How to verify the news?

[ChrisGreaves]

I sent this email this morning, following yesterday's email to a long-time teacher-friend.
I would like to hear from Lounge Members of other general ways to verify data published on general platforms, such as news sources, web pages etc.
I am confident in the peer-review process for scientific journals; here I am interested in what we, the Great Unwashed Public can achieve.
Please note that I am not looking for anyone to run a test, just for ideas about what sort of tests could be made to verify a numeric data statement such as (in this case) "A large storm can hold a billion tonnes of water and ice." You might say that I am, as always, interested in algorithms.

... and just to back up my comments of yesterday, here is a link to an article that appeared this morning. Nothing up my sleeve; this article was not available to us when i composed yesterday's email.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-10/ ... /100123460

The article says "By meteorologist Michael Conway" who we can assume is working for an Australian entity. Further, if we assume that Conway is a meteorologist, we can assume that he knows what he is talking about.

Near the start of the article you will read "A large storm can hold a billion tonnes of water and ice."


Answer this question quickly, immediately, and write down your answer: "Is the statement true?". Don't try to analyse the statement (yet), just record your response.


Now, the problem with a "billion" is that it sounds awfully like a "million", so our brains, which have not evolved to deal with numbers", thinks "ho-hum; same old same old", but there is a factor of one thousand here. If you are sixty years old today, how do you feel about hanging around until you are 60,000 years old?


The meat of the issue is NOT whether or not there can be a billion tons of water (in any phase) in a thunderstorm, but how you would go about verifying the statement "A large storm can hold a billion tonnes of water and ice."


A good exercise for kiddies aged, say, twelve or older. Or a room of teachers on a coffee-break.

You could email the issuing journal, in this case www.abc.net.au/news
You could email the issuing author, in this case Michael Conway
You could search the web to see how much surface water is on Earth; surface water because we want to get a handle on how much water is available for thunderstorms.
You could calculate the volume of a serious thunderstorm (say, fifty miles diameter and 32,000 feet high) and calculate the density of 1,000,000,000 water spread across that volume.

And so on.

My point here is that for much of the time we just accept a stated figure and do not question it because questioning a stated figure (cases/day, deaths/day, blood clots /day etc) is just too much work.

About eight years ago i was listening to an ABC podcast, WA Country News, i think, and the weather report was read by Colin(?) Puzey; an unusual name. I emailed the ABC/WA and passed on my contact information, Colin replied that yes, he was related to Mr. Puzey, my high school teacher, whose discussions of physics led Colin(?) to a career in the weather! So it is possible to ask; easy as an email.


If you do brainstorm techniques for verifying data, I'd love to see your results. You don't have to DO the exercises, just think up possible ways of verifying data.


Also, what was you spontaneous answer to the question "Is the statement true?"?

Cheers
Chris

[StuartR]

I used to give my kids Fermi problems to do, to help with this. We'd be building sand castles at the seaside and I'd get them to estimate how many grains of sand there were on the beach, or on another day I asked them how many piano tuners there are in Greater London.

[John Gray]

I think that in this context "a billion tonnes of water and ice" can be rendered as "quite a large amount of water and ice" .
There is also the 'spurious accuracy' problem, where a newspaper writes:
"The aircraft was travelling at 600 mph (965.6064 km/h)"
Sometimes even more decimal places are supplied!

[stuck]

...Sometimes even more decimal places are supplied!

It's not just journalists who make this sort of error. Far too often in my day job I see results from scientists, who should know better, given to an number of decimal places.

Ken

[StuartR]

It's even here in the lounge where 15.34129087% of posts include made-up statistics

[Argus]

https://xkcd.com/2170/

[PJ_in_FL]

...
I would like to hear from Lounge Members of other general ways to verify data published on general platforms, such as news sources, web pages etc.
...

Cheers
Chris

Chris,

Been keeping up with American Main Stream Media (MSM) lately? You can come up with the wildest ideas!!!!

[DaveA]

I have taken all of these statements to be a SWAG!

Scientific Wild Ass Guess

[John Gray]

https://xkcd.com/2170/

Excellent!

[Jay Freedman]

In both high school physics class and in my undergraduate engineering courses, we were encouraged to ask of our results "is it reasonable?" In other words, is it possible within an order of magnitude? That is similar to the Fermi problems that Stuart mentioned, although we didn't call it that.