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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