Running The Numbers

Download or read book Running the Numbers written by Matthew Vaz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day in the United States, people test their luck in numerous lotteries, from state-run games to massive programs like Powerball and Mega Millions. Yet few are aware that the origins of today’s lotteries can be found in an African American gambling economy that flourished in urban communities in the mid-twentieth century. In Running the Numbers, Matthew Vaz reveals how the politics of gambling became enmeshed in disputes over racial justice and police legitimacy. As Vaz highlights, early urban gamblers favored low-stakes games built around combinations of winning numbers. When these games became one of the largest economic engines in nonwhite areas like Harlem and Chicago’s south side, police took notice of the illegal business—and took advantage of new opportunities to benefit from graft and other corrupt practices. Eventually, governments found an unusual solution to the problems of illicit gambling and abusive police tactics: coopting the market through legal state-run lotteries, which could offer larger jackpots than any underground game. By tracing this process and the tensions and conflicts that propelled it, Vaz brilliantly calls attention to the fact that, much like education and housing in twentieth-century America, the gambling economy has also been a form of disputed terrain upon which racial power has been expressed, resisted, and reworked.

Download or read book Playing the Numbers written by Shane White and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most ubiquitous feature of Harlem life between the world wars was the game of “numbers.” Thousands of wagers were placed daily. Playing the Numbers tells the story of this illegal form of gambling and the central role it played in the lives of African Americans who flooded into Harlem in the wake of World War I.

Download or read book The World According to Fannie Davis written by Bridgett M. Davis and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on the Today Show: This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights "the outstanding humanity of black America" (James McBride). In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis's mother. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Living takes guts." A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" and provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time.

Download or read book Making Numbers Count written by Chip Heath and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything 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 world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

Download or read book Painting with Numbers written by Randall Bolten and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how to communicate better with numbers Whether you are distributing a report or giving a presentation, you have a lot of numbers to present and only a few minutes to get your point across. Your audience is busy and has a short attention span. Don't let an amateur presentation bog you down, confuse your audience, and damage your credibility. Instead, learn how to present numerical information effectively—in the same way you learned how to speak or write. With Painting with Numbers, you'll discover how to present numbers clearly and effectively so your ideas and your presentation shine. Use the Arabic numeral system to your advantage master the use of layout and visual effects to communicate powerfully Understand how audiences process your information and how that affects your "personal brand image" Learn how to be perceived as a professional who truly understands the business concepts and issues underlying your numbers Use software tools, including Excel, PowerPoint, and graphs, efficiently and to drive home your point Author Randall Bolten shares his decades of experience as a senior finance executive distilling complicated information into clear presentations, to help you make your numerical information more comprehensible, meaningful, and accessible. Painting with Numbers is brimming with hands-on advice, techniques, tools, rules, and guidelines for producing clear, attractive, and effective quantation (the word the author has coined for the skill of presenting numbers).

Download or read book Why Nobody Believes the Numbers written by Al Lewis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-06-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Nobody Believes the Numbers introduces a unique viewpoint to population health outcomes measurement: Results/ROIs should be presented as they are, not as we wish they would be. This viewpoint contrasts sharply with vendor/promoter/consultant claims along two very important dimensions: (1) Why Nobody Believes presents outcomes/ROIs achievable right here on this very planet... (2) ...calculated using actual data rather than controlled substances. Indeed, nowhere in healthcare is it possible to find such sharply contrasting worldviews, methodologies, and grips on reality. Why Nobody Believes the Numbers includes 12 case studies of vendors, carriers, and consultants who were apparently playing hooky the day their teacher covered fifth-grade math, as told by an author whose argument style can be so persuasive that he was once able to convince a resort to sell him a timeshare. The book's lesson: no need to believe what your vendor tells you -- instead you can estimate your own savings using “ingredients you already have in your kitchen.” Don't be intimidated just because you lack a PhD in biostatistics, or even a Masters, Bachelor's, high-school equivalency diploma or up-to-date inspection sticker. Why Nobody Believes the Numbers explains how to determine if the ROIs are real...and why they usually aren't. You'll learn how to: Figure out whether you are "moving the needle" or just crediting a program with changes that would have happened anyway Judge whether the ROIs your vendors report are plausible or even arithmetically possible Synthesize all these insights into RFPs and contracts that truly hold vendors accountable for results

Download or read book The Incomplete Book of Running written by Peter Sagal and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! and a popular columnist for Runner’s World, shares “commentary and reflection about running with a deeply felt personal story, this book is winning, smart, honest, and affecting. Whether you are a runner or not, it will move you” (Susan Orlean). On the verge of turning forty, Peter Sagal—brainiac Harvard grad, short bald Jew with a disposition towards heft, and a sedentary star of public radio—started running seriously. And much to his own surprise, he kept going, faster and further, running fourteen marathons and logging tens of thousands of miles on roads, sidewalks, paths, and trails all over the United States and the world, including the 2013 Boston Marathon, where he crossed the finish line moments before the bombings. In The Incomplete Book of Running, Sagal reflects on the trails, tracks, and routes he’s traveled, from the humorous absurdity of running charity races in his underwear—in St. Louis, in February—or attempting to “quiet his colon” on runs around his neighborhood—to the experience of running as a guide to visually impaired runners, and the triumphant post-bombing running of the Boston Marathon in 2014. With humor and humanity, Sagal also writes about the emotional experience of running, body image, the similarities between endurance sports and sadomasochism, the legacy of running as passed down from parent to child, and the odd but extraordinary bonds created between strangers and friends. The result is “a brilliant book about running…What Peter runs toward is strength, understanding, endurance, acceptance, faith, hope, and charity” (P.J. O’Rourke).