Cocaine Found on 90-Percent of U.S. Bills

[mdillenbeck]

Thanks for pointing that out Draven35 - there is something called an unrepresentative sample - and this is a common fallacy people fall for.

For those of you who have forgotten your statistics (or who never had to take it or a rigorous research science course), we can only extrapolate about the population we sampled. When we sample only 18 US cities (in other words, excluding many other cities, smaller urban settings, and all rural settings) then saying the results apply to the entire US currency set is an overgeneralization.

Its kind of like sampling 100 campuses across the US and stating that US citizens are liberal or sampling Nigeria and then concluding 98% of the human population is black.

I fully agree with the lecturer I saw on TED that said we need to change the apex of high school mathematics from calculus to probability and statistics. (For that matter, also change the goal of English from grammar to logic and argument - spelling is important but sound and valid reasoning is critical.)

 

[mdillenbeck]

Went to the Scientific America article to find out more - $1, $5, $10, $20, and $100 bills were samples.

If we are to assume an equal number of each bill, then this gives a sample size of 2.6 bills per denomination per city. N = 2.6 is no where near the needed sample size.

Where were these samples taken? At banks, from store registers, out of volunteers' wallets? Why so few?

My favorite response from that article's comments was by ifitzme:

Maybe they should find out what the guy that collected the money has been doing in his spare time.

Wouldn't that be an interesting confound! 😛

 

[RazberyBandit]

All it would take is one heavily contaminated bill to ruin an entire sample. Isn't it convenient how nowhere in either this writing or the one by Scientific America does it state that the samples were properly isolated prior to testing? This goes along with what frozenlead and MDillenbeck have been pointing out about the samples themselves.

This is just one more pile of garbage recycled as "scientific research."

 

[omnimodis78]

I think statistically speaking this statistic is inacurate...

 

[FSXFan]

Really old news. I read this well over a year ago.

 

[sloch]

I don't see why anyone is surprised at the number. It's old news.

Pretending it's new though... Just now I opened up my wallet and found bills that have been in circulation for over a decade. The study is reporting on whether trace amounts of cocaine were present or not, regardless of how much. Given the small amounts they're looking for, a clean bill could just as easily be "cocainized" merely through contact with a contaminated bill. Or even a single dirty bill passes through a cashier station, and the cashier passes trace amounts of cocaine to other clean bills through skin contact. Over ten years, that's a lot of paper a dirty bill could contaminate.

A much more interesting study would be to find the correlation between contamination ratio and the age of the bill. Building that picture up over many years could probably tell you something interesting and useful about a substance's use.

 

[rcmaniac25]

So thats why so everyone likes money...

 

[bourgeoisdude]

[citation][nom]MDillenbeck[/nom]Went to the Scientific America article to find out more - $1, $5, $10, $20, and $100 bills were samples.[/citation]

...so $50 bills are clean?

 

[gman24]

The Benjamins are fine

 

[justiceguy216]

Well that does it, I'm boycotting money.

 

[maigo]

Yet ANOTHER slow news day, this has been common knowledge since before I started using Bolivian Marching Powder

 

[bluzman32]

this is a random nontech article.

 

[Guest]

statistically not representative of the whole population

 

[anamaniac]

Such trace amounts on these... you're better off smoking banana peels... atleast a small buzz is involved. Otherwise, you'd be smoking 35% linen, 64.999999999999% paper, and 0.0000000000001% cocaine (approximately).

 

[davisorle]

Here in Greece about 99% has traces of tzatziki and garlic from too much souvlaki. If you haven't tried it so far pls do and make sure you use your walet without cleaning your hands afterwards.

 

[Guest]

who would uses currency nowadays anyway? When was the last time you bought anything using a Benjamin?

 

[wild9]

Dirty money - what money?! The Federal Reserve 'smoked' (not in a literal sense of course), most of it 😉

 

[Regulas]

WTF with President Bush in the picture. It show Tom's Hardware has some Oboma Socialist hacks working for it is what it tells me. You should probably put up a picture of ACORN and other socialist hacks up instead. Hows about crooked Union bosses and their Democrat/Marxist thugs. Bush was not the best be he sure as hell was better than the Racist, Marxist community organizer we have in there now.

 

[tat2demon]

WTF does this have to do with computers and/or technology? When I want to get my normal daily news I dont come to Toms.

 

[shabaa]

Gives a whole new meaning to "dirty money"