Making Numbers Count
The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Chip Heath, Karla Starr
- 224 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Making Numbers Count
The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Chip Heath, Karla Starr
About This Book
A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and dataâfrom bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds isâŠthirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essentialâbut humans aren't built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than fiveâanything from six to infinity was known as "lots." While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain's language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say "Wow, now I get it!"You will learn principles such as: - SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries.
- VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than "1/100, 000th of the size of an atom."
- CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into "2 months of commutes, without repeating a song").
- EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about ("that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer"). Whether you're interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you'd have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our worldâallowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.
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INDEX
- A&W, 19
- Aaron, Hank, 79
- abstraction, 55, 76
- converting abstract numbers into concrete objects, 36â47, 51â52
- expert knowledge and, 37
- making abstract things personal, 89â92
- accidental death, 50, 51, 55, 157n
- Aleut, 144n
- Alps, 58
- Amazon River, 80, 164n
- ants, desert, 60â61, 65, 161n
- Apollo 8 (Kluger), 59â60
- Apple, 82, 102, 165n
- MacBook Air, 112â14
- apples and buckets, 106
- assumptions and expectations, 112, 115â18
- atoms in the human body, 24, 150n
- audienceâs familiarity with numbers, 22â23, 71, 141â42
- Australian wildfires, 32, 152n
- automobiles, 80, 92, 167n
- avocados, 54, 159n
- awe, 134
- BĂ„genholm, Anna, 121â22
- Bangladesh, 13â14
- baseball, 96â97, 105, 158n, 170n
- batting averages in, 23, 137, 138, 141â42
- basketball, 111, 172n
- baskets, counting in, 22, 71, 138
- Benchmar...