Mark Twain (1924) probably had politicians in mind when he reiterated Disraeli’s famous remark (”There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”). Scientists, we hope, would never use data in such a selective manner to suit their own ends. But, alas, the analysis of data is often the source of some exasperation even in an academic context. On hearing comments like ‘the result of this experiment was inconclusive, so we had to use statistics’, we are frequently left wondering as to what strange tricks have been played on the data.
Monthly Archive for November, 2009
When I was a child I really enjoyed playing with this interactive books. I recently bumped into this web site that analyzes the interaction design of those artifacts and explains eloquently how they works.
As a child of the 80s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were a fixture of my rainy afternoons. My elementary school library kept a low, fairly unmaintained-looking shelf of them hidden in one of its back corners. Whether this non-marquee placement was an attempt by the librarians to deemphasize the books in favor of ‘serious’ (children’s) literature or was simply my good luck I still haven’t worked out. But it meant there was a place that I could retreat to and dive into unfamiliar worlds without distraction.
A lot of what I read in those days served a similar purpose. A narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.
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