Rating: 
Summary: Good idea, poor execution
Review: I found this book numbingly dull. After about 40 pages I lost any hope of maintaining the one-minded devotion to extract the interesting concepts buried within.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful commentaries on everyday life
Review: I truly enjoyed this book, and skim it again every summer. This work is like chatting with an extremely thoughtful friend who takes nothing for granted, and examines every facet of daily life, coming up with fresh insight into the utterly obvious, yet somehow as yet undetected. One of my chief delights in this book may be others complaints- a certain lack of thesis, a stroll from short chapter to short chapter. Some chapters require my undergrad ec degree to think about, some are so basic as to be a touch boring. (and occasionally diatribey) Truly fascinating. I find myself wanting not have lunch with the author, but to just walk through the city, hearing his strains of thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Not just for math people
Review: If you hate math, don't get scared by the title! You need very little mathematical knowledge to understand the book. Furthermore, much of the book deals simply with interpreting the news intelligently, whether there is a mathematical component or not. Paulos makes a lot of important points that should be understood by everyone who wants to intelligently appreciate the news
Rating:
Summary: I expected more than this book delivered
Review: Paulos did a fine job with his previous book, Innumeracy. However, this book falls short. I was hoping to see concrete examples of news stories "gone mathematically bad," and then have Paulos show what was wrong with those stories. However, the examples used were more ambiguous -- i.e., general stories about certain topics. It was even more frustrating given that his chapter titles appeared to promise some concrete news story, but then failed to deliver. For example, "Afta Nafta, Lafta" had nothing to do with NAFTA or free trade. While it did provide some less-than-illuminating discussion about how details tend to come after the headline and first paragraph, I failed to see how any of this related to a substantive topic. Also, the preceeding chapter about economic forecasts came to the remarkably banal conclusion that reality can be more complex than simple models, illustrated by a transformationof the Laffer Curve into a squiggly line. OK, fine, but how about an admission that Laffer's analysis came with the standard "ceteris paribus" clause that all social scientists should be familiar with. And how about citing empirical investigations that test Laffer's predictions while controlling for confounding factors? There are some good lessons scattered throughout this book, but as a previous reviewer said, it does tend to be scattered and lacking any common thread. Joel Best's "Damned Lies and Statistics" is a much better read.
Rating:
Summary: I expected more than this book delivered
Review: Paulos did a fine job with his previous book, Innumeracy. However, this book falls short. I was hoping to see concrete examples of news stories "gone mathematically bad," and then have Paulos show what was wrong with those stories. However, the examples used were more ambiguous -- i.e., general stories about certain topics. It was even more frustrating given that his chapter titles appeared to promise some concrete news story, but then failed to deliver. For example, "Afta Nafta, Lafta" had nothing to do with NAFTA or free trade. While it did provide some less-than-illuminating discussion about how details tend to come after the headline and first paragraph, I failed to see how any of this related to a substantive topic. Also, the preceeding chapter about economic forecasts came to the remarkably banal conclusion that reality can be more complex than simple models, illustrated by a transformationof the Laffer Curve into a squiggly line. OK, fine, but how about an admission that Laffer's analysis came with the standard "ceteris paribus" clause that all social scientists should be familiar with. And how about citing empirical investigations that test Laffer's predictions while controlling for confounding factors? There are some good lessons scattered throughout this book, but as a previous reviewer said, it does tend to be scattered and lacking any common thread. Joel Best's "Damned Lies and Statistics" is a much better read.
Rating:
Summary: A must have for any instructor of the social sciences
Review: Paulos' warm and inviting style and his relationship with newspapers made me reminisce of the evenings I spent reading the "green pages" while visiting my grandparents in Milwaukee. I enjoyed his tour of scientific journalism and working through his math puzzlers. This book provides perfect examples for applying statistical knowledge in the real world. It's a wonderful tool for demonstrating the fruits of critical thinking. I especially like the short chapter format. Any stats instructor (or any social science instructor for that matter) will be glad they read it
Rating:
Summary: A must have for any instructor of the social sciences
Review: Paulos' warm and inviting style and his relationship with newspapers made me reminisce of the evenings I spent reading the "green pages" while visiting my grandparents in Milwaukee. I enjoyed his tour of scientific journalism and working through his math puzzlers. This book provides perfect examples for applying statistical knowledge in the real world. It's a wonderful tool for demonstrating the fruits of critical thinking. I especially like the short chapter format. Any stats instructor (or any social science instructor for that matter) will be glad they read it
Rating:
Summary: Half Assorted (Numerical) Trivia, Half Useful Content
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading for journalists
Review: Should be required reading for journalists, and, since it isn't, the rest of us should read it so we'll recognize how we are being misled by journalists' ignorance. Using actual stories covered in the various sections of the newspaper, Paulos explains mathematical concepts that should have been considered by the reporter. He says that, in addition to the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, reporters should ask how many, how does that quantity compare with other quantities, are we looking at the right categories and relationships, are the statistics derived from a random sample or a collection of anecdotes... One example Paulos provides shows how readers can be misled by numbers, especially if the reporter uses the numbers provided by a biased source. In a story about contamination, suppose a pint of a toxic chemical were spilled in the ocean and the chemical becomes evenly dispersed around the globe. Seems like a minuscule amount of contamination, and not worth worrying about. But, if the ocean water were tested, it would show almost 6,000 molecules of that toxic chemical in a pint of water. Now, it looks like a reason to panic. Although not an easy read, most of the math is simply and entertainingly presented, and occasional dull passages are short and easily skipped.
Rating:
Summary: Who would have thought a Mathematics book could entertain?
Review: Strangely enough (or so one might think) I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I even caught myself chuckling aloud a few times. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper de-mystifies the role Math plays in our everyday lives, and sheds a little (much needed) clarity on many of the "truths" behind the statistics we hear about all the time. I highly encourage anyone (even self proclaimed or closet mathematophobes) to read this book. It teaches a little, encourages a little, explains a little, and entertains a lot
|
