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Title: How to Lie with Charts : by Gerald Everett Jones ISBN: 1-58348-767-0 Publisher: Author's Choice Press Pub. Date: 10 February, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Talk about yer irony.
Comment: The writing is fairly engaging and the topic is covered fairly well, but the graphics are just awful!
In fact, the gray-scale images are so poorly reproduced that it detracts from the message the author promotes. And, in many instances, the graphs are so mottled that you have to guess as to what is being shown. Unless, of course, the book's poor image quality is part of the lesson. In which case it's a brillant ploy to get the point across.
Reasonable book - really lousy pictures!
Rating: 4
Summary: Want to Learn How to Recognize a Deceptive Presentation?
Comment: Are you tired of watching managements', employees' or politicians' deceptive presentation with graphs? Do you want to call their bluff? "How to Lie with Charts" is your secret weapon. This book along side with Darrell Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics" gives you all the amunition you need to cut through those presentations that create optical illusions.
The author explains all of the various charts available, their characteristics and how people alter their graphic works of art to influence the audience to buy into whatever the presentor wishes.
Not only does the author talk about the graphs but he explores the area of our subconcious and how this strongly influence our positive or negative perception of a chart.
The book goes into great detail and is quite humorous. The only cirticism that I have about this book is located in chapter 10. The author talks about the importance of color and how it influences the audience but he explains all of this in black and white. If you are going to encourge people to use color presentations and graphs, stop being such a tight wad and use color in your own book. Explaining tones, shades, etc., in fuzzy gray color doesn't do the job. Practice what you preach. Use color to explain color.
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent resource for algebra, precalc and computers
Comment: This is a very funny book, but it's also quite informative. There are discussions of each kind of graph (or "chart") that you are likely to make, particularly if you use the spreadsheet software Excel. What types of graphs are appropriate for what types of data? When should you use a pie chart? How can you emphasize one piece of data in a chart, to make it stand out from others? This book answers these questions, and more. For algebra students learning to graph things on graph paper or on the computer, this may be interesting, or even more so for the teacher, who can use some of the funnier examples as a way to spice up the subject and keep students interested.
Besides discussions of the charts themselves, the author discusses how to write and display captions, how to put charts into slides, how to make an effective slide, how to change fonts and background colors to make your chart stand out, and more.
Reading this book will also help you to discern when other people have fooled with their charts to distort them. Local newspapers, news magazines, etc. are often guilty of playing with the scale of charts, stretching things, leaving labels off of axes, and so on - you'll be able to spot these manipulations better.
I teach a college freshman course in "Quantitative Applications Software" using MS Excel; I already have a lecture I usually call "How to lie with charts and graphs" and this book will help me add more details to that lecture, which teaches students that not every graph that CAN be made, SHOULD be made. With a good graph, you should always be able to start a sentence with "This graph shows that..." and complete it with some kind of comparison.
I have but one complaint about this book: it was clearly intended to be in a smaller format; each page of writing and illustrations takes up less than half the full-size page of the book. This could have been a trade paperback, and have cost less than it does as a larger book, without losing anything except 3" of empty margin all the way around. I plan to write to the publisher, telling them I really don't like that sort of inflation. However, you may find those margins handy for scribbling notes in; uses of this book are many, so you may need the space.
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Title: How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff, Irving Geis ISBN: 0393310728 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 1993 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists by Joel Best ISBN: 0520219783 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 07 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick, Woollcott Smith ISBN: 0062731025 Publisher: HarperResource Pub. Date: 25 February, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: How to Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier, H. J. De Blij ISBN: 0226534219 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos ISBN: 038548254X Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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