Whenever there is an earthquake, I don't usually take it seriously unless it is a matter of life and death. Besides, there are millions of earthquakes taking place in a year but most of the time we are oblivious of it. Some may be more sensitive to it while others are not. In my case, I am very much sensitive because I am in love (as always).
As I scroll for news in my Facebook news feed I am no longer surprised that Rappler posted first. It is always (well, most of the time) ahead of other news publishers online even to the extent of erroneous information. They should hire a science communicator.
However, scrolling further, GMA caught my attention not because of anything but the magnitude of the earthquake. Please refer to the screen capture below. The earthquake's magnitude is rounded off from 7.8 to 8.0 which is a great application of rounding off. BUT and a very big but are the underlying message it conveys to me as a science teacher.
Time and time again I would like to remind how important basic knowledge is even in the field of journalism. I don't expect everyone to be a science major, but they should have at least paid attention to their elementary science teacher.
Lesson 1: Rounding Off (Math)
Just because the magnitude is 7.8 does not mean that the number is taken as a natural number. A number is just a symbolic representation and one has to give meaning to the number itself. When we cannot bridge the math to science then we don't fully understand what the number is. I know I am biased towards Physics, but learning math is abortive of understanding the natural world. An increase of 0.1 to an earthquake's magnitude would result to a different intensity of an earthquake. Likewise, this is a magnitude scale and logarithmic at that. To put it simply, the table below will show you how rounding off would change how "strong" the earthquake is.
I know that the phase value of table is not good, and you are smart to notice it. What do you expect from Wikipedia?
Lesson 2: describing an earthquake (English)
I can always tell if an English teacher has mastered basic science competencies in his/her elementary grades the moment he/she opens his/her mouth. With a range of 6.0 to 6.9 magnitude, an earthquake is described as "strong". The USGS measured a magnitude of 7.8 which should be classified or described as "major". The news writer is not contented yet with the usage of "strong" and further described it as "powerful" to present the news.
I understand we need to vary our use of adjectives. I just cannot take "huge" or "big" as an appropriate word to describe the earthquake. Earthquake has no dimension. It is described in intensity. Great or massive would had been more appropriate.
Lesson 3: earthquake (Science)
In a dynamic world and in a country within the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is imperative that we should have at least an organic knowledge of earthquake. The sad thing is how he the misconception and our indifference to learning basic science competencies manifest in this news article.
If you intend to live on this planet, you should know how it works.
siraris
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