Stats gadgets

I was watching a very cool lecture last night on TED. I had never heard of TED until a few months ago, and now I love it. If I’m not careful, I can get sucked in and watch for hours.

At any rate, the presentation below is outstanding. As a wannabe statistician (and I use that term loosely), I love seeing how people display stats and engage the audience in snooze-worthy lectures that involve the “d” word….DATA! Hans Rosling does a great job here and it turns out that Google Docs offers a free program similar to the one Hans uses in this presentation. It’s called Motion Charts and my goal is to find a way to use something like this in my own research. And here’s another link worth checking out for more examples of making stats fun.