How the numbers bandied about in the news can be very wrong, due as much to ignorance and carelessness as any intent to deceive. ( )

All you need to know about numbers, counting things and how they are (mis)used by the papers and the news. Revealing, fascinating and incredibly useful read. ( )

Lovely book about practical understanding of statistics. ( )

An essential guide to numerate thinking and how the media allow politicians and ad-men to con us. It covers the same ground as the BBC Radio 4 programme "More or Less" that was created by the authors. Reading it all at once is a bit like listening to a whole series of podcasts one after another, so you may prefer reading a chapter a week. If you like the radio programme, you'll enjoy the book. ( )

Preaching to the converted. Only those already interested in the manipulation of numbers especially in the media are likely to read this - and for those this is very much an entry level popular guide containing nothing new, and no detail.

However if you are vaguely curious abou thte various numbers that get bandied about in the media and haven't yet aquired the maths/logical skills to appreciate them in context then this may well be the book for you.

A few different (but all very easy not involving any formal maths) techniques are described for the process of determining if a reported number maks sense. The first technicque is simply to ask 'is that a big number' in context. 300 million sounds a lot, and for a 1 person lottery win it certainly is. For a national healthcare improvement it is not.

And this is where the book falls down. Because it assumes a level of numeracy that I think is unwarrented. How many people live in your country? Can you divide 1 number by that many? in your head whilst reading a enws story? If you can I suspect you already know to do so, and if you can't then telling you do so doesn't help. The other issue is that all of the conclusions to the examples (such as 300 million not being large for a health care budget) are unsupported. There are no references for any item, so although the authors conclude that this number which sounds large, isn't, you don't know how they reached that conclusion. Which is precisely what this book is trying to avoid. References would have helped.

Several of the techniques seem very similar and repeat information given elsewhere. Perhaps this is just the nature of such a book which grew out of a radio series, but it is annoying.

That said, it's very readable, in an easily understandable prose. the complete absense of formal sums will appeal to many lay reader (although the requirement to do basic mental arithmatic may put as many off). The chapter on Risk i particularly illuminating, as it's one that so many media outlets seem incapable of reporting or understanding properly. In place of the detailed references there is a comprehensive list of further reading material, including the seminal Huff's How to Li wih Statistics which should be require reading for everone.

]Ultimately thisbook would be of most use to journlists - forbidden from publishing anything that deviates from these simple precepts. But as that seem unlikely to happen, the best we can do is educate ourselves and read this book, or others like it. ( )