This one comes from Ellen Wulfhorst on the Reuters wire:

Unlike traditional, mainstream media, blogs often adopt a specific point of view. Critics complain they can contain unchecked facts, are poorly edited and use unreliable sources.

I sense a great disturbance in the Schwartz, as if a million monitors were just sprayed with soda. (Well, no, I don’t have that many readers, but Dave Neiwert, Athenae and Coturnix have already picked up on it.) And here’s another puzzling statement from the same piece, describing the poll which found that “a majority of Americans do not read political blogs.”

The poll was conducted online from January 15 to January 22 among 2,302 adults. Harris said it does not calculate or provide a margin of error because it finds such figures can be misleading.

Is anyone else concerned by the sampling bias which this procedure could entail? If you ask people online what websites they read, you’re going to get (at best) a measure of what people who spend time online read, not what Americans in general are reading. Sure, that’ll probably increase the percentage of blog readers, skewing the poll towards “new media,” but it’s still bias. (They claim to have used “propensity score weighting” to “adjust” for this.)

On their website, Harris Interactive lays out their rationale for not reporting margins of error. Basically, they assert that people are too poorly educated to know what “margin of error” means: people don’t know that the phrase refers only to sampling error, not to other possible sources of obfuscation (which are harder to get a quantitative handle on). Therefore, people will assume that polls are more accurate than they really are; to avoid this problem, and to save the wear-and-tear on a newscaster’s mouth which the tediously long phrase “margin of sampling error” would produce, Harris will not admit fallibility at all.

Gee, how nice of them to make that decision for us, so that even the people who know statistics can’t get the figures. I just loooove suffering for the sins of innumerate America.

UPDATE: I also get a kick out of this:

Just one in ten (19%) Echo Boomers (those aged 18-31) regularly read a political blog

One in ten. Nineteen percent. Oops.

There are only 1.27 times as many straight people as gay people in the world, and most people aren’t either.

How do I know? Google says so. Just count the hits.

porn: 227,000,000
lesbian porn: 9,930,000
straight porn: 610,000
heterosexual porn: 360,000
homosexual porn: 284,000

Now that I’ve gotten Science After Sunclipse banned from every school room in America (oh, like it wasn’t already, me being an ill-tempered, illiterate evilutionist and all), you can just go about your business. Or you can hang around while Windy and I resolve the group selection controversy.

Isabel finds a curmudgeonly 1842 quotation from Augustus de Morgan, about the way we write factorials:

Among the worst of barabarisms is that of introducing symbols which are quite new in mathematical, but perfectly understood in common, language. Writers have borrowed from the Germans the abbreviation n! to signify 1.2.3.(n – 1).n, which gives their pages the appearance of expressing surprise and admiration that 2, 3, 4, &c. should be found in mathematical results.

You know, I’d always thought the formula for “n choose k” was a little, well, enthusiastic:

[tex]\left(\begin{array}{c} n \\ k \end{array}\right) = \frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!}.[/tex]

“n! k! n minus k!! You gotta believe me, guys!”

Still, though, if I saw de Morgan’s way of writing the factorial of n, I’d read it as

[tex]1 \cdot 2 \cdot 3 \cdot (n-1) \cdot n,[/tex]

which is only the factorial of n when n is 5. I guess there’s little point in pleasing the dead. . . .

When traveling through the Internet, one often encounters crackpot physics, and after some familiarity with the genus, one begins to organize the specimens into species. I often find myself remarking upon a particular characteristic of pseudo-physics: the use of verbal instead of mathematical arguments. Instead of positing a premise and doing the math to deduce consequences of that premise, we get a whole pile of jargon, pulled from different sources and decorated with equations to disguise the fact that the “arguments” are essentially plays on words, with the whole thing bent towards bolstering some pre-established conclusion. What do you do in order to debunk this kind of nonsense? One option is to focus on a few highlights and show that they lack validity; however, addressing all the points may balloon out into a full physics course of its own.

This problem is accentuated when a single piece of crankery indulges in misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, special relativity, general relativity and other fields, all together in a single vessel of fractured ceramic. The anti-Einstein polemic recently unearthed by PZ Myers is a good example of such a “target-rich environment,” as was biocentrism woo. Another example, currently unfolding before our cybernetic eyes, is Salvador Cordova’s ongoing misunderstanding of quantum mechanics (commentary here, here, here, here, here and now at Tyler’s new place too — and we’ve hardly gotten started).

When I have an idle moment, I might pull the thoughts I’ve scattered around my fellow skeptics’ blog threads into a unified post, but for now, I’ll just refer the Interested Reader to the links provided above.

From Dirk J. Struick’s A Concise History of Mathematics (1967), quoted by Shallit:

There exists a widely quoted story about Diderot and Euler according to which Euler, in a public debate in St. Petersburg, succeeded in embarrassing the freethinking Diderot by claiming to possess an algebraic demonstration of the existence of God: “Sir, (a+b^n)/n = x; hence God exists, answer please!” This is a good example of a bad historical anecdote, since the value of an anecdote about an historical person lies in its faculty to illustrate certain aspects of his character; this particular anecdote serves to obscure both the character of Diderot and of Euler, Diderot knew his mathematics and had written on involutes and probability, and no reason exists to think that the thoughtful Euler would have behaved in the asinine way indicated. The story seems to have been made up by the English mathematician De Morgan (1806-1871). See L. G. Krakeur and R. L. Krueger, Isis, Vol. 31 (1940), pp. 431-32; also Vol. 33 (1941), pp. 219-31. It is true that there was in the eighteenth century occasional talk about the probability of an algebraic demonstration of the existence of God; Maupertuis indulged in one, see Voltaire’s Diatribe, Oeuvres, Vol. 41 (1821 ed.), pp. 19, 30. See also B. Brown, Amer. Math. Monthly, Vol. 49 (1944).

Krakeur and Krueger state that his investigations into mathematics “dominated Diderot’s youthful activities and represent an important phase of his universal interests.” They speculate that a lack of mathematical background among scholars who studied the man impaired those scholars’ ability to address this part of Diderot’s life.

The arXivotubes have delivered unto me A. James and M. J. Plank’s “On fitting power laws to ecological data” (4 December, arXiv:0712.0613).

Heavy-tailed or power-law distributions are becoming increasingly common in biological literature. A wide range of biological data has been fitted to distributions with heavy tails. Many of these studies use simple fitting methods to find the parameters in the distribution, which can give highly misleading results. The potential pitfalls that can occur when using these methods are pointed out, and a step-by-step guide to fitting power-law distributions and assessing their goodness-of-fit is offered.

The classic in this genre is Clauset, Shalizi and Newman’s “Power-law Distributions in Empirical Data,” but more correctives are always appreciated.