CityReads│The Joy of Stats
Hans Rosling can make the data sing. With statistic, the “data deluge,” is leading us to an ever-greater understanding of life on Earth and the universe beyond.
BBC documentary: The Joy of Stats, 2010
Source: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/the-joy-of-stats/
The world we live in is awash with data that comes pouring in from everywhere around us.
On its own this data is just noise and confusion. To make sense of data, to find the meaning in it, we need the powerful branch of science - statistics.
There's nothing boring about statistics. Especially not today when we can make the data sing. With statistics, the data deluge is leading us to an ever greater understanding of life on Earth and the universe beyond.
But not everyone understands the world well. You are more ignorant than you thought.
Hans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation.
The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We started the Ignorance Project to investigate what the public know and don’t know about basic global patterns and macro-trends. We use surveys to ask representative groups of people simple questions about key-aspects of global development.
These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run. Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.
Ignorance Test
1. What is the life expectancy of the world population?
A. 50 years
B. 60 years
C. 70 years
2. How did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century?
A. more than double
B. about the same in the world as a whole
C. decreased to less than half
3. So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years?
A. 7 years
B. 5 years
C. 3 years
4. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change?
A. almost double
B. more or less the same
C. halved
5. Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs？
Sri Lanka or Turkey
Poland or South Korea
Malaysia or Russia
Pakistan or Vietnam
Statistics are essential to us to monitor our governments and our societies.But it was our rulers up there who started the collection of statistics in the first place in order to monitor us! In fact the word 'statistics' comes from 'the state'. It was also called political arithmetic.
Modern statistics began two centuries ago. And guess who was first!
The Chinese have Confucius, the Italians have da Vinci, and the British have Shakespeare. And we have the Tabellverket -the first ever systematic collection of statistics!
Since the year 1749 we have collected data on every birth, marriage and death.The Tabellverket recorded information from every parish in Sweden. It was a huge quantity of data and it was the first time any government could get an accurate picture of its people. Sweden had been the greatest military power in Northern Europe, but by 1749 our star was really fading and other countries were growing stronger. At least we were a large power,thought to have 20 million people, enough to rival Britain and France. The first analysis of the Tabellverket revealed that Sweden only had two million inhabitants.Sweden was not just a power in decline, it also had a very small population. The government was horrified by this finding - what if the enemy found out?
But the Tabellverket also showed that many women died in childbirth and many children died young. So government took action to improve the health of the people. This was the beginning of modern Sweden.
It took more than 50 years before the Austrians, Belgians, Danes,Dutch, French, Germans, Italians and, finally, the British, caught up with Sweden in collecting and using statistics.
One of the founders of the Royal Statistical Society was the great Victorian mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.
In 1842 he read the latest poem by an equally great Victorian, Alfred Tennyson. Vision of Sin contained the lines:
"Every moment dies a man
Every moment one is born."
So keen a statistician was Babbage that he could not contain himself. He dashed off a letter to Tennyson explaining that because of population growth, the line should read,
"Every moment dies a man and one and a 16th is born."
Of the pioneers of statistical graphics, my favourite is Florence Nightingale. There are not many people who realize that she was known as a passionate statistician and not just the Lady of the Lamp.
She said that "to understand God's thoughts, we must study statistics, "for these are the measures of His purpose." Statistics was for her a religious duty and moral imperative.
When Florence was nine years old she started collecting data. Her data was different fruits and vegetables she found. She put them into different tables to organize them in some standard form.And so we have one of Nightingale's first statistical tables at the age of nine.
In the mid-1850s Florence Nightingale went to the Crimea to care for British casualties of war.
She was horrified by what she discovered. For all the soldiers being blown to bits on the battlefield, there were many, many more soldiers dying from diseases they caught in the army's filthy hospitals.So Florence Nightingale began counting the dead. For two years she recorded mortality data in meticulous detail.
What has cemented her place in the statistical history books are the graphics she used. And one in particular, the polar area graph. For each month of the war, a huge blue wedge represented the soldiers who had died from preventable diseases. The much smaller red wedges were deaths from wounds, and the black wedges were deaths from accidents and other causes. Nightingale's graphics were so clear they were impossible to ignore.
Today, 150 years on, Nightingale's graphics are rightly regarded as a classic. They led to a revolution in nursing, health care and hygiene in hospitals worldwide, which saved innumerable lives.
Numbers alone don't tell you anything. You have to analyze them, and that's what makes statistics.
With statistics, we can begin to see things as they really are.
From tables of data to averages, distributions and visualizations, statistics gives us a clear description of the world. We can not only discover WHAT is happening but also explore WHY, by using the powerful analytical method - correlation.
Correlations can be very tricky. I got a joke about silly correlations.
There was this American who was afraid of heart attack. He found out that the Japanese ate very little fat and almost didn't drink wine, but they had much less heart attacks than the Americans.
But, on the other hand, he also found out that the French eat as much fat as the Americans and they drink much more wine but they also have less heart attacks. So he concluded that what kills you is speaking English.
The best example of a really ground-breaking correlation is the link that was established in the 1950s between smoking and lung cancer.
Not long after the Second World War, a British doctor, Richard Doll, investigated lung cancer patients in 20 London hospitals. And he became certain that the only thing they had in common was smoking. So certain, that he stopped smoking himself.
But other people weren't so sure. They came up with other possible explanations, such as genes, air pollution, and poverty.
To verify his correlation did imply cause and effect. Richard Doll created the biggest statistical study of smoking yet. He began tracking the lives of 40,000 British doctors, some of whom smoked and some of whom didn't, and gathered enough data to correlate the amount the doctors smoked with their likelihood of getting cancer. Eventually, he not only showed a correlation between smoking and lung cancer, but also a correlation between stopping smoking and reducing the risk.
This was science at its best.
In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Hans Rosling makes complicated facts and stats sound like music to your ears.
Rosling's presentations are grounded in solid statistics, illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development snaps into sharp focus.
His patented moving bubble graphs were the highlight of the show – in one section the data about life expectancy and average income of the world, which involved plotting 120,000 numbers, appeared to be floating on a gigantic glass touchscreen. Within 4 minutes, he told a story of 200 countries over 200 years and showed how the world was moving from the poor and unhealthy corner to the wealthy and healthy corner.
http://v.qq.com/iframe/player.html?vid=u0116ilzaus&width=500&height=375&auto=0
（click to watch the video）
Appendix: answers to the test
1．C．70 years
2. C. less than half
3. A. 7 years
4. C. halved
5. Turkey;Poland; Russia; Pakistan; South Africa.