Highly politicized physics and faulty news reporting

[Joe Carillo]

Let’s take a look at this lead sentence of a front-page headline story by a major Metro Manila broadsheet last October 13:

“MANILA, Philippines—Water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second hit 10 hapless towns in Pangasinan province on Thursday when the San Roque dam spillways were opened amid a storm drenching and swirling floodwaters, scientists say.”

AMID A STORM, THE SAN ROQUE DAM SPILLWAYS WERE OPENED, FLOODING COMMUNITIES DOWNSTREAM

I would like to make the following observations about the language and mathematics used in telling this particular flood-disaster story:

1. The “water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes” metaphor. This imagery of the dam’s water releases as so many balikbayan boxes falling from the San Roque Dam is false and misleading. It mistakes the concept of volume of water with the actual balikbayan box itself, and gives the wrong impression that the water releases fell as a solid mass in rigid containers, which is far from the reality of the actual event—the water remained liquid and fluid all the time. Also, the figure of 1 billion boxes, although presented in a highly sensational manner, appears to be wrong and understated. A very simple computation shows that the total volume of water released by the dam on that fateful day was the equivalent of 2.54 billion balikbayan boxes instead.
 
2. The idea of “balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second.” That the balikbayan boxes tumbled at the rate of 5,000 cartoons per second is highly loose, inaccurate language that has no bearing on reality altogether. The boxes presumably fell at that rate, not individually tumbled at that fantastically high rate; to "tumble," according to my Merriam Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, is “to turn end over end in falling or flight.” Also, the “5,000 cartons per second” figure itself looks wrong and understated. A very simple computation shows that it should be “29,412 cartons per second” instead, or almost six times that quantity.

3. The statement that “a billion balikbayan boxes…hit 10 hapless towns in Pangasinan province.” As I will demonstrate in my analysis, this statement misrepresents what actually happened when the dam made its water releases at the height of Typhoon Pepeng.

4. The imagery of “spillways opened amid a storm drenching and swirling floodwaters” being attributed to the scientists. The news story made it appear that the scientists themselves made this highly effusive and contrived description of the dam’s water releases. I find the attribution to the scientists incredible, for the statement looks every bit a fastidious literary flourish either by the paper’s reporters or desk editors.

MY CRITIQUE OF THAT STORY AND MY ANALYSIS OF ITS RECITATION OF FACTS:

I will now analyze the problematic aspects of the language of that flood-disaster story and show how I arrived at my conclusion that its physics and mathematics could be terribly flawed as well.

1. The “water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes” metaphor

I think this is flawed, over-the-top reportorial language that uses incendiary imagery to boot. To begin with, it’s not the water that’s equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes; it’s the volume of the dam’s water releases that’s presumably equal to the combined volume of a certain number of balikbayan boxes filled with water. I particularly found the billion figure for the balikbayan boxes suspiciously low in comparison to the huge water releases of the dam on that fateful day, so I asked myself: Was this billion figure arbitrarily chosen simply for political resonance, or was it in fact computed correctly? (Later in this critique, I will make some computations to verify this billion-box figure.) And even if the equivalence is tenable from a computational standpoint, what does this farfetched imagery serve other than to politicize what should be a dispassionate, level-headed assessment of the flood disaster by scientists? 

2. The idea of “balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second”

Figuratively speaking, if it was only empty balikbayan boxes that were falling from the dam at the rate of so many boxes per second, that shouldn’t have been cause for great worry. After all, the volume and weight of one balikbayan box are negligible compared to the volume and weight of all the water it could presumably contain. What’s dangerous is if those boxes are filled with water and they fall on you, regardless of how many boxes eventually fall. This aspect of the mass of water inside the box—in physics terms, this is the density of the water times the volume of the box—is what the news story was unable to convey anywhere in its narrative, so preoccupied it was with exploiting the number-of-balikbayan-boxes metaphor.

It’s also appropriate to ask at this point: What’s the logic of further stretching the already strained imagery to “a billion balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second.” Assuming we accept the metaphor of water becoming balikbayan boxes for illustrative purposes, why must the water be also made to tumble like balikbayan boxes at such a great oscillatory rate? After all, liquid water by nature flows and doesn’t tumble. So why stray from the physical reality of the disaster much too much? Why overrely on figurative language when the bare facts could very well speak for themselves in a tragedy as big as this?

3. The statement that “a billion balikbayan boxes…hit 10 hapless towns in Pangasinan province”

This is obviously false imagery, for assuming that the equivalent of a billion balikbayan boxes of water was indeed released by the dam on that day, those water releases fell on the dam’s spillway and not on the 10 towns directly, and the releases were made not all at once but spread out presumably over a 24-hour day. Those water releases doubtless contributed to the flooding of each town, but not to the extent of “a billion balikbayan boxes” hitting each town in full force, for over that 24-hour period the floodwaters would have naturally distributed and dispersed themselves over the area comprised by those 10 towns.

4. The imagery of “spillways opened amid a storm drenching and swirling floodwaters” attributed to
    the scientists

I strongly doubt if the scientists really made this statement, as the construction of the news story’s lead sentence would like the reader to believe. If anything, it looks to me like a reporter’s or a deskman’s overly exuberant literary flourish. Indeed, the phrase “amid a storm drenching and swirling floodwaters” sounds like nonsensical doggerel to me. If a scientist actually said that in a press conference, I would be very leery of everything else he would say.

CHECKING THE PHYSICS AND MATH OF THAT NEWS STORY:

Does that news story’s balikbayan-box metaphor have a proper basis?

Now let’s analyze the news story’s basis for its balikbayan-box metaphor, as stated a little later in the story proper: “A balikbayan box measures two feet by two feet. If it is shipped, freight cost is based on size. If airfreight, it is weighed.”

It looks like whoever came up with that balikbayan-box metaphor or whoever wrote that news story had a two-dimensional mindset about balikbayan boxes, able to picture the box in their minds only in its flattened state. I can’t imagine how the reporters or the paper’s deskmen could have missed out on the critical third dimension of the balikbayan box to complete the width-length-height triad so the volume of the box could be determined. And yet, the writers or editors were resourceful enough to provide the following curious, totally irrelevant, and—if the subject wasn’t that dire and serious—laughable information about the balikbayan box: “If it is shipped, freight cost is based on size. If airfreight, it is weighed.” (There’s something semantically wrong even with this statement: In the language of transport, freight is considered shipped whether it’s by land, sea, or air. The term "shipping" is inclusive of all modes of transport.)

Anyway, for the balikbayan-box metaphor to actually hold water, so to speak, I searched for and found the following standard dimensions of the balikbayan box:

Standard:   24 x 18 x 18 inches
Regular:     23 x 17 x 20 inches
Medium:     24 x 18 x 24 inches
Jumbo:       30 x 20 x 20 inches

For simplicity, let’s use the size that corresponds nearest to the two dimensions (“two feet by two feet”) provided in the news story, which is “Medium: 24 x 18 x 24 inches.”

Now let’s figure out what the holding volume in cubic meters of that balikbayan box is, after it’s actually formed into a three-dimensional box. As we do so, let’s keep in mind the following conversions from the English system to the metric system:

1 foot = 12 inches
1 inch = 2.54 centimeter (cm)     1 cm = 0.01 meter (m)

The dimensions of the medium balikbayan box would then be:

Width =  24 inches x 2.54 cm/inch x 0.01 meter/cm = 0.6096 meter
Length = 18 inches x 2.54 cm/inch x 0.01 meter/cm = 0.4572 meter
Height = 24 inches x 2.54 cm/inch x 0.01 meter/cm = 0.6096 meter

So the carrying volume of that box would be:
Width x length x height = 0.6096 meter x 0.4572 meter x 0.6096 meter = 0.17 cu. m

The medium-size balikbayan box’s carrying volume = 0.17 cubic meter

I must say that I was floored when I reached the part of the news story where the geologist among the team of scientists was quoted as saying that “one cubic meter of water was much like one balikbayan box.” Either the geologist had computed a wrong figure or she was misquoted in the news story. For as my computation shows above, the carrying volume of a medium balikbayan box is definitely not in the region of 1 cubic meter—that would be a very huge balikbayan box indeed!—but  only 0.167 cubic meter. Even for the biggest balikbayan box available, the jumbo size at 30 inches x 20 inches x 20 inches, that carrying volume would only be 0.197 cubic meter. The geologist therefore appears to have overstated the volume of the balikbayan box by over 5 times!

Still, let’s accept with no argument this declaration of the group’s lead scientist: “Based on our computation, it was unbelievable that with 5,000 cubic meters released per second, it was like having a billion balikbayan boxes dumped on Pangasinan in a day.”

In volumetric terms, 5,000 cubic meters of water per second released from the dam would be equivalent to the carrying volume of how many medium-size balikbayan boxes? That would be:

Number of balikbayan boxes = 5,000 cu.m per second / 0.17 cu.m per box
                                                  = 29,412 boxes per second
                   
The news story’s description of “balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second” is almost six times lower than this number of boxes. So that quoted statement should be corrected as follows: “balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 29,412 cartons per second.” This is an even worse flooding scenario than the team of scientists had envisioned. At this point, though, the count of balikbayan boxes falling from the San Roque Dam doesn’t have as much shock value anymore, given what we now know about the tenuousness and misleading aspects of this imagery.

It looks like the scientists got their balikbayan-box volume wrong 

Based on what we have found so far about the presentation of facts by the news story, I now suspect that the team of scientists and the broadsheet’s reporters got their balikbayan-box-metaphor figures all wrong. A telltale sign of the major error in their computation is, as I have already pointed out, the geologist’s statement that the volume of a balikbayan box is about 1 cubic meter. For them to get a figure this big, they must have computed their balikbayan-box volume based on a two-dimensional box instead of a three-dimensional one, then possibly mixed up their English-metric conversions besides. If this is indeed the case, then all of their computations of the number of balikbayan-box equivalents of the dam’s total water releases for that fateful day would be wrong, too! 

Now let’s check if at the given rate of 5,000 cubic meters per second of water release by the dam, this claim by the lead scientist would still be sustainable: “it was like having a billion balikbayan boxes dumped on Pangasinan in a day.”

Number of seconds in 1 day = 1 day x 24 hours x 60 min per hour x 60 sec per minute
                                              = 86,400 seconds

Therefore, assuming continuous uniform flow at 5,000 cubic meters per second, the total volume of water released by the dam on that fateful day on would be:

Total volume of water released for one day = 5,000 cu m per second x 86,400 seconds
                                                           = 432,000,000 cubic meters

The equivalent number of balikbayan boxes for this volume would be:

Equivalent number of boxes = 432,000,000 cubic meters / 0.17 cu m per box
                                                 = 2,541,176,400 boxes
                                                 = 2.5 billion boxes

The lead scientist’s figure of 1 billion boxes is way, way below this figure by a ratio of 1 is to 2.5. What we have here is an even graver flooding scenario than the one they projected during the press conference and the one reported by the broadsheet. This can only mean either of two things: the flooding computations of the team of scientists were erroneous by being based on the wrong volume for the balikbayan box, or they had made assumptions in their computations that they didn’t tell the media about.

I do hope the latter is the case; otherwise, the team of scientists and the broadsheet’s reporters and editors would have a lot of public explaining and apologizing to do for what looks like seriously inaccurate and misleading reporting.

[maxsims]

Speaking of arithmetical inaccuracies, I happened upon this sentence in Chapter 5 of "Give Your English the Winning Edge""

The passage is, in a word, pure gobbledygook.

I count two words!

 

[Joe Carillo]

Speaking of arithmetical inaccuracies, I happened upon this sentence in Chapter 5 of "Give Your English the Winning Edge""

The passage is, in a word, pure gobbledygook.

I count two words!

 

Your arithmetic is absolutely correct, but that's the literal count. Your objection would hold water if I wrote "The passage is, in one word, pure gobbledygook." In English, though, the expression "in a word" means "in short." Here's a case where the article "a" instead of the numeral "one" makes all the difference.

[maxsims]

Good try, Joe!     

[Joe Carillo]

Good try, Joe!     

You don’t really have to take my word for it, Max:

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms:
in brief idiom
Also, in short; in a word. Concisely, in few words, to sum up. All three phrases usually precede or follow a summary statement, as in In brief, we didn't get much out of his speech, or There was no agenda; in short, they could discuss whatever they wanted to, or The sun was shining, the sky was clear—in a word, it was a beautiful day. The first expression dates from the early 1400s; in short dates from the 1300s but the present usage dates from the 1700s; the hyperbolic in a word (since there is nearly always more than one word) dates from the late 1500s.

The Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary:
   –good word
1 : a favorable statement  <put in a good word for me>
2 : good news  <what's the good word>
  –in a word: in short
  –in so many words
1 : in exactly those terms  <implied that such actions were criminal but did not say so in so many words>
2 : in plain forthright language  <in so many words, she wasn't fit to be seen — Jean Stafford>

[jasonago]

No wonder why these things happen in our country. I believe that the tragic flooding in many parts of the Philippines are caused by wrong human judgments - a simple miscalculation.

The dam authorities and engineers should use smart computer systems like Bayesian decision models or Markov models to compute and decide on when and how much water to release.

Maybe and probably they just look up in the sky and if it is very hazy and dark it means massive rainfall and if not then just a normal rainfall. Then someone who thinks he knows how to predict act like Madame Auring and tells "Hey I think we should release" OR "Hey it's not yet time dude..."

One newspaper headline sensationalized the point of view of the Dam authorities as "Dam if they do, Dam if they don't"

I think it is really "Dam if they don't think correctly"

Disclaimer: It's my first time to post in this forum. Please forgive me if I have some errors in grammar.

[Joe Carillo]

Well said, jasonago!

All errors in grammar--even in math, science, and overall judgment--are forgivable in this Forum, but once an error is pointed out and validated to be in fact an error, the one who made the error is expected to accept and follow thereafter the proper usage or correct way of doing things. As you yourself have alluded to in your posting, the importance of correct thinking in any human activity can't be overestimated. Whether it's about releasing water from a swollen dam or computing the volume of a balikbayan box or making up metaphors about a natural disaster, the road to perdition is paved with bad thinking. 

[Joe Carillo]

Let’s take a look at this lead sentence of a front-page headline story by a major Metro Manila broadsheet last October 13:

“MANILA, Philippines—Water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second hit 10 hapless towns in Pangasinan province on Thursday when the San Roque dam spillways were opened amid a storm drenching and swirling floodwaters, scientists say.”

You can read the complete story by clicking this link.

I made the following observations about the language and mathematics used in telling this particular flood-disaster story:

1. The “water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes” metaphor. This imagery of the dam’s water releases as so many balikbayan boxes falling from the San Roque Dam is false and misleading. It mistakes the concept of volume of water with the actual balikbayan box itself...

2. The idea of “balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second.” That the balikbayan boxes tumbled at the rate of 5,000 cartoons per second is highly loose, inaccurate language that has no bearing on reality altogether.

Later in my critique, I pointed out that the carrying volume of a medium balikbayan box is definitely not in the region of 1 cubic meter—that would be a very huge balikbayan box indeed!—but  only 0.167 cubic meter. Even for the biggest balikbayan box available, the jumbo size at 30 inches x 20 inches x 20 inches, that carrying volume would only be 0.197 cubic meter. The geologist therefore appears to have overstated the volume of the balikbayan box by over 5 times!

The following response to my original posting on the news story about the San Roque Dam's water releases was e-mailed to me by someone who identified himself with the initials PJRM - JMCN - SGN:

Normally, I would have let this pass just like anything that is not worth bothering about. Unfortunately for the author/writer/originator of the message posting, events since early morning have riled me up so much that I couldn't care less whether I will be perceived as a "loose cannon" for the rest of another bloody messed up day here in the 7,107 islands. Besides, I am out for a little fun that can be derived from this forum ...

Jose Carillo's pitch for his English Forum should be understandable to anyone. It should be a no-brainer that an infomercial is an infomercial, regardless of the product or service being offered.

As a review of the basics of the English language, I am curious why Professor Carillo forgot that a metaphor is a metaphor, i.e., there can be no "exactitude" about any. Thus, I am truly amazed that he considers the metaphor "brighter than a thousand suns" for the description of the first atomic bomb explosion as generating a flash of light “brighter than a thousand suns" to be "stunningly resonant and true"

The term "true" applied by Prof. Carillo implies that there is a valid reference to use in the first place.  And so, I can not help but wonder who exactly would have seen a "thousand suns"

And that should serve as reminder to everyone including Prof. Carillo that a metaphor is a metaphor, i.e., there can be no "exactitude" about any, since "exactness" is not the objective.  In fact, it is the lack of any complete and accurate description that prompts an "observer" to use a metaphor in describing something that can not be readily described among the terminologies in one's vocabulary.

And that should be the proper perspective in dealing with another metaphor like:  “Water equivalent to a billion balikbayan boxes tumbling at the rate of 5,000 cartons per second hit 10 hapless towns in Pangasinan province…”

I do not have the slightest concern about the infomercial of Prof. Carillo for his English Forum. What merely drew my attention is the lack of acknowledgment or reference on the part of Prof. Carillo that the facts should have been made available by the operators of the San Roque Dam to the general public. 

With that as the proper reference, it should have been easy enough for anyone, including Prof. Carillo to understand that in the absence of the facts that seem to be intentionally being withheld by the operators of the San Roque Dam, whoever was the assigned/designated writer of the Metro Manila broadsheet was constrained to use a metaphor, calibrated in terms of the language that would have been used by the victims at the very moment when the deluge hit them, at their respective spots.

And logic dictates to expect that the metaphors that may be used by those in the midst of the moments of possibly getting killed will be different from the metaphors that may be "acceptable" to those who will be simply reading the narratives, in the comforts of their homes or offices, without any danger of getting drowned.

What a day in the 7,107 islands about to be hit by another Super Typhoon.  Isn't there any directional control to lead that Super Typhoon straight into Malacanang Palace, the Senate and House of Representative Buildings, the Supreme Court, and the GHQ of the AFP and PNP?  I am inclined to believe that those who will become "collateral damage" will not mind at all, provided all those in the structures mentioned shall be "wiped off the face of the planet" ...  a metaphor as an ending, Prof. Carillo.

Thanks for the entertainment/break ... now back to the salt mines ...

[maxsims]

Joe,

What a load of rubbish....and an unsigned load of rubbish at that!   My guess is that the writer was the editor!

[madgirl09]

For me, there's no question about using any metaphor in the lead sentence of any "news article", provided the metaphor used establishes the idea, or helps in clarifying the unclear fact. It's just a poor choice of a metaphor. Any Filipino balikbayan would react to the wrong and negative use of this symbol- balikbayan box. Hey, I keep sending balikbayan boxes of relief and life support...just how many in a year? And to associate it to a calamity and "the great deluge"-courtesy of some officials' neglect of their duties which eventually drowned my very own people in Pangasinan is outrageous. 

[Joe Carillo]

For the benefit of Forum members, I am providing a link to a column in the October 22, 2009 issue of The Manila Times responding to my posting in My Media English Watch on “Highly politicized physics and faulty news reporting.” The column under the kicker Prometheus Unbound is entitled “Boxes, estimation and politics.”

Read “Boxes, estimation and politics” in The Manila Times now!

[maxsims]

I read the reply, Joe.

With an argument of that standard, she should not have a bachelor's degree, let alone a master's!

 

[Miss Mae]

Probably the writer just wants to hyperbolise what happened. Almost everybody, after all, knew of someone working abroad. Probably the writer decided to rely on that fact, certain that their target market would realize instantly how precious the water that was lost.

Although I agree that no one has the right to mislead anyone, I believe that the writer has just intended to make prospective readers understand how the spill became an issue. Almost every balikbayan box is hard-earned. Every drop of water is like a treasure too, especially at that time when no one needed to suffer further from human's irrevocable neglect.

[Joe Carillo]

I have moved your stand-alone posting and merged it with this old discussion thread so you can clearly appreciate how the discussions on the balikbayan-box metaphor evolved from the very beginning. I really have no objection to the occasional use of hyperbolic language even in news reporting, but I think bad mathematics in supposedly expert opinion about a catastrophic event is definitely unforgivable. Those who have foisted such bad mathematics in the mass media need to apologize profusely to the public instead of falsely invoking fair use of figurative language as defense for their error.