Joy of Stats, The

Synopsis: BBC4 series on statistics presented by Hans Rosling. In San Francisco, a new app mashes up police department data with the city’s street map to show what crime is being reported street by street, house by house, in near real-time. Every citizen can use it and the hidden patterns of their city are starkly revealed. Meanwhile, at Google HQ the machine translation project tries to translate between 57 languages, using lots of statistics and no linguists. The programme argues that without statistics we are cast adrift on an ocean of confusion, but armed with stats we can take control of our lives, hold our rulers to account and see the world as it really is. What’s more, Rosling concludes, we can now collect and analyse such huge quantities of data and at such speeds that scientific method itself seems to be changing.
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Year of release: 2011
Year of production: 2010
Notes: The programme won the Best Science Documentary in the 2011 Grierson Awards.
Subjects: Mathematics; Science
Keywords: statistics

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