New Business Book Edition Coaches Presenters How Not to Lie

LaPuerta Books and Media announces the publication of the fourth edition of the disruptive business textbook How to Lie with Charts by Gerald Everett Jones. Previous editions of the book have been adopted as college-level courseware in curriculums such as data visualization, mathematics, graphic design, and political science. The book has been suggested reading at institutions such as Arizona State, Stanford, Harvard, Brown, San Jose State, Leicester University, and Georgetown Public Policy Institute.

This fourth edition includes new chapters on fake news and deliberate disinformation in social media, along with Big Data abuses and misinterpretation of metadata. Jones describes what's new:

"In this new fourth edition, we explain eleven ways bad actors can create and sell fake news. The added material on metadata analysis of climate change may surprise people on both sides of the issue. And then we've retained the new stuff from the third edition, which was aimed at financial analysts and investors. There's a nontechnical overview of technical analysis that gives you the tools you need to begin to explore this powerful method of understanding stock market behavior. There's enough about the inherent flaws of viewports and dashboard displays to make you wary of those charts that are generated for you on a daily basis by robots. And I haven't seen a comprehensive discussion of financial proofreading anywhere, so here it is."

The core content of the early editions of How to Lie with Charts focused on how chartmaking software can generate potentially misleading graphics, as well as how presenters often make inadvertent mistakes that can affect crucial business decisions.

In her five-star review of the new edition on Amazon, epidemiologist and research analyst Betty Jung says:

"What [the author] does with this textbook is to remind everyone that data visualizations require careful scrutiny of what you are seeing and to question the validity and veracity of such graphic presentations. This is an excellent supplemental textbook for undergraduate and graduate biostatistics and statistics courses as well as for research courses as presenting one's findings is essential to conducting research. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in trying to make sense of the constant bombardment of so-called news on social media platforms, much of which could use more scrutiny before pressing that share button."

Gerald Everett Jones has managed major proposal and business analysis projects in government, healthcare, and commercial sectors. He is the author of more than 25 business and technical books on digital media production, including numerous how-to books on legacy charting applications such as Harvard Graphics and Freelance Graphics. He has also written extensively on PowerPoint and Excel. He has hands-on background in IT systems development and was project leader on the ARTIS computer graphics system, a precursor of PowerPoint.

How to Lie with Charts: Fourth Edition is currently available from booksellers worldwide in trade paperback and Kindle PDF (print replica) formats.