Here’s a well produced, hour-long documentary on statistics and their presentation, from the BBC: The Joy of Stats. It features the effervescent Swedish statistician and global health researcher, Hans Rosling.
If you don’t have a full hour for it, here are the section starts that you can jump to:
7:00 Crimespotting – San Francisco crime reports mapped online – “making citizens more powerful and the authorities more accountable”
11:30 The historical origins of modern statistics – from Sweden in 1749
16:30 The importance – and weakness – of the use of the average (vs. variation and distribution)
20:00 Types of distribution
24:00 Pioneers of statistical graphics – Florence Nightengale and the polar area graph; the all-important British graph of Crimean war deaths
27:00 Contemporary data designers and the ‘billion pound’ graphic
28:30 Rosling’s animation of global health data in real space
33:30 Correlations – and how they can be silly
37:30 The information explosion – the zettabyte – and how computers are crunching it
40:20 Google and statistical language translation
46:00 Instrumenting the earth, mapping the universe
53:00 Data driven science vs the old hypothosis-driven
54:00 The statistics of feelings – data patterns of our thoughts and emotions
AUTHOR
Mick Weinstein
Mick is the Head of Editorial for Covestor, a financial journalist and online content specialist. Prior to joining Covestor, Mick was for five years the Editor in Chief and VP Content at stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha, where he built the editorial function as the site attracted over 3.5 million unique monthly visitors and developed an innovative platform for intelligent stock market discussion. Mick is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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