Presented by Bill Cloud

Julian Scheer term associate professor

School of Journalism and Mass

Communication

University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill

American Copy Editors Society Convention

Denver, 2008

No Calculators

Required

Joe Nuxhall, age 15, is shown in a Cincinnati Reds uniform in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 10, 1944, when he entered a game and pitched two-thirds of an inning to become the youngest player to ever participate in a major league game. (AP Photo)

A football field is 120 yards long (endline to endline)

Either way, the Baltic would not have covered two football fields and most of a third.

The fastest Indianapolis 500 ever:

185.981 mph, Arie Luyendyk, in 1990

Or 200 mph.

Sgt. J .M. Praskey told the Syracuse Herald American that t he race began Saturday morning in Boston and that some of the people arrested covered the 1 75 miles from the Massachusetts-New York line to Syracuse in 90 minutes — averaging 115 mph.

300 miles in 90 minutes = 100 miles every 30 minutes

How heavy is a paperweight?

Addition = sum

Subtraction = difference

Multiplication = product

Division = quotient

If 50 percent more is X + 0.5X …

Then isn’t 6 times more equal to X + 6X?

350 + (6*350) =2,450, not 2,100

If 50 percent as much is X * 0.5 …

Then, isn’t 6 times as much equal to X* 6?

350 *6 = 2,100

A distinction worth preserving?

“The average (mean) score for blacks in percentage terms was 49, and that for whites was 72.”

Less than half as well?

200,000 km2 * 0.386102159 = 77,220.4318 square miles.

An imprecise estimate (200,000) becomes a precise figure (77,220)

Chernobyl

Another estimate becoming exact?558 feet = 170 meters

902 feet = 275 meters

3,000 Miles

3,000 Miles

3,000 * 3,000 = 9 million square miles

Wikipedia: 3,718,695 square milesAtlapedia: 3,618,784 square miles Enchanted Learning: 3,537,441 square milesCIA: 9,826,630 km2, or 3,794,083.1 square milesTake your pick!

Area of United States?

But it was labeled mcf!

So much for a trend!

• In 2001, there were 79 train-vehicle crashes.

• In 2002, there were 78.

• In 2003, there were 72.

The chart belies the lede

A good rule of thumb:

A trend is three measurements in the same direction.

The M&M ChallengeCourtesy of Phil MeyerKnight Chair in Journalism

Regression toward the mean:

A school district views with pride that its lowest-scoring school in 2006 on a standardized text shows improvement in 2007.

But that’s what’s most likely to happen. Extremely high or extremely low scores tend to regress toward the mean simply because of random luck.