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| Authored by: jrl on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 11:28 AM EDT |
It's "entirely normal". People who learn arithmetic
and math well enough to use them effective do not usually
wind up reporting for magazines or newspapers, whether print
or web based.
They will normally get much better paid jobs doing things
that ordinarily have better working conditions.
So any time a number comes up in any "news story", think
about the economics professors who had an error in their
spreadsheet - the number is almost certainly wrong,
and wrong in ways that make having a number present not
only useless but harmful to the promotion of understanding.
It's good practice to try to guess what they meant to do
or say, clearly a 160% reduction implies a negative
reaction time so that's not what they meant. Did they
mean 16%? or is it (previous time)/(better time) = 1.6
which is actually the inverse of the improvement,
which would be a 37.5% improvement?
My guess is the 37.5% value - a 16% difference is
probably too small to be consistently measured with
quantum ants. Hey, how did these ants get inside the
sugar canister?
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