http://www.gapminder.org/videos/the-joy-of-stats/
I hope you enjoy watching this informative video. More than ever, I'm proud to be a statistician and an educator who spreads the word of this wonderful science called Statistics. This movie helps to dispel the myth and the "accusation" some people have on statistics: "There are three kinds of lies, Lies, damned lies, and statistics".
What do you think?
Please share your thoughts and comments after watching the video.
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Trang
While I enjoyed this movie, I don't think it does much to dispel the myth you mention. It was a very broad look at statistics and didn't really even bring up the concept of how statistics can be misused to mislead people. I think it did do a great job of making statistics sound interesting and useful to a wide variety of people. When I saw that it was an hour long I said to myself...no way am I going to sit through an hour video about statistics just for extra credit, but before I knew it, more than half of the video was over. I learned a number of new things (I had no idea Florence Nightengale was a statistician...I really enjoyed the section of the video that discussed the importance of graphical representations for helping people to understand and be able to use statistics. I also enjoyed hearing about the concept of community statistics are hearing about some of the work being done in San Francisco with the crime data. I had no idea that Google's translating software was statistics based...that was also very interesting. It seems that the video's purpose was to give some very general information to a wide audience and as such, there was not a lot of detail about what actually goes into statistical analysis beyond a very brief discussion of averages and normal distributions. I think an equally interesting video could be made of the ways in which some groups have used statistics to mislead or just a discussion of common misunderstandings that come up when interpreting statistical data. Well maybe not quite as interesting... :)
ReplyDeleteThank you Trang for sharing this interesting video. Besides learning about the History of Statistics it has given me an insight into new and futurist applications of Statistics. The use for translation in Google has been surprising for me,and the prospects of computation are really amazing not to mention how feelings are analyzed troughout the Internet. I'm now curious about the Poisson distribution, and its application to daily routine. I'm also interested in the old and new ways of representing data like the polar graph (?) of Florence Nightengale or the square graphs example. I've always been interested in Statistics but now I'm more conscious of the many ways in which it helps to increase knowledge and make our life better.
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