Imprecise machines mess with history

The mass media continues to gloss over the imprecision of machines/algorithms. 

Here is another example I came across the other day. In conversation, the name Martin Van Buren popped up. I was curious about this eighth President of the United States.

What caught my eye in the following Google search result (right panel) is his height:

 

Mr. Van Buren was very short, only 5 feet tall. I was about to spin a story about defying the conventional wisdom that the success of men is correlated with height (Wikipedia's entry on human height even has a sub-section on its correlations with occupational success). 

Then a noise in my head led me to click on the White House link. And the first thing on Van Buren's biography concerns his height.

 

Except the White House website tells readers he was 5 feet 6 inches. Those 6 inches are a world of difference!

I'm assuming the White House number is official, and the machines at Google got it wrong (same mistake at Yahoo! and Bing; you wonder what source they are all using, or just copying each other). Not sure why these search engines ignore what would seem to be the authoritative source.

This calls for machines fact-checking machines. How to make that happen?

***

The error is not trivial! The standard deviation of height in U.S. males is about 3 inches according to Wikipedia. An error of 6 inches is two times the standard deviation. The range spanned by two standard deviations around the average covers two-thirds of U.S. men!

Wikipedia also advises that human growth hormone treatment is recommended for anyone whose height is 2.25 times or more below the population average so the machines thought Mr. Van Buren should be thus treated.

Comments

[Ken]

People of Van Buren's era were generally much shorter than today, and I think with the importance of television, presidential candidates in the future will always be of greater height, but without looking skinny. Hilary Clinton may change that, but obviously one question the power brokers will be asking is, does it matter fro a woman? Interestingly the estimates for her height range from 5 foot 4 to 5 foot 8.5.

[Xan Gregg]

Bing lists Wikipedia and Freebase as sources, and the latter had 5' as the height until I just changed it to 5'6". We'll see if the search engines pick up the change. Wikipedia also has 5'6" in the Heights of Presidents page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_presidential_candidates_of_the_United_States