Picturing the Uncertain World : : How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display / / Howard Wainer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Wainer, Howard,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 p.) :; 11 color illus. 14 halftones. 81 line illus. 12 tables.

In his entertaining and informative book Graphic Discovery, Howard Wainer unlocked the power of graphical display to make complex problems clear. Now he's back with Picturing the Uncertain World, a book that 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--and misused--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. We live in a world full of uncertainty, yet it is within our grasp to take its measure. Read Picturing the Uncertain World and learn how.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Picturing the Uncertain World -- Part I Introduction and Overview -- Part II Political Issues -- Part III Educational Testing -- Part IV Mostly Methodological -- Part V History -- Part VI Epilogue -- Notes -- References -- Source Material -- Index