The Open University has made available clips from the BBC4 programme "The Joy of Stats", featuring statistician Hans Rosling of the Gapminder Foundation. The segment "The Joy Of Stats: 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes" we've posted before, but this is the first time these other clips have been available for streaming outside the UK:
- Why you might go up a hill, but come down a crime victim: Plotting San Francisco's crimes onto a topographical map revealed a surprising factor in crime rates: where you are on a hill.
- Above average: How many legs does the average Swede have? The surprising answer can tell us a lot about averages...
- The Lady With A Data Visualisation: Famous for her lamp, it was the light shed by Florence Nightingale's statistics that really saved lives in great numbers.
- Meaningless and meaningful correlations: Just because two things might appear to be related, it doesn't mean they are - but it's the meaningful correlations that are the treasures of...
- How statistics make understanding foreign words simpler: Through a massive statistical analysis, Google have taught a machine to translate across dozens of languages pretty effectively.
I haven't watched them all yet, but fortunately I have a bit of time over the holidays to catch up on what looks to be a very interesting programme. Not that you can also download audio-only versions of the clips by clicking on the "Listen" tab of the videos.
Open University: Watch The Joy Of Stats