Good Math Bad Math

This past weekend, my friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece
of bad math. One of Orac’s big interest is vaccination and
anti-vaccinationists. The piece is a newsletter by a group calling itself the “Sound Choice
Pharmaceutical Institute” (SCPI), which purports to show a link
between vaccinations and autism. But instead of the usual anti-vac rubbish about
thimerosol, they claim that “residual human DNA contamintants from aborted human fetal cells”
causes autism.

Among others, Orac already covered the nonsense
of that from a biological/medical
perspective. What he didn’t do, and why he forwarded this newsletter to me, is because
the basis of their argument is that they discovered key change points in the
autism rate that correlate perfectly with the introduction of various vaccines.

In fact, they claim to have discovered three different inflection points:

1. 1979, the year that the MMR 2 vaccine was approved in the US;
2. 1988, the year that a 2nd dose of the MMR 2 was added to the recommended vaccination
   schedule; and
3. 1995, the year that the chickenpox vaccine was approved in the US.

They claim to have discovered these inflection points using “iterative hockey stick analysis”.

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Here’s a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link
to the same story via CNN. It’s yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something very different than what it really means.

Here’s the story. Chevy is coming out with a very cool new car, the Volt. It’s
a hybrid with massive batteries. It plugs in to your household electricity when you’re home to charge its batteries. It operates as an electric car until its batteries start to get low, and then it starts running a small gas motor to power a generator. It’s a very cool idea. I’m honestly excited about cars like the volt – and Google helped develop the technology behind it, which biases me even more in its favor. So you’d expect me to be very supportive of the hype around it, right? I wish I could. But GM has decided that the best way to promote it is to use bad math to tell lies to make it look even better than it really is.

Chevy has announced that for city driving, the Volt will get gas mileage of 230 miles per gallon.

That’s nonsense. Pure, utter rubbish.

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Yet More Deceptive Graphs

As you’ve probably heard, there was a horrible incident in Pittsburgh this weekend, in
which a crazed white supremacist who believed that Obama was coming to take his guns shot and
killed three policemen. Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos, pointed out lunatics like this shooter
are acting on conspiracy theories that are being relentlessly promoted by the likes of Glen
Beck and Michelle Bachman. It’s not an unreasonable thing to point out, given the amount of
time that Beck and Bachman have spent lately talking about the impending socialist/fascist
crackdowns that will require a revolutionary response from all right-thinking patriotic
citizens.

Now, you may think that Kos is an idiot. In fact, even though we agree on many
political issues, I think that Kos is an idiot. I (obviously from what
I wrote above) happen to agree with the basic hypothesis that if you tell
people that the government is going to come and get that and that they need to
defend themselves, that some people are going to believe that the government is
coming to get them and that they need to defend themselves. But the way
that Kos responded was disgusting; it was latching on to a tragic event in
a shallow, snide, heartless way.

But whether you think Kos is an ass ore not isn’t the point. Regardless of your opinion of
the man, there’s no arguing the fact that he’s created a website that draws a really
astonishing amount of traffic, and has become a nexus for many activists on the political
left.

And that, in turn, naturally draws hatred and mockery from the political right. Because,
you see, no one who disagrees with those fine patriotic folks could possibly be an
honest, serious person. They must be a bunch of scheming bastards, obviously.

So, when Kos came out bitching about how the rantings of various crazies really do
have a connection to the actions of people like the Pittsburgh killer, naturally it couldn’t be that he actually believed that people ranting about how the President is
creating a fascistic tyranny that’s going to come take all of your guns could actually
inspire a crazy person to believe that the President creating a fascistic tyranny that was going to come and take away his guns. No, that couldn’t be. He must be up to something – like trawling for hits!

Which, finally, brings us to our topic.

A conservative blogger named Moe Lane posted his theory about why Kos spoke out about the Pittsburgh shooter. It’s because his pageviews have declined so much. But, of course, it wouldn’t be good enough to just say that DKos pageviews are down – he’s got to show that it’s specific to those dirty liberals. So he produces two graphs – one for DKos, and one for RedState, a major conservative site. Here are his graphs; DKos first, Redstate second:

A quick glance shows that both had a huge spike right around the elections, and then they
dropped off pretty dramatically. Then both had a slow upward trend. But the RedState trend
looks a lot steeper.

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