Lecture: "Damned Lies and Statistics"
| Date/Time: | Wednesday, 01 Apr 2009 at 8:00 pm |
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| Location: | South Ballroom, Memorial Union |
| Cost: | Free |
| Contact: | |
| Phone: | 515-294-9934 |
| Channel: | Lecture Series |
| Categories: | Lectures |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Dr. Best's lecture will be an accessible and humorous overview and critique of the way statistics are used and misused in media and public discourse. He will illustrate his lecture with widely-publicized but questionable figures and argue that understanding the social construction of statistics provides a basis for critical thinking about numbers in the news.
Joel Best has written three books related to understanding statistics: Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Lies from Media, Politicians and Activists; More Damned Lies; Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues; and Stat-Spotting: A Field-Guide to Identifying Dubious Data.
A professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, he is a leading scholar of social problems and an advocate for statistical literacy. Dr. Best's work on statistics focuses on the origin and life-course of statistical claims about social issues, how these claims are used by the media, politicians and activists, and how the public can better understand and evaluate these claims.
Dr. Best is the author of several other books, including Threatened Children (1990), Random Violence (1999), Deviance: Concept of a Career (2004) and Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads (2006). He is a former President of the Midwest Sociological Society and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and a former Editor of the journal Social Problems. He is currently editor of Sociological Compass.
Cosponsored by:
Department of Sociology
Department of Statistics
Miller Lectures Fund (LAS)
Committee on Lectures (funded by GSB)