The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life - Hardcover

Blastland, Michael; Dilnot, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592404235 ISBN 13: 9781592404230

Publisher: Gotham, 2008

Synopsis

The team from BBC Radio's More or Less demonstrates how to better understand the world and make more responsible consumer choices using accessible mathematical principles, in a lighthearted guide that redefines the concepts of averages, risks, and statistics. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Blastland is a writer, broadcaster, and the creator of More or Less, the BBC Radio 4 show.

Andrew Dilnot, the former presenter on the show, is the principal of St. HughÂ’s College, Oxford, and was the director of EnglandÂ’s Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Reviews

Americans are assaulted by numbers, whether it's the latest political poll or most recent clinical study on caffeine. But what do these numbers really mean and are they communicating a categorical truth? Blastland and Dilnot, from the BBC radio show More or Less, embark on a monumental task of interpreting numerical data and showing how its misinterpretation often leads to misinformation. It is one thing to measure, they write, quite another to wrench the numbers to a false conclusion. The authors take a close look at statistics that are accepted at face value—many stemming from scientific or medical discoveries. They examine everything from the link between alcohol and breast cancer risk to baseball batting averages to fascinating assessments of the manipulation of data by politicians when they talk taxes or the cautionary tale of a U.K. educational measurement program designed much like No Child Left Behind. Blastland and Dilnot apply their famously cheeky approach to the analysis of how people are duped, frightened or falsely encouraged by data. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Gotham
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1592404235
• ISBN 13: 9781592404230
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192