A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!

eldavojohn writes "Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions is an addition to six or so other books in the 'Beautiful' series that O'Reilly has put out. It is not a comprehensive guide on data but instead a glimpse into success stories about twenty different projects that succeeded in displaying data — oftentimes in areas where others have failed. While this provides, for the most part, disjointed stories, it is a very readable book compared to most technical books. Beautiful Data proves to be quite the cover-to-cover page turner for anyone involved in building interfaces for data or the statistician at a loss for the best way to intuitively and effectively relay knowledge when given voluminous amounts of raw data. That said, it took me almost two months to make it through this book, as each chapter revealed a data repository or tool I had no idea existed. I felt like a child with an attention deficit disorder trying my hand at nearly everything. While the book isn't designed to relay complete theory on data (like Tufte), it is a great series of short success stories revolving around the entire real world practice of consuming, aggregating, realizing and making beautiful data." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.