{"id":3295,"date":"2017-12-18T08:30:09","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T13:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/?p=3295"},"modified":"2017-12-15T23:03:30","modified_gmt":"2017-12-16T04:03:30","slug":"news-in-numbers-and-nurturing-numeracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ams.org\/blogonmathblogs\/2017\/12\/18\/news-in-numbers-and-nurturing-numeracy\/","title":{"rendered":"News in Numbers and Nurturing Numeracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

My attention span is a little short right now. There\u2019s always the news, of course, but the lack of daylight around the end of the year gives me a weird combination of restlessness and lethargy. That\u2019s why one of my favorite columns in my blog feed right now is Significant Digits<\/span><\/a> from FiveThirtyEight. Every weekday, Walter Hickey rounds up a few numbers from the news. FiveThirtyEight<\/span><\/a> is well-known for its data-driven reporting about sports, politics, health, and pop culture, and I highly recommend their multi-article in-depth reports. (The series on gun deaths<\/span><\/a> was particularly compelling, and I\u2019m looking forward to reading and listening to their work on gerrymandering<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Credit: Jorge Franganillo, via Flickr.<\/p><\/div>\n

Significant Digits boils everything down to bite-sized nuggets of numbers, often with a splash of humor. I can almost ignore the occasional sponsored content and the fact that the numbers are listed in increasing order, but he treats percentages as 100 times their value. (That is, 85% is filed under 85, not 0.85. Am I pedantic? Very well then I am pedantic.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Numbers by themselves can do as much to obscure as to clarify. A million is a lot. But is raising or lowering the national debt by a million dollars a lot? Does a disease with a million sufferers affect a lot of people? I appreciate the fact that Significant Digits tries to contextualize the numbers and links to longer news stories so people who want to can get a more complete picture.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think of myself as a fairly numerate news consumer. When I read numbers in the news, I try to roll them around in my head a little to put them into context. A million dollars added to the US national debt is $0.30 per person or on the order of magnitude of 0.00001% of the current national debt. I like to play with Fermi problems, as I\u2019ve written about here before<\/span><\/a>. So it was especially hard on my ego when I visited math teacher Fawn Nguyen\u2019s<\/span><\/a> website Between 2 Numbers<\/span><\/a> and found out I was out of my depth trying to answer a lot of the questions. How many grains of sand does it take to cover LA to the depth of a foot? I have no idea. I guess I have some work to do to catch up to her students!<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My attention span is a little short right now. There\u2019s always the news, of course, but the lack of daylight around the end of the year gives me a weird combination of restlessness and lethargy. That\u2019s why one of my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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