ams16 ([info]ams16) wrote,
@ 2007-02-24 13:00:00
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Current mood:exasperated

Amazon's math
From their Movers and Shakers page:

The Movers & Shakers index identifies, by category, the biggest gainers in sales rank at Amazon.com in the past 24 hours. For example, suppose a music item has a sales rank of 10 today, but was ranked as low as 30 yesterday. Its Movers & Shakers increase would be 200 percent.


I never knew that you could use percentages on ordinal numbers.

(I'm tempted to send this to a certain Karen, but given that we haven't really been in touch for a while, it would be a weird thing to send out of the blue.)

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[info]fairdice
2007-02-24 07:43 pm UTC (link)
Wow, the math on that is pretty remarkably bad. (But not quite as scary as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Evaluating_how_interesting_an_integer%27s_mathematical_property_is , to which J just pointed me earlier today!)

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[info]ams16
2007-02-24 08:31 pm UTC (link)
Wow. That wikipedia essay is insane. "Let's quantify how interesting a number is." Bleah.

If someone wants to write a math-based article on a number, I'd say it's interesting enough. It's not like Wikipedia has space limitations.

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[info]fairdice
2007-02-25 01:59 am UTC (link)
Bu it has Standards, don'cha know! If it didn't, people might get the idea that it's just a bunch of people, y'know, writing articles about whatever they want...

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[info]ams16
2007-02-25 03:11 am UTC (link)
Though, overall, I still think the Amazon thing is worse.
1) Many more (at least a couple of orders of magnitude) people will see the Amazon thing. And believe "Hey, if Amazon does it this way, it must be right."
2) The wikipedia thing is an opinion piece, not an actual article. (An opinion of an engineer(?) who thinks that everything is quantifiable.)
3) Percentages on ordinal numbers????? Seriously, that is bad in SO many ways. And the method they are using makes it even worse, somehow.

Ok. Who do I know who is still fairly close to KB? TC? Dr.Dre? I just think this is bad on general educational numeracy issues.

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[info]dpg178
2007-02-27 02:52 am UTC (link)
Karen would be perfectly happy to have you send this to her. It's not like she communicates regularly with anyone. TC or Dr. Dre are both probably in touch with her if you'd rather.

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