A Field Guide to Lies and more ....

A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel Levitin is subtitled “Critical Thinking in the Information Age” and I loved the author’s many, many references to our inclination to believe inaccurate and distorted information.  I am sure that I can use those examples with students and I look forward to hearing Daniel Levitin speak about transforming education.  He will be at our Cornog Auditorium (Northfield Campus) on Thursday, September 8^th beginning at 7:00 pm.  Contact FAN (Family Action Network) or The Book Stall for more information.

Levitin writes that, “Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations.” In A Field Guide to Lies he explains the scientific method and encourages students to ask questions like: What is the source of this data or quote? Are the experts credible? Has the graph been distorted? What alternative relationships or explanations exist?  These are exactly the types of questions that we, as librarians and teachers, are constantly modeling for students. Levitin raises these issues in an engaging and entertaining way and is a popular author with students, several of whom read his This is Your Brain on Music each year as part of a non-fiction assignment.  

Here are a few recent articles that we could tie to the concepts in A Field Guide to Lies (on order for the new library): 

• “Recidivism Watch” from The Washington Post (8/29/16)
• “The Fix” (8/24/16) also from The Washington Post
• “13 Tips for Reading General Election Polls like a Pro” (9/2/16) on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight
• If you have more to add, please let us know. 

Also, see a separate review for Good Charts by Harvard’s Scott Berinato which does an excellent job of discussing data visualization.

Another new and related book is called Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone. This title, too, deals with information, although the focus is more on the value (or not) of general knowledge when students can just Google everything.  Well-known author Poundstone relies on a number of surveys (Levitin would ask: What were those sample sizes? Was this a representative sample? How were the questions worded?) in order to illustrate the inability of respondents to accurately identify country names on a map, for example. 

Overall, the instances that Poundstone shares are interesting and provide a great selection for trivia enthusiasts, but serious concerns arise, too, when one realizes that the least knowledgeable respondents (Where is Ukraine?  When did that dinosaur live?) also often hold the strongest (and uninformed!) opinions on important issues like immigration and global warming. I have ordered a copy of Head in the Cloud for the new library since it could certainly serve as a starting point for some very stimulating arguments.

New non-fiction

As librarians, we are always reviewing and looking for non-fiction selections which will be of interest to students and teachers so I was thrilled this past week when I was asked about two new books I have been reading. In one case, a teacher spied the pre-publication copy of Truth or Truthiness on my desk. She, like me, was drawn to the subtitle, “Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist,” for this book written by Howard Wainer. Packed with charts, graphs and data tables, this relatively skinny book examines the line between reason/evidence and belief/faith. It is probably too technical statistically for most students, but all could benefit from the basic idea of asking, “What evidence do you have to support it?” whenever a claim is made.     

Secondly, I have several students who are working on Junior Theme and are interested in learning more about Autism.  We talked this week about the newly released In a Different Key by John Donvan and Caren Zucker. At 688 pages, this is a complex and thorough history of autism, with numerous case studies since the 1930’s, a timeline, and extensive notes and bibliography. Several chapters deal with controversies (“refrigerator mothers,” MMR vaccination) often linked with autism as well as inspiring stories of patients, parents, and physicians.

For more on this book, there is a January 25th New Yorker article, “Seeing the Spectrum” and  pbs NewsHour interview with the authors:

In a Different Key received a starred review from Kirkus.