Customer Reviews

A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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