Grit Post has the article CNN and MSNBC Caught Manipulating Poll Numbers to Give Joe Biden Artificial Edge.

Corporate-owned media outlets are already manipulating poll numbers to give former Vice President Joe Biden the edge over his rival, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

In a CNN/SSRS poll released April 30, Biden is shown with an impressive 24-point edge over Sanders, with 39% of voters saying they supported him, compared to just 15% for the Vermont senator. However, a Grit Post analysis of the results found that the poll noticeably excluded voters under the age of 50 in coming to that conclusion.

I archive this story on my blog so that I will have it handy if someone ever disagrees with my thesis that the oligarchs’ news media tells blatant lies.

USA Today has the article Bernie Sanders raises $18.2 million in first quarter for 2020 presidential campaign.

• 88 percent of money came from people who have given $200 or less.

At last, a meaningful measure that I have been wanting to see. I think this measure is much harder to manipulate by the candidate than quoting the size of the average donation. The average donation can be made to appear much smaller by the candidate asking for a flood of $1 donations while still depending for most of the money raised to come from a small number of large donations. In the fudged number case, the large donors still have a much larger voice with the candidate than any one of the small donors.

This may be the one article that is the exception to my “law”.

Greenberg’s Law of The Media

If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.

Inequality.org has the article A New Statistical Shell Game for Justifying Billionaires.

Some daring conservatives are using the successes of Scandinavia to rationalize grand private fortunes.

I put this post under Greenberg’s Law of The Media – If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading because this article debunks an attempt to mislead with numbers.

CNBC has the story Stocks in Asia gain following stronger-than-expected US economic data

US GDP exceeds expectations

Overnight on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 69.16 points to close at 25,916 and the S&P 500 shed nearly 0.3 percent to finish its trading day at 2,784.49. The Nasdaq Composite also lost about 0.3 percent to close at 7,532.53.

The losses stateside came despite the release of data which showed the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to the U.S. government. That was above forecasts of economists polled by Dow Jones, who expected the economy to grow at a pace of 2.2 percent.

Maybe there are enough astute investors who realize the GDP, which grew at 2.6%, includes gains made in the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) Any growth in that industry is a dead weight overhead on the economy, and actually subtracts from the productive capacity of the economy.

When Trump brags about the growth of GDP, he surely hopes that most of the people in the 99% don’t know this about the GDP. Then again, maybe Donald Trump doesn’t even know that buying and selling real estate does not add anything to the economy. Building real estate does add something if it is useful for carrying out business or satisfying a real need.

Yes, there is fake news, and it comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth when he talks about stories like this one.

AP news has the article Leahy backs Sanders in shift from 2016.

On the first day of his presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders picked up the support of his fellow home-state senator, Democrat Patrick Leahy.

Leahy, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, says he’ll back Sanders this year.

I got into an interesting conversation on an Ernesto Cruz Facebook thread.

Steve Greenberg The other candidates like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar may have raised similar amounts of money after they announced, but where did their money come from? How much came from small donations, and how much came from Wall Street?

Jeff Bourque Steve Greenberg I think Harris had 38k donors totalling $1.5m

Steve Greenberg You can divide the money by the number of donors to get a mathematical average, but you won’t know what fraction of her money came from big donors and how much can from small ones.

As an extreme example, only to show you the point I am making, She could have received 38K dollars total from all but one of those 38K donors giving $1 apiece, and $1.5M from one Wall Street PAC.

There actually was a point in the 2016 campaign where Hillary Clinton was specifically asking for $1 donations, so she could skew the meaningless average.

Steve Greenberg Few news media will be smart enough (or honest enough) to tell you what fraction of money raised came from donations under $200. Most will either stupidly report the average or slyly report the average knowing full well that they are giving a false impression.

I refer you to Greenberg’s Law of The Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”

By the way, Hillary Clinton’s misleading statistic would be what percentage of her donors gave a $1 donation. That is not the same thing as what percentage of the money she raised came from $1 donations.

Greg Palast has the article Florida = Honduras: Inequality kills. Want to end the American shooting epidemic?.

The result of my scatter plot came as quite the surprise to me: there was just about no correlation between number of guns and number of gun homicides.”

In fact, “the correlation coefficient was -0.105871699.” That is, by a small amount, more guns meant fewer homicides.

So what DID prove a strong correlation? Homicides versus the “GINI” coefficient. GINI is the measure of income inequality in a nation.

The graph he presents makes little sense as an explanation of the excerpt above. I have yet to figure out exactly how the horizontal axis of the graph should be labeled to make sense of it. We must also remember that correlation does not prove causation. However, at least in this case the premise does make sense to me. Given this hint of what these measures might be indicating, I’d like to see someone publish a real study of the possibilities.

Reluctantly, I have to file this story in the category of Greenberg’s Law Of The Media – If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.

MIT Technology Review has the article The tricks propagandists use to beat science from January 22, 2018.

It’s a mildly interesting article, but I would be very, very wary of the suggested “solution”.

…the solution is clear: bigger, more highly powered studies. “Given some fixed financial resources, funding bodies should allocate those resources to a few very high-powered studies,” argue Weatherall and co, who go on to suggest that scientists should be given incentives for producing that kind of work. “For instance, scientists should be granted more credit for statistically stronger results—even in cases where they happen to be null.”

I have noticed this in the electrical engineering technical papers I have read over my 40 year career. One respected university had one bent in their work and a different respected university had a different bent. Knowing authors from both universities, I could tell which side of the discussion a paper would fall on based on which school the author came from. Faculty from both universities were the peers reviewing the papers published in peer reviewed journals. In this case, I don’t even think the bias was from the sponsor’s of the research because the companies I worked for sponsored research from both universities. Although I don’t doubt that there were influential engineers in the company that had received their advanced degrees from one university or the other.

Neither of the universities discussed above were MIT. However, I have had my dealings with sponsoring research at MIT, and I can tell you that the people there are human, too. To that, I guess I have to say #MeToo. I am aware that I have my own biases.

I have posted this article in the category of Greenberg’s Law of The Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.” This category applies to the subject of the article and to the article itself.

NBC Nightly News had a story Growing concern over children dying of the flu.

There is one statement in the report that is a perfect example of how the media mislead you with half a statistic.

The report never told you what this number means. What did they expect you to learn from this? I can think of three possible conclusions you could take depending on what is the value of the statistic they did not report. What they failed to report was what percentage of the children who survived were never vaccinated.

In the figures below I have chosen three possible values for the missing statistics of the percentage of children who were not vaccinated that survived. Above each graph, I have put a label of what you might be able to conclude given any one of the green bars compared to the red bar.

In the above figure, of the children who survived they had a lower percentage of not being vaccinated so you might conclude there was an advantage to being vaccinated.

In the above figure, of the children who survived they had the same percentage of not being vaccinated so you might conclude there was neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to being vaccinated.

In the above figure, of the children who survived they had a higher percentage of not being vaccinated so you might conclude there was a disadvantage to being vaccinated.

Without seeing a green bar, there is nothing you can conclude from seeing the red bar alone. You might have concluded that certainly the vaccine had whatever advantage or disadvantage you had assumed before seeing the number. In other words, this half statistic may have made you more sure of the wrong thing.

Science Alert has the article A Revolutionary New Type of Lens Focuses All The Colours of The Rainbow Into a Single Point.

A brand new type of lens called a metalens has just passed a major hurdle. A metalens is a flat surface that use nanostructures to focus light, and it could change optics forever by replacing the traditional bulky, curved lenses we know.

This was an interesting read, but the following stopped me in my tracks.

Making a metalens like this is so tricky because different wavelengths of light move through materials at different speeds. That leads to focusing errors known as chromatic aberrations, which traditional lenses get around through curved surfaces.

And here I thought that lenses used curved surfaces as a way of changing the magnification of an image. In other words the curved surface is what makes it a lens. I went to WikiPedia to see what it had to say in the article Chromatic aberration.

There exists a point called the circle of least confusion, where chromatic aberration can be minimized.[6] It can be further minimized by using an achromatic lens or achromat, in which materials with differing dispersion are assembled together to form a compound lens.

This is the explanation I imagined. Of course, the Wikipedia has much more detail and talks about other techniques of correcting chromatic aberration.

I just think this is an example of what happens when an author with a tenuous understanding of a scientific topic tries to simplify an article to explain science to other people with a tenuous understanding of the topic. Don’t treat as gospel what you read in a news medium that has the word “science” in its name. Actually, such a medium may be no more trustworthy than a medium that makes no claim to be about science.