News – Page 4 – Fooyah

December 19 2014December 24 2014

Apologies And Why They Annoy Me

I’m fed up with people, mostly MPs apologising for their dim-witted ill-informed opinions/behaviour. I taken some clips from the BBC website. Here they are:

So, these people feel that they did wrong and believe that apologising means it’s all ok. I think the recent spate of politicians apologising just shows how bad our representatives are [I’ve no evidence that apologies are becoming more frequent, just I am noticing it more]. If you do something wrong while in the position of public office, then fuck off and resign. Grow some balls. Become a better person.

If someone says something that they later regret [because it affects their position of power] then we should embrace what they say and use it to inform debate and discussion. I want sincere apologies and education. I want reformed behaviour. How do you show you are truly sorry? You reform.

An MP plays Candy Crush during a meeting. Why? What is wrong with his job/meeting/attention span? After our representatives are caught out they should use this as an opportunity to explain themselves, not run and hide behind an apology. The media should use this as a chance to inform and educate.

Tory Peer says the poor can’t cook. She apologises because that’s easier and quickly forgotten rather than explaining her comments and having an informed debate about why she said that. Is there a reason she believes this? Perhaps we should educate her and the rest of society. This gaff should have been used as a tool for informing people what is really going on in society and facing up to our collective responsibilities. Informed, evidence based discussion is how we change people’s minds. Apologising is the easy way out.

Image from #Rochester pic.twitter.com/rOjTgpskmF

— Emily Thornberry MP (@EmilyThornberry) November 20, 2014

This tweet caused no end of trouble for the MP. I don’t understand why. She tweeted a picture of a house from Rochester. It looked pretty standard to me. She apologised. That was easy. What we didn’t have was a debate, an informed discussion about what that picture meant. We didn’t use this tweet as a opportunity to educate and inform people. The mass media used “outrage” to force an apology rather than look into the deeper social issues. We shouldn’t pretend that houses like this don’t exist, we should work at getting everyone involved in our society.

My message here is that I want people to stop apologising for things they say or do. It’s easy to apologise. It’s easy to stand up and say sorry. What is harder is admitting you have biased or poor views of the reality and then trying to change future behaviour and inform and educate people.

“I deeply regret posting that naked picture of my cock on twitter and apologise for any offence caused” – a poor apology.

“I wish to inform you that I am a bigoted old man who lusts after young women. I thought that posting a picture of my cock would encourage women to want me back. I realise that I am the product of a mostly misogynistic world where women are treated like property and I will now work tirelessly to educate people and to improve the balance of the sexes within our patriarchal inherently sexist society. I have joined the following organisations and will form a political committee with powers to adjust laws and highlight the injustices we have in our society.” – this man would get my vote.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’m annoyed by people apologising and thinking it’s all forgotten. I want apologies and then a CHANGE in behaviour. I want reformation. I want education of the issues. I don’t want these issues just dismissed with a simple apology.

I think this communication, as rambling as it is, goes with another to come. It will be titled OUTRAGE.

November 26 2014November 26 2014

The Extreme Rule – A Gaussian Explanation

Why do nutters make the headlines? Why is it reportable if a 13 year old kid decided to go and fight for Islamic State? There are plenty of people who have decided to go and fight, it shouldn’t surprise us that one of them turns out to be a youngster. It WASN’T news. People lied about their ages and signed up for WW1, that was seen as patriotic [different issue though].

The crazy 5% of our population seems to inhabit 95% of our news time and concern. This is pathetic. The news reporting for the Islamic killer kid should have been more realistic, along the lines of “This kid has decided to do go to Syria and fight for a cause he believes in but there are approximately twenty million children who haven’t”.

Crazy person drives down the wrong carriageway on the motorway, it happens and makes the news. The reporting is never “out of 200 million journeys this has happened only once”.

Here’s a diagram to show what I mean [with apologies to Karl Gauss].

The continuum in the top graph is meant to describe how there are stupid people who do stupid stuff and there are nutters who know what they are doing but do it anyway. 95% of the population are somewhere in the middle.

The media seems obsessed with crazy or stupid people who, by definition, do crazy or stupid stuff. This is made even more evident by the amount of this shit on the internet. There is never a realistic version explaining that actually this is a rare event and we shouldn’t be bothered by it.

Humans have a very poor “risk calculating” ability. We are unable to understand probability correctly. Partly because it actually gets quite hard and complicated and partly because we are shielded from correct interpretation of risk by a culpable media.

Some things we don’t seem to understand:

Flying is safer than crossing the road
MMR is safe
The difference between relative risk and absolute risk
Crime is falling
Education is a good thing [the stupid are celebrated]
Weather is not climate

A final hurrah before I go and do some ironing:

Q: If you have twenty people, how many different soccer teams could you create from those people (if you specified which position they played in)?

A: 6,704,425,728,000

Wow, that’s a lot you should say.

Q: If you have twenty people, how many different soccer teams could you create from those people?

A: 167,960

Q: Suppose you were the captain. How many different teams could you create from the remaining nineteen people?

A: 92,378

See, you are useless at numbers and probability.

September 17 2014

Chin Strap

This really is a headline on the BBC News website. There’s a picture below this of a piece of chewing gum.

Apparently two engineers have taken a pre-existing material and attached it to a chin strap. It then produced some electricity when the user used their jaw and it could feasibly be used to charge a device.

I don’t even know where to start being annoyed at this. While I am nearly impressed with their idea it seems ludicrous to me that you would wear something on your FACE that then required you to use your jaw constantly. SURELY there are other parts of a body that move further and more often. This would only work if you have to wear a chin strap for safety reasons anyway [definitely not Sikhs].

Most of my anger remains directed at the BBC. They are the premier news reporting service in the UK and yet they constantly produce shit like this. Is it really someone’s job to read science journals and then EXTRAPOLATE wildly to make some form of headline that will attract readers. I hate it. It’s lazy and not what a NEWS service is for.

Let’s see what the final line of the article is:

“This is just a proof of concept,” Dr Voix emphasised. “The power is very limited at the moment.”

If you have to include this in your story then it is NOT a story. Report on real science responsibly.

July 21 2014

It’s What Happens

I teach. It’s what I do. I teach teenagers. A lot of people I meet consider this to be a mad career. Teenagers are horrible. They wonder why I don’t teach younger kids. I teach because of a long series of accidents and uninformed choices throughout my life. However, after starting my teacher training in 1995 I found that I loved being in the classroom and working with kids. I consider myself utterly fortunate to have discovered a career that I enjoy so much. I have often said to myself that the day I “have to go to work” is the day I quit, at the moment I still get up every (working) day and “go to school”.

Teenagers are hilarious. They try to argue and make valid points, they are starting to learn the craft of putting together valid arguments and come to valid conclusions. Some can do this well, others take quite a bit longer. They often try to communicate their thoughts are struggle to do so. Daily I am involved in creating new thoughts and ideas and methods for explanation. This is great. It’s exciting and when the teenagers mess it up it’s just funny. I work with some of the brightest and [unintentionally] hilarious young people.

You’ll have to take this on trust but having a teenager try to explain his/her actions in a logical manner leaves me laughing (inside rather than in their face). Although my role is to teach mathematics I also aim to offer up techniques for questioning and finding out what really happens, how to get evidence, how to appraise arguments. I see this as far more important than the actual mathematics I teach. If I can help people seek their own evidence and make their own decisions then I have succeeded in improving their contributions to future society.

The title of this communication is “It’s What Happens”. I’d just like to point out that society seems to have a massive “downer” on teenagers.

Said Socrates [not the footballer]:

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.

This is a quite well known quotation. It’s definitely gives the impression that we hate teenagers and have done for many years of society. There are often modern headlines in the newspapers and web-news-services where the implication is that modern society is going to ruin because of a type of behaviour of teenagers or young people. This is utter rubbish.

Here’s some cases of behaviour of the youth ruining society:

Pinball machines in the 1940s
Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1950s
Sex and drugs in the 1960s
Punk in the 1970s
Alcopops in the 1990s
Mobile phones in the 2000s

Most of the people “corrupted” by these forms of behaviour are now the ESTABLISHMENT. I’m pretty sure that if you look hard enough you will see that society isn’t ruined. My theory is as follows:

People who write opinions and the news are jealous of teenagers. They don’t like the freedom, the care-less-ness, the risk taking, the fun that teenagers have. It reminds them of what they have lost and the dreams that have dimmed. It reminds them of mortgages, children and politics. They want to be young again.

The constant dislike of teenagers in the press is a constant of society, it will always be there. Are the youth terrible? Are the youth poorly behaved? No, not really. Teenagers are meant to be restless and care-free. It means they move on and develop in to fully functioning adults. It’s what happens.

July 10 2014

Daily Fail

I shouldn’t really pick on the Daily Mail because it is like shooting fish in a barrel. This was the MAIN headline earlier today:

Firstly, my response to this is “you are stupid and you should say NO to her”.

A bigger issue with this, apart from the celebration of the outliers of society rather than concentrating on reinforcing the good of society, is that this was the FIRST story on the Daily Fail website today. I’ll say that again: The FIRST.

Today there are massive public sector strikes, the government are bringing in a snooping law and there are wars still killing people around the world. Even the soccer world cup is on at the moment and this was what the Daily Fail chose to inform the world about. Tossers.

April 5 2014April 5 2014

Spot The News

Can you spot the news in the following BBC Website clip?

NO?

Neither could I. This appears at first reading of the headline to indicate that they’ve found a signal from the airplane. Then you read the next bit and realise it isn’t. Maybe, just maybe the BBC should have waited for the Chinese to confirm something. The endless speculation about this airplane has driven me to indifference.

Here’s a crazy idea for the BBC News people:

How about you report something when it really is new and confirmed from two independent sources.

Can you believe that this organisation is the pinnacle of reporting in this country? No, once again neither can I. I have pretty much given up following the news. I get most of my information from the following sources:

The Today Programme on Radio 4
The New Quiz on BBC Radio 4
Private Eye

Here’s a recent tweet of mine to show I don’t hold The Today Programme in high esteem all the time:

Here’s a link to a recent rant about BBC News Reporting. I find that I get the general idea of what is going on in this country by listening to and reading satire. While listening to the radio I used to think that people were being a bit harsh in their picking on Ed Milliband’s voice, but that was until I heard him. Thank goodness for satire. Putting the stories in their place.

I am sure this isn’t the last of my rants and moans about news reporting. There’s plenty more to come in future communications. Happy weekend.

January 29 2014February 13 2014

Arrrrrrrrrrrgh

I don’t understand the logic or reason behind this:

My questions are:

What colour would 54.4% be?
What colour would 59.15% be?
What colour would 64.5% be?

Why are they coloured using whole numbers to differentiate the boundaries and then why tenths for the light blue-ish colour?

Ohhh, I think I get it. Because the national average is 59.2% that means it’s ok to have three colours below that and only two above it.

Does this chart say that no local authorities managed to get the average but some were below it and some were above it?

There are about 52 areas below average. There are way more (I got bored of counting) above that. Does this mean there is positive skew?

Do you know what?

I CAN’T TELL FROM THIS DIAGRAM. IT TELLS ME NOTHING OF ANY USE.

May 22 2012

BBC Headline #9

Headline from the BBC website.

Bogus PPI Complaints “Hit 6000”

My issue with this as a headline is that it is plain wrong. I know that they put the hit 6000 in quotes and therefore can pretty much say whatever they want because nobody believes anything in quotes, but quite clearly the text in the article states that it is 5661 bogus complaints. I’d argue that this is not 6000.
Perhaps I’m being petty but I always assumed the BBC had particular standards but it is clear they do not and are quite willing to “lie” to make a headline. In reality the real story is that there has been such huge miss-selling of PPI and that the banks are now making massive losses to cover paying people back thier own money. There were just more that 157,000 complaints last year (from the article) and so the bogus claim level is running at 4%. Whether that is a lot or not I’m not sure. There are probably people out there who don’t understand finance and also some people out there are complete blaggers.
I think the BBC should campain and help people understand the real story of our capitalist banks rather than sensationalise such a small part of the PPI scandal.

January 4 2012January 5 2012

BBC Headlines

This is, hopefully, going to be a semi-regular blog post topic. I’ve decided now is the time to give this website some meaning other than my vanity project! It’s taken a while to think about and find my area of “expertise” but this is it:

Rubbish headlines on the BBC News website

It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel! I used to have an image of the website here but have decided it was a copyright infringement. All headlines will be linked to the original stories.

Spiderman web ‘closer to reality’

Headline taken from the BBC News iPhone app. As a first example this is a goody. We have two main headline issues:

Unreasonable extrapolation
Quotation in the headline

Unreasonable Extrapolation
Take a science paper and then make the most extreme possible prediction based very loosely on the science. As an example, lemon juice killing cancer cells in a petri dish does not lead to drinking lemon juice curing cancer in a human.

Quotation in Headline
Anyone could be asked for a quotation and then that used in a headline. Quotations need to be in context so the reader can decide their validity. For example a peddler of quackery might insist (incorrectly) that there is plenty of evidence for the efficacy of homoeopathic products but that does not mean that should be in a headline. People rely on headlines being true.

Spiderman web “closer to reality”

I don’t think anyone would be taken in by this headline. Get the credit card out! I want a wrist ejaculator now so I can fly from building to building.