It enables display and interpretation of derivatives, integrals, sums, products, vector operators, brackets, and various forms of subscripts and superscripts using the traditional mathematical notation based on the low-level box language and contains over 700 functions for notation, algebraic manipulation and evaluation of mathematical expressions. There are other better venues for that.Symbolic Computing package is an add-on package that facilitates symbolic computation in Mathematica. Please refrain from making any comments on politics (and interpreting this post as anything more than just calling for awareness about mathematics). NOTE: After reading a couple of comments, I feel I should reiterate that this is not a discussion about politics or even about the source of the material, it is about how we, as consumers of information, need to be mathematically critical of whatever is sent our way. How about you, dear readers? Do you have any good examples of mathematical manipulation in the media you would like to share? It doesn’t have to be about the Venezuelan election! Share your favorite examples in the comments section below. In my case, I will certainly use both of these charts as examples next time I teach our Intro Stats course at Bates. This way, it would be much more difficult to be manipulated by the media, politicians, and anything posted on the internet. The main thing I want to say with this post is that people should be more prepared to question numbers (like the opposition chart) and should be more comfortable with representations of data (like the government bar chart). It is worrisome that both of these things can go unchallenged. At any rate, this is not how votes are counted, so it is not very useful information (at least as evidence of wrongdoing). So for example, Amazonas, which had 73 thousand voters, counts the same as Miranda, which had around 1.5 million voters. More importantly, this gives equal weight to each state, regardless of their population. Given that in Venezuela we have a plurality voting method (you count the votes and add them up), it doesn’t really matter what the result was in each state (unlike in the US, where it does). The numbers pictured on the right are the averages of the percentages pictured on the left (this I actually checked manually). The chart gives a tally of the vote state by state (I have not verified each tally, but this information would be available in the official page of the CNE, or National Electoral Council). There have been lots of legitimate-seeming claims floating around, but this image found its way to me via facebook, and really annoyed me.Ī chart tallying percentages state by state, claiming that Capriles won. At any rate, close results like this make people suspicious, and susceptible to wrong information. There have been many claims that the close result (pictured above) warrants a recount, and many people in the opposition claim that there was election fraud. The second example comes from the opposition. I guess you truncate the graph at 49 and then only look at how much more than 49 each person got? Still, it’s an interesting choice, and a clearly deliberate one. Sure, Maduro’s number is larger, but I’m not sure what scale they’re using.
I’m not saying anything about politics here, simply about the numbers. Now, the numbers in the chart are correct, but the graph has nothing to do with them! If you think about the fact that most people will react to the image more than the numbers, you can see that this is a clear example of manipulation of mathematics. Like the graph shows, Maduro won the election with 50.66% of the vote, while Capriles had only 49.07% of the vote. The two main presidential candidates and their vote tallies.