Book Review: How to Lie with Statistics

I Breezed through this book pretty quickly, but still consider it time poorly spent. I bought it on impulse from Amazon based on title alone and while the subject matter was what I expected, it was handled at too elementary a level, and with examples so dated that I can't even recommend it for beginners.

The book is an overview of the most elementary use of statistics and how they can be misused out of ignorance or malice. Mean vs median, graph doesn't start at zero, "four out of five dentists recommend...", I'd imagine that most of these are obvious to anyone over the age of fifteen. However the case examples and language are so dated (the book was originally written in the fifties), that I can't recommend it for someone under that age either.

In short, not recommended.

Wealth vs Religiosity

Fascinating Graph

from this flickr page.

There's of course an interesting "religious" argument about whether X causes Y (I'm in this camp), Y causes X (a VERY dangerous argument), or whether its just coincidental.

Outliers (like USA) are interesting. Would be interesting to see the outliers (Kuwait, USA, etc) further expanded among their populations.

Casual gamers are PEOPLE!

[OK, the image isn't contextually relevant to the post, but Kim's #7 Rule of Blogging is that 'When presented with an opportunity to include references to a Charleton Heston movie, one should do so, regardless of how far a stretch it may be to make relevant'. We now return you to regularly scheduled programming]

Lots of people have been quoting this report that states that women constitute a majority of the US internet population. (saving you the click, it's about 52% women, 48% men).

My point is this:

The casual games industry has spent a lot of time talking about how there are more women playing casual games than men. Stats go anywhere from 55% to 70% depending how you slice it and which site stats you look at. These numbers get dampened somewhat when normalized to take into account the general internet usage gender split.

Having said that, perhaps we're better off looking at casual gamers as just "people".