A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

Rating:
Summary: transformed my reading of the paper
Review: A funny, instructional tour of the newspaper as seen by a mathematician. Each section starts out with a headline and a brief sketch of a news story and then Paulos discusses in a witty and enlightening way the insights that mathematics provides. Deals with everything from politics and economics to sports and food. Every reporter and serious reader should know what's in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Good arguments against politically correct busy-bodies
Review: A light-hearted account of the fallacies of day-to-day arguments. It clearly shows how bureaucrats push their own agendas with very little solid arguments of hard proof. It is interesting to see how public opinion is manipulated on the basis of irrational thinking while exploiting the good will, sentimental, and affectionate side of humans. Positive action, equality of employment, anti-abortion, etc. all those issues that are dealt with "feelings" rather than "thinkingn" are effectively demolished with no compassion by using basic mathematics.

Rating:
Summary: Journalist's Requirement
Review: All journalists should be encouraged to read this witty book as well as other members of the chattering classes. It is rather surprising how a little math and common sense can shed light on so much tripe in the paper and on TV.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing and entertaining - a perfect "commuting" book.
Review: Althought it took a few chapters to get in to the groove of the book, "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" quickly drew my interest. Although some topics are repetitive, and at times you wonder what the point is, in essence the author does a good job at teaching us how to understand what we read. Broken down in short (2-3 page) chapters, this book is ideal for people who need something to read for 5-10 minutes - although it is just as rewarding in a longer-term reading session. The use of complex math is limited, and he explains things well - although some may have to re-read his mathematical and logical points to fully understand them. Overall, for people intrigued with logic, mathematics, or understanding how people perceive the world, it's a worthy read.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing and entertaining - a perfect "commuting" book.
Review: Althought it took a few chapters to get in to the groove of the book, "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" quickly drew my interest. Although some topics are repetitive, and at times you wonder what the point is, in essence the author does a good job at teaching us how to understand what we read. Broken down in short (2-3 page) chapters, this book is ideal for people who need something to read for 5-10 minutes - although it is just as rewarding in a longer-term reading session. The use of complex math is limited, and he explains things well - although some may have to re-read his mathematical and logical points to fully understand them. Overall, for people intrigued with logic, mathematics, or understanding how people perceive the world, it's a worthy read.

Rating:
Summary: should be required reading for EVERY adult 16yrs and older
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Unique little book
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An explanation of much of what is wrong
Review: Exploring once again the numerical ignorance of the American society,Paulos examines serious realities and the potentially harmful consequencesof the lack of a basic number sense in the general population. From supposed experts "explaining" the economy and the recent actions of the stock markets to sheer guesses given as hard facts, so much of our lives is affected by incorrect suppositions. It also points out how many jobs in our society are economically irrelevant in a very real sense.
Consider the section entitled "Darts Trounce the Pros: Luck and the Stock Market," where stocks were picked by throwing darts and the results compared to that of the "pros." Over a six-month period, the choices performed by the random process has a 42 percent gain as opposed to the Dow Jones rate of 8 percent and the experts rate of 2.2 percent. As time went on, the gains tended to move toward equality, but the reality is that those stocks picked by market watchers generally match the behavior of a random selection. In other words, money spent on "expert" stock advice is essentially wasted, with the obvious exception of insider trading.
Economic forecasts are also subjected to a similar investigation. In a convoluted world economy, where the behavior is essentially chaotic, it is impossible to predict what the future behavior will be. Recently, the executive and legislative branches of the U. S. government have been pounding each other over their separate long term predictions of the behavior of the U.S. economy. Such "knowledge" is being used in the attempt to balance the budget of the U.S. federal government. There is dark humor in the knowledge that one way to assist is to eliminate all jobs involved in the forecasting and pick a random number in the range of reasonable choices. Since random numbers have no biased political agenda, the chances are very good that such a choice will be better than the "experts."
Some other items discussed are:

(a) Do cellular phones cause brain cancer?
(b) Is it possible to have a truly fair democratic election?
(c) How is it possible for a small, committed block of voters to completely dominate the behavior of a politician?
(d) What does the phrase, "trace amount of a substance" really mean?

Entertaining in the dark sense, this book points out one of the saddest facts of modern life, Not only are the bulk of the people illiterate in the sense of numeric facts, but many decisions are made based on that illiteracy. People often justify their actions by saying, "I am a people person, not a numbers person." However, the fact is that if you want to maximize your chances of making the right decision, consult a numbers person. Given the current high rate of unemployment in the mathe0matical community, we need the work!

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

Rating:
Summary: Behind the scenes look at the daily news.
Review: Great book. Gives much needed insight into the "facts" and "figures" that supposedly anchor news in reality. And it's out in paperback now from Anchor Books, I believe

Rating:
Summary: All the Quantification That's Fit to Print
Review: I found Professor Paulos's book, Innumeracy, to be a delightful expression of the key elements of mathematical ignorance that can be harmful, along with many new ways to see and think about the world around. You can imagine how much more pleased I was to find that A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is an improvement over that valuable book. Every editor and newspaper writer should be required to read and apply this book before beginning their careers. Almost all those who love the news will find some new appreciation for how it could be better reported. Those who will benefit most are those with the least amount of background in math, logic and psychology. Although the subjects are often related to math, if you can multiple two numbers together using a calculator you will probably understand almost all of the sections. If you already know math well, this book will probably only provide amusement in isolated examples and you may not find it has enough new to really educate you. Most of the points are regularly treated in the mathematics literature.

In the introduction, Professor Paulos reveals a long and abiding love for newspapers. And he reads a lot of them. He subscribes to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times, skims the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Daily News, and occasionally looks at USA Today (he likes weather maps in color on occasion), the Washington Post, the suburban Ambler Gazette, the Bar Harbor Times, the local paper of any city he is in, and the tabloids.

This knowledge is reflected in the book's structure. There are four sections, reflecting the typical four section format of many weekday papers. The four sections 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

Then, within each section, he uses a headline and subtitle for each subsection to capture the essence of a story type that we have all read lots of. For example, "Lani 'Quota Queen' Guinier: Voting, Power, and Mathematics" is the subsection that looks at how different ways of compiling votes would affect the power of individual interest groups and minorities. "SAT Top Quartile Score Declines: Correlation, Prediction and Improvement" examines all of those many stories we read about the SAT and what they really mean. Each subsection tends to run from 2-5 pages. As a result, this book can be read in 10 minute intervals very comfortably. In that sense, it's an ideal book for commuters who've finished reading their daily paper and still have more time on their hands.

This book covers many of the same topics as Innumeracy. I suggest that if you feel you really understand that subject that you skip the relevant subsection here unless you find the treatment amusing in its opening lines. Professor Paulos tends to repeat examples from Innumeracy and while that makes the book easier to understand, the repetition can dull your interest.

I found the book to be most appealing when it pointed out the fundamental absurdity of some approach that is commonly used now. One of the most powerful examples involved pointing out that putting one pint of toxic material into the ocean would create a frequency of molecules in the entire ocean that would sound scary to anyone, even though the material would be extremely dilute. Naturally, as an author, I was in complete agreement with his point about the too infrequent reviewing of new books (except on Amazon.com, of course!). My mind was also expanded by the problem of whether Moslems should pray towards Mecca straight through the Earth or as though they were traveling over the top of the Earth.

You probably won't agree with all of his solutions . . . or even think that all of the problems he cites are important ones. But you'll find yourself amused and informed more often than not. That's better than you can expect from all but a tiny fraction of nonfiction books. Take a peek at "Recession Forecast If Steps Not Taken" as a test of your potential interest in the book. This subsection explores chaos theory and why it's not possible to forecast accurately all of the things that people regularly claim to forecast (such as the weather, the economy and many social trends).

After you finish the book, I suggest that you pick out a newspaper article that falls into some of these errors . . . and write a letter to the editor suggesting how it could have been improved. If we all did that even once a year, newspaper reporting would soon improve and we would all be better informed.