Interesting, but I find it hard to conclude anything from that list.
What happens if you do a similar search but for "coolest intitle:summer"
for 2009? Granted, it was only the 34th coolest on record (not the 4th
warmest winter) but at least then we'd be able to see whether we should
be surprised or not.
Robert A. Cohen, Department of Physics, East Stroudsburg University
570.422.3428 rcohen@esu.edu http://www.esu.edu/~bbq
-----Original Message-----
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
[mailto:phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu] On Behalf Of John
Denker
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2012 7:19 PM
To: Forum for Physics Educators
Subject: [Phys-l] not a monopoly on the news
People can be divided into two categories as follows:
a) those who get all their news from one source, versus
b) those who routinely check multiple news sources.
You can fairly well predict the political affiliation of the folks in
category (a), and you can even more-or-less predict what their news
source will be, but that's not what I want to talk about. It's too
easy.
I would like to share some observations that only partially fit the
usual pattern.
It turns out that in the continental United States, this winter
(2011-2012) was the fourth-warmest winter on record, since they started
keeping records
118 years ago. Did you learn about that from news reports? It depends
on what news source(s) you look at. I did some googling for things like
warmest intitle:winter site:abcnews.com restricted to the last
month. Here are the results:
The ones at the top of the least might have been predictable, but
several of the ones at the bottom of the list surprise me.
You can quibble with my methodology, but for some purposes it doesn't
much matter because whatever faults there are apply equally to all the
news outlets.
For example, independent of the meaning of the story, we get to ask
whether the observed distribution of appearances makes sense. The null
hypothesis is that the story appears randomly in the various news
outlets, according to some sort of unbiased IID Poisson process. This
hypothesis is rejected by a wide margin.
I am absolutely *not* suggesting that this list should be used to select
a "good" or "bad" news source. Just the opposite. I don't trust any of
them.
If you searched on a different topic, you would get a wildly different
distribution. My point is that if you want to be the least bit
scientific about staying informed, you should check multiple sources.
If you only have time to look at one each day, choose a different one
each day.
Then ... check the primary sources if at all possible. For example, if
CERN is in the news, go to the CERN site and see what they are actually
saying. In all probability it will be different from what the reporters
claim CERN is saying.
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