World Statistics Day

Did you know that 20^th October 2010 or 20.10 2010 is World Statistics Day, as declared by the United Nations? Across the globe, we are all to celebrate the achievmeents and contributions of official statistics. Statistics is the talk of the day on twitter (alongside statistic-rich grim realities about science funding cuts in the UK, ouch). I stumbled across some interesting things related to statistics and I wanted to share my love of the subject with you all. But first off, what is statistics?

Statistics is a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection, organization and interpretation of quantitative data. Don't panic, it's a simple enough concept at first sight: collect data, make sure everything is properly laid out and interpret them. Unfortunately to those who have never studied statistics, the methods used by the statistician are an impenetrable closed book. So say Frank Owen and Ron Jones in their own excellent and accessible book efficiently titled "Statistics," a resource I keep on my desk at all times.

I agree with them. People do not like statistics and in turn do not trust it because it seems inscrutable. When I was first exposed to statistics in my high school years, the subject was a bunch of frightening equations with weird symbols and permutation problems which made me sweat more than a football (not American football) match. I disliked it. But in university, my introductory statistics course was plain brilliant. I realized that statistics was much more than just equations. The course taught me how to design a sample for an experiment and also introduced me to statistical significance and hypothesis testing, the main guide for interpreting experimental results. Ah, the power of it! It came to the point that I realized statistics was cool.

You see, numbers themselves never lie. Computers understand the number 0 as "false" and 1 as "true," never the other way round. I am 22 years old and if you are 20, I'm older than you - fact. High school students in the U.S. scored an average of 489 out of 1000 on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Programme for international Student Assessment (PISA) in 2006. This is less than the overall global average of 500 and far below the scores of most other developed countries. The numbers show that the U.S. is in a crisis, so a crisis the U.S. is in.

Statistics don't always tell us why, but they briliantly show us the what. They merely a tool which deciphers the meanings of numbers. Don't blame it if it shows you what you didn't want to see. In order for us to use statistics to its fullest potential, we need to understand it and trust it. And acknowledge that, yes, statistics is cool.

Don't believe me? See for yourself:

1. Papua New Guinea has a song for World Statistical Day! http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/downloads/PNG_WSD_Jingle.mp3

2. How juries are fooled by statistics: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2010/oct/20/1)

3. UN's official World Statistics Day website http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/

4. Wikipedia's entry on statistic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics

-->Disclaimer: My mum the statistician has not paid me to write this blog post... yet.

Image Credit: UN World Statistics Day logo page