were those fries, Nation's Newspaper of Record?

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the elimination of reduced-fat French fries in some Burger King outlets misstated the number of stores that decided to eliminate the item, called Satisfries. It is slightly fewer than 5,000, not about 7,500. The article also misstated the amount of sodium in Satisfries and regular fries. Satisfries have 300 milligrams of sodium, not 300 grams; regular fries have 480 milligrams, not 480 grams.

We'll be reviewing some of the basic rules of copy editing in the weeks ahead (there is, after all, a new semester closing in), so here's one to start with: Whenever you see two numbers, do something with them. That doesn't mean you should turn every proportion into a percentage, or every mean into a median, at first sight. It should suggest that your first reaction upon seeing a number -- let's say, "six" -- in a news story shouldn't be "omg SIX!!!!!" Rather, you should look the number, and the person waving it at you, squarely in the eye and ask: Six of what?

In this case, you might be asking: What does 300 grams of something mean in real money? Whether you get to the answer by flipping open your stylebook or by looking things up on the Googles, you're going to arrive in a similar place: An order of regular fries doesn't come with a pound of salt, even if all the weight of salt came from sodium by itself.

Broadly speaking, there's little you can do as a copy editor that's more valuable than to have some suspicion about the things you're looking at. It's risky to overstate the role of common sense, but here, it's a rather good starting point.

Math is hard. Let's go gambling!

What's the bad news from the East Coast there, Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper?*

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Atlantic City started the year with 12 casinos. By Labor Day, it could be down to nine.

Nine minus twelve, carry the two, look at the tens place -- do you suppose there's a hint in the fourth graf?

... Mayor Don Guardian, who could see a quarter of his city’s casinos close during his first year in office, said Atlantic City is in the midst of a difficult but necessary makeover from being a gambling resort to a multifaceted destination where betting is only part of the allure.

Let's stay away from those friendly games of chance until we get this worked out, all right?


(h/t operative "Natasha" from the Central Ohio Bureau) 

* UPDATE: The hed's now corrected online, so credit where it's due.

Today in 'Ask the Editor'

Q. I am writing material that requires Imperial dimensions with parenthetical metric dimensions. Would I write "the 60-foot-tall (20-meter) tree" or "the 60-foot (20-meter) tall tree"? – from Charlotte, N.C. on Sun, Feb 23, 2014

A. The 60-foot-tall (20-meter) tree ...

Dear Charlotte: Neither of the above. A 60-foot tree is about 18.3 meters (18 if you use the feet-to-meters conversion on page 170 of your AP Stylebook, which is a little less accurate than its meters-to-feet counterpart).

Practically, your audience is likely to default to height if that's the only number you mention, so "the 60-foot (18.3-meter) tree" would be fine. But if your style is picky enough to demand both measurements, it's picky enough to tolerate a little arithmetic and a decimal point.

The Magnificent ... wait, what?

This isn't really "do the math." It's barely even "do the arithmetic," since it more or less boils down to "take your shoes off and count, being sure to stop at the seventh little piggy."

Astute readers will note that by now, the image has been, erm, updated, as shown at right, though there's still a stray arm in there that looks like something from the Big Soviet Encyclopedia days. But the prose is still its magnificent self:

This week, we finally get to see six of these seven samurai clash -- in showdowns that have everything except Yul Brynner! -- and if we've already broken the three-reference-per-sentence barrier, you know this week is good, before we even get to the Dysfunctional Power Rankings and Flinch Bowl.

Thanks to the alert Philadelphia bureau for the catch -- and thank you, toy departments everywhere.


 

If 10 was 11

It's easy to put a foot, or a finger, wrong in trying to convert those pesky metric measurements to real American ones, but converting tons to tons does seem a bit like painting the lily -- especially when 10 turns out to be 11.

This one's fairly widespread, suggesting that it started with the AP.* Here's the version from the WashPost:

The trail of a falling object is seen above a residential apartment block in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk. A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia’s Ural Mountains on Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more.

I expect someone at the AP simply opened the stylebook to the metric conversion chart (p. 166) and followed the rule -- "Normally, the equivalent should be in parentheses after the metric figure" -- for converting metric tons to short tons. As Lawrence said of transliteration systems, that's really helpful if you already speak AP. The rest of the world is justified in being a little confused.

* Though it obviously persisted through the minimal sort of processing that agency copy gets these days at individual US websites; the screen grab from the N&O was provided by Strayhorn in the Triangle buro.

Those pesky zeroes

How much ice, Associated Press?

The meteorological administration said Saturday that ice had covered 27,000 square meters (10,500 square miles) of the sea surface by Thursday, the most expansive since 2008 when authorities began to collect such data. The administration expects the ice to continue to grow.

Credit to the Times, which actually reads AP copy before running it. Many others could draw conclusions.

Math is hard. Let's go editing!

Kids, are you ready to be a copy editor? What's your first reaction to the hed above?
Read more »

Why do you think it's on the test?

Given this from the Nation's Newspaper of Record:

Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about the concern of some economists that a failure to extend the payroll tax cut could undercut the country’s fragile economic recovery described incorrectly the increase in taxes that would occur without such Congressional action. Taxes on the payroll income of America’s 160 million wage earners would increase to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent; the change would not amount to a 2 percent tax increase.

And this, from the Foremost Newspaper of the Carolinas:

Employees have paid a 4.2 percent Social Security tax this year, a 2 percent cut.

... three questions (rounded for your convenience):

• What's the percentage increase when a tax rises from 4 percent to 6 percent?
• What's the percentage decrease when a tax falls from 6 to 4 percent*?
• If a tax rate is cut by 50 percent one year and that result is raised by 50 percent the following year, is the resulting tax rate the same as the initial tax rate?

These will continue to be on the final until there's evidence from the field that America's Newspapers -- whether international, regional or hyperlocal, whether delivered in print or through some yet-unimagined satanic tablet device developed in some garage in California -- can get the answers right at better than chance levels.

* Your audience is significantly -- χ² (2 df) 53.25, p = .001, v = 0.648 -- less bothered by "30 to 40 percent" than by "$2 to $3 million," if you're looking for style rules to reconsider.

DTFM: You're going to need a bigger river

Well, there's a lovely idea for a pre-Fourth-weekend centerpiece: the Old Hometown's paper has a guide to watching the fireworks in Wilmington, where the retired battleship North Carolina is among the stars of the holiday.

Comes a point in every shift, though, when we need to put down the hot dogs and sparklers and actually read over the stuff in front of us. Even if you aren't familiar with that stretch of the Cape Fear, your editorial radar ought to be sending out the old alarm: Seven thousand feet is a lot of boat.

Now let's not hear any com- plaints about how busy it is on the rim and how we aren't supposed to check everything, are we? No, we aren't. But we are supposed to read everything, and and one handy hint for reading effectively is to stop at any number or set of numbers and ask where it stands in relation to other numbers.

Read more »

DTFM: No, he didn't

The basic math rule -- when you see two numbers, do something to them -- doesn't just apply to numbers you see. It's also for numbers that are implied. When an obit says someone served in a war, you don't just subtract the birth date from the date at the top of the page and see if it matches the listed age, you compare the birth date to the end of the war.

Same thing with childhood influences. So when you see that Glenn Beck grew up listening to Orson Welles's "Mercury Theater of the Air," your response ought to be: Not without a time machine.

Romenesko's one of my must-read stops, but -- well, everybody needs a copy editor. A buzzer should go off when your source copy starts by saying Beck is a "former" Fox pundit. And this is from the conclusion:

By the end of Citizen Kane, it is clear that Kane has abused his capacity to connect with listeners, by coding his views into headlines, both on the global scale, in declaring the Spanish-American War, and personal, launching an opera career for his wife against her will.

"People will think what I tell them to think," Kane says.

That line* is from quite a bit before the end of "Kane" -- back in Charlie's first marriage, when, on the evidence, he's still "connecting" pretty well with his audience (who were mostly "readers," not listeners). Sloppiness with detail suggests sloppiness in metaphors too.

* And if it's the one I'm thinking of, he doesn't say it. Emily says "Charles, people will think ..."; he picks up the "what I tell them to think."

DTFM

The physicist Torahiko Terada wrote in 1934, “The more civilization progresses, the greater the violence of nature’s wrath.” Nearly 67 years later, his words appear prescient.

As we're told, the articles collected under the hed are translated from the Japanese. That doesn't mean they don't have to be edited in English. Again, we can't tell from here if it's a mistake in the original, an error by the translator or a random slip of the finger somewhere. But we should be reminded that whenever two numbers occur in this sort of relationship, an editing subroutine has to kick in: Does A plus (or minus, or times, or gazinta) B add up to what we say it does?

There's a clue in the second part that might have helped: a reference to Hirohito's "radio address at the end of World War II, 66 years ago." Why the first is "nearly 67" and the second is an unadorned "66" (the speech in question would most likely be the one of Aug. 15, 1945, so it's hard to see why one is less "nearly" than the other) is a mystery. Maybe it's the general fear in news style of beginning a sentence with a number. But sometimes, what we don't notice is as interesting as what we do.

The fear of all sums

All right -- I totally stole the hed from this week's Economist, because it's the best hed I've seen in a while and is far better than the lame effort I was playing with for this entry.

Anyway. Enjoyed the Ben Zimmer language column in the Times magazine this month, which reminds me that I haven't been rushing to the magazine first thing on Sunday mornings to read the language column, which probably means some important part of my weekly quota of political and epistemological train wrecks is being met somewhere else now that the "On Language" column is written by an actual language person. I count that as progress, and I expect to be a more regular reader.

Ben's topic is "quant" and how it got that way: a noun meaning not just people who do quantitative research, but people whose quanthood marks them as the double-naught spies of the financial world. It's a deft, professional and speedy (columnists are shortstops, not chessplayers) look at how a word that you might see in daily discourse came to mean what it does. Given my druthers, I'd like to see him spend some time on the cultural factors that make the Times itself so worshipful of some quanty approaches and so clueless about others, but that's asking a lot of a biweekly column that belongs to someone else.

Intentionally or not, the column is even nicer in context. This issue, after all, declares that "we are all statisticians now" (p. 37) and that for journalists, "the recession has ... made capitalists out of everyone" (p. 50). Fortunately, along with platitudes, it has a column by John Allen Paulos that addresses the importance of putting even the scariest of quant results into their appropriate social as well as statistical contexts.

All of that had me in an appropriate mood for Monday's Freep, which produced this candidate for dumbest statistic of the year:

The Fiesta could save its owners more than $100 a year in fuel costs compared with other subcompacts.

This, mind you, from the auto columnist who just the day before had set out to debunk "myths on fuel economy":

The window-sticker mileage figures are a guarantee of the mileage you'll get

Not even close. How you drive has a massive impact on your mileage. However, the window-sticker figures are the only way to realistically compare fuel economy and operating costs when you shop for a new vehicle.

The numbers are generated in lab tests, so every vehicle is held to the same standard. "Your mileage will vary" as the fine print says, but you can trust that a higher EPA rating will save you money.

What I'd like out of a writer who covers the industry? A little basic curiosity -- enough to ask about what the "lab tests" entail, and what the results look like, and their relationship to the number I see in the showroom. In other words, some reporting that not only helps you relate the test conditions to real life (validity) but hints at the relationship of the sample statistics to real life (reliability). There should be an equivalent of the much-abused "margin of error" here. What is it, and why isn't it a part of reporting about fuel economy?

That gets us off track a little from the cosmic measure of fuel economy introduced in Monday's story, the "dollar per year." What the Fiesta "could save" its owners is, in the story's terms, partly a question of statistical significance:

The Fiesta will lead other subcompacts by a significant margin, however. The Chevrolet Aveo, Honda Fit, Kia Rio, Mini Cooper, Nissan Versa, Scion xD and Toyota Yaris have EPA ratings of 27-29 m.p.g. in the city and 34-37 on the highway.

Not so fast. The city ratings -- 27-29 vs. 29 -- show that in some of those cases, there's no difference at all. How significantly 37 is different from 40 should have some bearing on the overall question, but we're going to have trouble interpreting that without some sort of handle on the average (or test) proportion of city miles and highway miles in our calculations.

And we're still nowhere near addressing the core components of DPY,* or dollars per year: how much does gasoline cost, and how much do you drive? Three years ago, the Official HEADSUP-L Saturn spent most of its time going back and forth on Stewart Road,** and it was fed about once a month. Today, it mostly goes up and down I-75, and it's fed twice a month. It's going about 30% farther per nom, but it has a lot farther to go, so in a short-term sense*** it's a relief that the price has stayed below $3/nom.

Summary? I'm not sure I'd be happy in a world in which we were all statisticians now. (I'm not going to qualify, for one thing.) But I'd be much happier about the future of journalism if people who undertook to use numbers to support their assertions actually paid attention to the numbers/assertions relationship and whether it did what it was meant to do. It's sort of like checking the oil.

* Freep style would probably call for periods: D.P.Y. Ack.
** Honk if you know how to get to the original Manor from Neff Hall.
*** Longer term, we should just tax the hell out of the stuff. My goal is to laugh all the way from campus to the light-rail stop a block from the brewpub.

When you see two numbers ...

... do something to them. Sometimes one of those numbers isn't in the story, but it's usually close at hand:

A biography of Mr. Zinkhan, 47, on the university Web site said he was the co-author of two books, on consumption and electronic commerce, and had served as editor of The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and of The Journal of Advertising. He received a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1981 and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1974. He joined the faculty at the University of Georgia in 1994.*

The number you want to invite to the party is "2009," which you'll find in the folio line at the top of the page. Try subtracting the subject's age from that. Now compare the result to the year he got his undergraduate degree (1974). Precocious, huh?

I'm not even sure we should call it "math," since it's rarely more complicated than addition and subtraction, but -- DTFM. Every time. Please.

* His age is given as 47 in the national edn that we get up here, but it's 57 (which the AP had been using since Saturday) in the online version as of this writing. If you can shed light on when it was fixed, pls do.

DTFM: Sports edition

Journalism doesn't have a lot of respect for motherhood, does it? After all, it's the craft that gave humankind the phrase "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Well, time for a corollary:

If your mother says "somebody already checked the arithmetic," stuff a towel in her mouth and get out your calculator.

Even in sports? The one department in which a "statistics junkie" is considered an asset, rather than a nuisance who gets in the way of the soaring prose in your survey stories? Alas:

The most games the Tigers can win is 83. The White Sox have 83 wins and the Twins 82. Because the Twins and White Sox have three games left with each other, one will be assured of winning at least 83 games.

True (as long as you don't count the subordinate clause; the Sox are assured of 83 wins because they have 83 wins, not because of how many games any dyad has left), but off by a game. The leading team needs 84 wins, not 83, for the Tigers to go under*, and if the Sox and Twins finish more than one of their three games, one of them will get to 84.

The math doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be done. And if your mother tells you to steal third with two out, kick her in the shins.

* As the online version now notes. It used to be a point of pride to actually get things right in print, though.