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December 1

Innumeracy causing carelessness with formatting big numbers, leading to more innumeracy

I am quite resigned to the fact that some people will often copy text from an online scientific publication and indiscriminately paste it into a forum's generic text-input field, with little or no regard as to how numbers (especially numbers which are pertinent to an argument) could be incorrectly displayed as a result; specifically, big numbers expressed in scientific notation (e.g. 10⁵⁰ subsequently rendered as "1050"). However, when this sort of thing occurs in several online NCSE articles (from an organization purportedly devoted to debunking misconceptions about science in general), I become especially concerned. Has there ever been any study done on this kind of careless copypasta behavior resulting from, and/or contributing to, innumeracy in the general population? DWIII (talk) 16:18, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Can you link to some examples? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:34, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The one example that really caught my eye is at https://ncse.ngo/creationism-and-pseudomathematics. Incidentally, I only just now looked into that site's source code and by golly they are in fact using HTML superscript tags for the exponents, but they are not displaying properly (neither in Firefox, nor MS Edge). It could be a CSS styling error on the NSCE site; even so it looks just as unprofessional as when creationists/IDists repeatedly propagate Borel-flavored pseudoarguments on internet forums without even bothering to double-check that the numbers make any sense. DWIII (talk) 20:00, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I use IE and that 1050 looks like a larger 10 with a smaller 50 that's more like a subscript than a superscript. It's clear there's a glitch there somewhere. As to the general situation, proofread fails are all too common on the internet. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:09, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know how to access their source code. If you can, then maybe you could post it here verbatim and see if it looks any different here. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:11, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The 'vertical-align' property is set to 'baseline' for 'sup' elements in the CSS.—eric 20:42, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Baseball Bugs and EricR: The 'vertical-align' property is correctly set to 'super' for <sup> elements, but it gets overridden with the 'baseline' value set by a script at https://ncse.ngo/sites/default/files/css/css_e2kN2OXLwXkPwZMp2ZoVS6wlvBNuFYOHJIcGx1gDcpk.css?q1nf01 for elements {html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, time, mark, audio, video}. The script is included by a <link rel="stylesheet" ...> element in the document's <head> element. --CiaPan (talk) 08:24, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Baseball Bugs: AFAIK in IE or Chrome it's the F12 key which invokes 'Developer tools', which allow the HTML & CSS data browsing (and many others features). --CiaPan (talk) 08:24, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There's lots of studies for copy/paste by clinicians and medical records, see e.g. this reference list, tho i didn't see anything related to what you identified.—eric 20:54, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@EricR: OTOH transplantology focuses on cut-and-paste, but I'm afraid that has little connection to innumeracy, either.

--CiaPan (talk) 09:32, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I forwarded the observation to the NCSE, and they are putting their bug hunting team on it. Something good may come of this. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:18, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]