Ideas for World Statistics Day
October 19, 2010
World Statistics Day is 2010 October 20. If you work with data or you should, then you are a statistician and this is a day for you.
- Try the Monty Hall problem on your mother.
- Start reading Bad Science. I mean the book, but here’s the blog.
- Take a step towards breaking your spreadsheet addiction by starting to use R.
- Watch Hans Rosling’s TED talk on the best stats you’ve ever seen
- Think about what new data would be informative for something that you are doing.
- Think about how data that you are using may be misleading.
- Conceive of a more useful graphic for some data that you have.
- Take advantage of and/or support http://www.getstats.org.uk/, the newly launched outreach project of the Royal Statistical Society.
- Start reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. Several of the pieces are statistics lessons in disguise.
- Modernize your data analysis by learning the statistical bootstrap and related methods. If you already know it, then teach it to someone else.
- Start to read Obliquity by John Kay to rein in your belief in models and upgrade your appreciation of experimentation.
- Get around to deriving the Uniformly Most Powerful Unbiased test for that problem that you’ve been putting off.
More ideas are welcome.
Update: The official United Nations site for World Statistics Day is http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/Default.aspx
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Great ideas. I’ve added another couple at http://robjhyndman.com/researchtips/wsd/