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The Story In The Numbers

January 2, 2011

Two wonderful articles that I’ve found in the last week:

Global health statistician Hans Rosling’s 59-minute BBC video on statistical understanding of the world, The Joy Of Stats. Skip a re-run this week and let Rosling entertain, enrich and inspire you. Find out, among other things, why you probably have more than the average number of legs. How Florence Nightingale revolutionized medical practice with statistics. How statistics has become an immensely powerful scientific tool for understanding the universe in the data our current instruments can collect.  How public policy can be smarter, better-targeted, and more accountable because of it.  And learn how Swedish people pronounce “com-puuutaers”.

(This would be a great video to assign to gen-ed science students, BTW. Make them answer questions about it.)

Check out Wired Magazine’s What a Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York. It’s exactly what Rosling is talk-ing.g about; a great example of the real-world improvements in quality of life that can be achieved by statistical analysis of what once seemed like random urban noise. From potholes to restaurant health inspections to helping people find that thing they left in a cab, it’s a nexus of information and analysis.  I smell maple syrup! Is it a terrorist attack? Or something more sinister..

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