Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists Review

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Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists ReviewAre ten percent of Americans gay? Is the white male in the work force rapidly becoming a minority? Are 150,000 young American women dying each year from anorexia?
Joel Best clearly answers "no" to each of these three questions and, more importantly, shows why many people would say "yes". His point is that descriptive statistics are the product of a social activity, not just a representation of society. Social advocacy causes people to collect the data that they feel will best support their preconceived notions: They talk to unrepresentative groups. They start to collect new measures and then wonder why the "statistics" have grown since ten years earlier (when they weren't much -- if at all -- measured). They multiply erroneous assumptions. They mutate data. And the press and other publications carry the mutations forward.
This book offers plenty of illustrations of intentions run amok. Many of the reports provide useful information for a classroom lecture on the need to discern if a person is "speaking rot", as Harold Macmillan once said was the primary purpose of an education.
A good, crisp 171 pages in length, it is absent discussion of the more difficult inferential statistics and, as a result, it is easy to understand by the lay person.Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists Overview

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Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving Review

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Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving ReviewDr. Mahajan's has been teaching this sort of course for a while now and has been generous enough to make almost all his material available through his course web pages at MIT for The Art of Approximation and Street-Fighting Mathematics. If you want to preview this book I suggest you check those websites out.
The book is reminiscent of Consider a Spherical Cow by Harte, The Art and Craft of Problem-Solving by Zeitz, and How to Solve It by Polya. Although much of the book focuses on how to avoid doing integrals and taking derivatives, it presumes the reader is familiar with calculus. In this respect it's different from the books I just mentioned and other ones out there on approximation, e.g. Guesstimation. The example problems are diverse, most are borrowed from physics, geometry, and math, with a few are that are Fermi-type "real-world" scenarios.
My main complaint is that the book is so short. I wish the author had combined this book with material from his Order of Magnitude Physics and Art of Approximation courses, which are marvelous not only for the problem-solving on display but also for the physics content.
This type of book addresses a serious gap in American math-science education. Learning techniques for approximation allows one to tackle the sort of ill-posed problems one is most likely to encounter in the real-world. It is also intimately tied to recognizing the salient features of a problem, such as the physical principles involved in a physics problem or the most questionable assumption in an economic model. Street-Fighting Math deserves a wide readership and will hopefully influence other math-science teachers and authors.Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving Overview

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