Two new reviews of Numbersense

I've learned one thing about book readers. There is a lag between buying a book and reading it. In fact, I imagine an author has two battles to win: one is at the bookstore (or Amazon) getting you to purchase the book; the next is to get you to pull out the book from your shelves and start reading it. I mean, what am I to say? I own shelves of unread books.

Anyway, reviews of Numbersense are trickling in. The following two long reviews make me happy, as these readers get the points I'm trying to get across.

Here's Thinkanator's review (link). He apparently is tired of the heavily-groomed media coverage of Big Data, and wanted the world to know about "Real Big Data," the less glamorous side of the job. He noted: "In the epilogue Kaiser shares one of his own Real Data Science stories and I found myself nodding my head and saying, “Yup, that’s how I spent several days in the last couple of weeks!”

Thinkanator probably wrote a better summary of the book than I have: "Numbersense is a wonderful and accessible book that consists of a series of stories about data that illustrate how to think about the kinds of statistics you read about on a daily basis. The emphasis isn’t mathematical, it’s more about when you should think, “Hmmm… that doesn’t sound right”, when you hear some statistics thrown around."

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Veronique Frizzell wrote not one but three posts about Numbersense.

Post 1, Post 2, Post 3

In Post 1, she highlights the sections of the book that she enjoys most. In Post 2, she applies the Groupon analysis to her own business. In Post 3, she draws lessons from the chapter on unemployment statistics.

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Get your copy of Numbersense here.