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A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper :: 038548254X
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| In this book the author of Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences reveals the hidden mathematical angles in countless media stories. His real life perspective on the statistics we rely on and how they can mislead is for anyone interested in gaining a more accurate view of their world. The book is written with a humorous and knowledgeable style that makes it great reading. Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
This is a book full of amusing anectodes relating mathemtical concepts to the daily newspaper.
While the book reads easy enough and is mildly entertaining, I felt a little disappointed. There was no unifying theme or common thread, and it left me wondering what point the author was trying to make. Perhaps that was intentional.
I would have favored a theme, nontheless. For example, the author could have shown how mathematical concepts are consistently abused and misused by news writers. Sometimes the abuse is to further a particular bias or point of view. Sometimes the abuse is unintentional.
But the author doesn't really go there. One gets the impression he wants to, but something is stopping him.
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Author: Guest
Just re-read this book again, jumping from one subject to another during a lonely weekend. Reading the ones i mark the last time iread it.
I love Innumeracy, and I love this one too....
This book consists of loosely connected materials that you often see in the newspaper and John take a fresh mathematician look into it, sneering and smiling and teaching us what to watch over next time we read it.
The logic will make you smile a lot, and the awakening will make you look at your newspaper with a different point of view, some sort of small revelation.
I believe that John Allen Paulo has awaken up the mathematic curiocities in a lot of his readers, including me. He would argue that the percentage is too small to make a dent to this world of innumeracy people, (which is mathematically correct, and he has mathematically proven that into this world).
But to those who have been changed, it did matter for their lives. Go get it and have funs reading, if you found it too daunting, take a rest, and re read the book next week, you will be glad you did.
Thank You John.
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Author: Guest
Dr. Paulos is a mathematician who likes to read and think about newspapers and their stories. He admits to having a sentimental fondness for several of them and to being an avid news junkie, despite conceding some of their faults. He admits the average paper may concentrate too much on the bad news and on political reportage and crime, sometimes making them look like nothing more than glorified police blotters.
But there are other, more subtle ways in which newspapers can mislead. Because the selection of stories seems so diverse, disjointed, and unrelated--a tornado hits Kansas, an earthquake in Japan, a gang-related murder in L.A., a psychic in London predicts the end of the world, a story on global warming, a farmer in Korea grows the world's largest turnip--he feels they enourage the illusion of being well-informed by providing us with a snapshot, as it were, of the world beyond our own limited purview, when in fact, all one has done is read a disjointed collection of stories that might merely reflect the selection biases of the newspaper, or what stories they could actually obtain because the reporter was there and not somewhere else, vs. the more important ones that they couldn't, for whatever reason.
Despite these shortcomings, Paulos finds newspaper stories a fascinating source of usually good information on many topics, and for the ones that don't, he finds they provide interesting food for the thought for a mathematician like himself, and he likes to use his mathematical and logical skills to show why a particular story's interpretation is probably false, misleading, or doesn't follow logically from the facts in the story. The book is devoted to showing how the application of simple mathematical and logical skills can provide insights into the real "facts" behind a news story.
One of the best examples was a story in which it was claimed that black voters voted along racial lines for a particular mayorial candidate. (I don't recall the exact percentages, but I'll use a similar example to show how Paulos analyzes the statistics). Suppose 85% of blacks had voted for the black candidate. Does that support the story's claim? Paulos points out that the story failed to consider that most blacks are democatic, and the black candidate was a democrat. If 80% of blacks are democrats, that means only 5% more voted for the black candidate than one could expect based on that percentage, which is probably not very significant.
Contrast that with the white situation. White voters are fairly evenly divided between republicans and democrats. If 70% voted for the republican candidate, that means that 20% more voted for the white candidate, and against the black candidate, than one would expect based on the distribution of party affiliation, which could be significant. Hence in this case, it's actually the white voters who appear to vote along racial lines than the blacks. Paulos shows how this kind of simple mathematical analysis can provide a useful foil to the often overly facile, unjustified, and distorted claims made in newspaper stories.
One brief note on how to read the book. It's divided up into several sections, reflecting the typical format of most newspapers, which are:
1. Politics, Economics, and the Nation
2. Local, Business, and Social Issues
3. Lifestyle, Spin, and Soft News
4. Science, Medicine, and the Environment
There are so many examples in the book in each section that you could just read the section or two that interested you, or the stories that interested you, and you could still learn a lot.
This book should be required reading for students and probably most adults in our increasingly illiterate and innumerate society. It's the only book I've ever seen on applying mathematical concepts to things as fuzzy and inexact as newspapers stories often are, and if someone had told me there was a book on it, I would have been sceptical, in the same way Paulos approaches each newspaper story with a healthy does of scepticism. In fact, the book really is about how to use simple math and logic and even common sense thinking to develop a healthy BS filter, probably a useful tool in many areas of life, in addition to reading the newspaper. Paulos has done a fine job and the book counts as one of the most interesting and practical applications of math and logic to everyday life that I've seen.
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Author: Guest
As a mathematician living in a high-tech, post-industrial society of highly literate citizens, I am often astounded (and disturbed) by the naivete and incapacity of educated, intelligent people to grasp simple mathematic concepts and their profound relevance to much of our everyday lives.
Paulos has done something about it.
This book (and his book 'Innumeracy') should be required reading for every high school student - nay, every adult - in this country. Many of the most important mathematical concepts that we need are horrendously misunderstood by large portions of our 'educated' society, and as this book illustrates, we all suffer for it.
This book is eminently accessible to most any reader beyond junior high school, and the organization into multiple independent little chapters means it can be broken up into bathroom reading sessions if necessary.
Paulos is America's greatest mass educator of math for the lay person, and belongs in the "Math Is Fun For Everyone" pantheon with Eli Maor, Colin Bruce, Ivars Peterson, Martin Gardner, and Ivar Ekeland.
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Author: Guest
Paulos's second effort, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, is a motley of topics culled from his avid(and perhaps rabid)devotion to reading a variety of newspapers. While some of the vignettes struck me as off-beat and at times annoying, others did impart some very useful information. This leads me to believe that different readers will assign a different value to some things in the text. One man's trash is another man's treasure, so they say.
The book is actually quite a demonstrable improvement over some of his previous efforts, most notably his book Innumeracy in particular. Compared to Innumeracy, this book contains less smug academic snobbishness, less intellectual elitism and much less of an obvious attempt to show how much smarter Professor Paulos is to the average, everyday simpletons he must unjustly suffer. Instead, there is a concerted effort throughout the book to show and tell. In terms of accessibility, both in writing style and content, I feel compelled to give it high marks.
In particular, this book contains a short bibliography as well as an extensive index. The actual book does not have formal chapters per se, but it does have sections, five in all, devoted to all the topics one normally finds represented in the local newspaper. This in turn allows one to pick and choose topics of interest, as opposed to embarking from page one and setting one's jaw firmly for difficult and staid reading. Actually, the book is more of a series of vignettes on a particular theme, short essays, usually not more than five pages, which highlight the hidden but crucial role of mathematics in the stories that we read in the newspapers. Paulos also includes many diagrams and charts as an aid in presenting each topic and helping the reader to understand some of the more arcane(and often bizarre)concepts involved.
I especially liked his treatment of Bayes' rule, or conditional probabilities. It often pops up in medical statistics, and is almost always never appropriately understood. Moreover, section four of the text, which deals with newsworthy statistics from science, medicine and the environment, will probably be the most informative section of practical interest to most readers.
However, be forewarned that even in this book, Paulos has succumbed to the urge to recycle some of his material, both from his previous book, Innumeracy, and going forward to other books. So if you've read this book, you pretty much have the gist of his subsequent books. Still, the content is mostly fresh, and much of it is interesting, at least to me. Overall, I found the book to be a good learning experience, and one that I would really lend to others seeking enlightenment on statistics in the news.
In sum, this little book is not nearly as painful a read as Innumeracy, and is definitely more entertaining, educational and informative. The good professor has allowed his liberal roots (he was once, perish the thought, an English major in college, but defected to math, and as such he is an embarassment and an affront to all self-respecting humanitarians everywhere) to come briefly out of the closet, so to speak, and it shows in the crisp, clear writing consistently appearing in the text. This book is without a doubt the best of all his musings on mathematics and society.
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