Title: Picturing the uncertain world : how to understand, communicate, and control uncertainty through graphical display /
Authors: Wainer, Howard
Publisher: Princeton University Press,
Year: 2009
Subjects: Uncertainty (Information theory) Graphic methods.; Communication in science Graphic methods.
Abstract: From the publisher. This book explores how graphs can serve as maps to guide us when the information we have is ambiguous or incomplete. Using a visually diverse sampling of graphical display, from heartrending autobiographical displays of genocide in the Kovno ghetto to the "Pie Chart of Mystery" in a New Yorker cartoon, Wainer illustrates the many ways graphs can be used{u2014}and misused{u2014}as we try to make sense of an uncertain world. Picturing the Uncertain World takes readers on an extraordinary graphical adventure, revealing how the visual communication of data offers answers to vexing questions yet also highlights the measure of uncertainty in almost everything we do. Are cancer rates higher or lower in rural communities? How can you know how much money to sock away for retirement when you don't know when you'll die? And where exactly did nineteenth-century novelists get their ideas? These are some of the fascinating questions Wainer invites readers to consider. Along the way he traces the origins and development of graphical display, from William Playfair, who pioneered the use of graphs in the eighteenth century, to instances today where the public has been misled through poorly designed graphs.
Contents: The most dangerous equation -- Curbstoning IQ and the 2000 presidential election -- Stumbling on the path toward the visual communication of complexity -- Using graphs to simplify the complex : the Medicare drug plan as an example -- A political statistic -- A Catch-22 in assigning primary delegates -- Testing the disabled : using statistics to navigate between the Scylla of standards and the Charybdis of court decisions -- Ethnic bias or statistical artifact? : Freedle's folly -- Insignificant is not zero : musing on the College Board's understanding of uncertainty -- How long is short? -- Improving data displays -- Old Mother Hubbard and the United Nations -- Depicting error -- The Mendel effect -- Truth is slower than fiction -- Galton's normal -- Nobody's perfect -- When form violates function -- A graphical legacy of Charles Joseph Minard : two jewels from the past -- La diffusion de quelques idées : a master's voice -- Numbers and the remembrance of things past.