The story in last night's paper about Fort Wayne Community Schools' proposed building plans contains an important lesson about presenting and defending arguments. When you make a causal claim, like this,
Jeff Lackney, an educational planner and architect for Wisconsin-based Fielding Nair International, studied the link between the quality of education and older buildings. “If I was to generalize, there is usually a 5 percent lower test score in buildings with lower quality ratings.”
This should generate a lot of discussion:
Indiana's News Center has learned that the Fort Wayne pizza store employee who was shot and killed on the job over the weekend had a gun at the time of the robbery.
[. . .]
23-year old Chad Brunson, the night manager, was shot in the head early Sunday, after two black men with their faces covered burst in and demanded cash.
Barney Frank is the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which makes him one of the most poweful members of Congress when it comes to economic policy. And he says this:
I saw an annoying report on "Good Morning America" yesterday in which Diane Sawyer stared with worshipful adoration at Oprah Winfrey while they discussed the $40 million school Winfrey has been building in South Africa. But that's pretty much the way everyone in the press treats the woman, and it's her money. She can spend it however she likes, and there are worse things than education.
It's such an old story. The bad guys break the rules, forcing the adoption of tougher rules that do nothing but hurt everybody else. Today's version results in a step back in Milwaukee, to the probable dismay of thousands of teenagers:
If you wanted to buy condoms 30 years ago, you had to bear the embarrassment of asking a pharmacist to fetch them from beneath the counter.
Always ready to welcome a new convert, even President Bush discovering fiscal restraint:
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- In a welcome message to the new Democratic Party-controlled Congress, U.S. President George Bush asked to be given line-item veto authority for spending bills.
Ah, Pat is at it again:
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
The "cell phones banned at the courthouse" story has been in the news for weeks now, and some people were still caught unawares:
There is this, on the opinions of Hoosiers:
Consistent with the 2003-2005 surveys, a majority of residents rated schools highly: 65 percent of respondents rated schools in their district as excellent or good and 56 percent gave such ratings for overall state education.
And there is this, reality:
I've always liked John Lennon's "Imagine," in fact would rank it somewhere in the top 10 pop/rock songs of all time. Imagine there are no religions, countries, possessions to divide us into opposing camps, that we had to deal with each other strictly human being to human being, with only the consequences of those dealings motivating us. That is the essence of idealism, which is the heart of so much good music.
Being an expert in one area does not make one an expert in other areas. Starbucks should stick to coffee, and leave the doughnuts alone:
Starbucks Corp. is cutting trans fats from the doughnuts, muffins and other treats in half of its U.S. stores, and plans to eventually drop the artery-clogging fats from company-operated coffeehouses across the country.
I once knew a woman who asked me, I swear, every five minutes, "What are you thinking?" That question asked occasionally is not too annoying, especially if I might have stopped listening to the other person's conversation and am staring off into space. The content of my mind at the moment is fair game. But, over and over and over? That results from a deep insecurity, which is undersandable. But it deeply invades my privacy, which is intolerable. Half the time, I'm thinking nothing in particular; the other half, it's not something I want to share.
Apparently, religious fundamentalists aren't the only ones willing to turn their backs on science because it profoundly disturbs their sense of the way things should be:
SCIENTISTS are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of “gay” sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.
If the category is "best newspaper corrections of the year," that also means they were for the silliest errors of the year. The St. Petersburg Times presents a collection from regrettheerror.com and graciously incudes one of its own doozies:
A few days ago, in a post called "Doubt and certainty," I wrote this:
I have a friend whose mother was a runway model with Betty Ford in Grand Rapids, Mich. I should have her get in touch with the newspaper. It would certainly be a much better "I knew the famous person when" story than this one:
On the other hand, if this is the best the professional journalists have to offer -- a lazy exercise in divining what Americans think will happen in 2007 -- perhaps we are better off to let YouTube visitors do the sorting for us. Did the people who put this together stop and think that their standard disclaimer put on this story comes very close to self-parody? "The telephone poll of 1,000 adults was conducted Dec. 12-14 by Ipsos, an international polling firm.
I happened to be watching ABC's 20/20 report called "Caught," a two-hour special about user-generated "viral content" on sites like YouTube," when the network broke in with the news of Saddam Hussein's execution. 20/20 then decided to stay with the execution and scrapped the rest of the show, which was still fairly early in the second hour. This Washington Post report notes that program interruption but fails to grasp the significance of it:
Your curmudgeonly language nitpicker reporting for duty.
I think one of my blog goals this year will be to write about stories that give, at best, a superficial view of reality or, at worst, a distorted one, because they use numbers incorrectly or incompletely. Journalists are mostly innumerate, with neither the inclination nor the ability to convey a sense of proportion. We just don't do math.
