Reporters without…Mathematics
DM pointed me to this Register story, “Fraud expert becomes victim of credit card crime.” Its a nice bit of irony, but my favorite bit is the very end:
CNP (Cardholder Not Present) fraud in the UK has grown nearly 50 times between 1994 and 2003 to £116.4 million. Goodwill wants the government to recognise the seriousness of this crime which is costing companies and the public £440 million a year.
In one of the subjects for Journalism major in my school, a class spends the semester producing a newspaper that’s distributed to the whole campus. In one of the issues, the headline (in the front page!) feature a very embarassing percentage error. I know it’s school, but percentage is the kind of thing we learn before college. There was some jokes about it at the time, but the rest of the journalism students didn’t seem to care much about it — and it was a really ugly miscalculation. Then these reporters graduate, go to the field… and that’s what happens.