Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: The book is dedicated "To storytelling number-crunchers and number-crunching storytellers," and I consider myself in this group. However, the book is written for those who are not really familiar with statistics and number crunching. Some interesting topics and stories, but no Aha's.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: The book is dedicated "To storytelling number-crunchers and number-crunching storytellers," and I consider myself in this group. However, the book is written for those who are not really familiar with statistics and number crunching. Some interesting topics and stories, but no Aha's.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: The book is dedicated "To storytelling number-crunchers and number-crunching storytellers," and I consider myself in this group. However, the book is written for those who are not really familiar with statistics and number crunching. Some interesting topics and stories, but no Aha's.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanted to enjoy the book, but was disappointed
Review: There seem to be very few actual newspaper examples, and too many contrived discussions. Comes across as preaching at the reader, but without enough facts to back up what he says, in my opinion. Not that I don't think journalists stretch the truth a lot with their misleading and misinformed use of statistics -- I just think with some effort the author could have included more real-life examples. I really wanted to like this book, because I think the subject has great potential. However, I would have to agree with the review of Ian Westray and say that I was somewhat disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag
Review: This book had a few good examples of how numbers are used and abused in the media. The book was genenrally good when it kept its discussion to narrowly defined cases (the contamination of a pollutant in the water, e.g.). However, the discussion of the broader issues, especially any topic to do with ethics, came across as astoundingly naive and uncritical its hidden assumptions. Much as the author would like to believe, not every problem is quantifiable, at least not in the simplistic way done here. Read this book if you want to see a reason why mathematicians do not hold all the answers.
Rating: 
Summary: If only we could get journalists to read it...
Review: This book puts the world into a meaningful mathematical perspective. News, by its nature, focuses on the unusual, but it makes the unlikely seem commonplace. This book does a great job of helping us understand the probabilities of our world
Rating:
Summary: Basic Mathematics Primer, Lacking in Lively Context
Review: This book read as if Paulos began with a list of common mathematical fallacies and went looking for archetypal examples of them. In many places he doesn't even use specific examples, instead describing a type of story without referring to any particular ones. I really missed the sense that he was reacting to real articles; it seemed more like he was contriving neatly exemplary, and hermetically sealed, examples.Paulos should have concentrated on a collection of the newspapers that went out on a given day, or on a single paper over time. That way he could have stumbled across some of the more muddled and spontaneous uses of number in the news, and his math primer reactions could have been less pat. Ultimately this book failed to surprise me with anything. It was pleasant, but not delightful.
Rating: 
Summary: It'll make you skeptical
Review: This book will make you wonder about every "statistic" that you've ever seen reported. Not really a "math" book per se, but just showing that by applying some probability, philosophy, and a point to get across, you can manipulate numbers any way that you'd like. Although the text varies widely from the "headlines" of the chapters at times, the basic jist of the examples come across. Paulos could have used exact news events more often, but the basic theories that he explains could be (and are) applied to current news events. No need to get deep into math with this book. Just see how the spin doctors work out stats and opinions to their advantage. Like Paulos points out about the farmer who hangs up the targets that with all of the bulleyes shot out of them. When asked how he shot them so accurately, he said, "No problem. I just shoot the target and then draw the circle around it."
Rating:
Summary: Useful but fragmented, like the newspaper
Review: This is a clever and useful book about the foibles in the media's use of statistics, with short primers on complexity, psychology, and probability theory -- and an occasional lapse into philosophizing that ends almost as soon as it begins. Ultimately this book, deliberately written so as to emulate the fragmented, unsustained format of the newspaper, suffers from this very cleverness: no issue is taken up long enough for Paulos to do it proper justice, very much like the newspaper (and television) reporting of which he is so rightly skeptical.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: Well worth the read. It's not preachy like Innumeracy, it entertainingly goes through the ways that news sources screw up their numbers.
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