Improve your chances
If More or Less has stirred an interest in you, why not explore our suggested courses.
Off the shelf
If you want to know more, but feel like a break from the screen, why not cast your eye over our list of books.
When media meet numbers
Can you rely on numbers in the news? Examine statistics and the media.
Statistics
Like all governments of developed countries, the UK government is a major producer and consumer of statistical information. The main UK statistical website gives access to huge quantities of statistical information, from the Census, regular government-run surveys and many other data sources, together with links to explanatory articles (some very simple and clear, some horribly technical) describing what the data mean. The UK Statistics Authority is the body responsible to Parliament for building trust in UK official statistics.
The Royal Statistical Society (the RSS) is a learned society, founded in 1834, that aims to nurture and promote the discipline of statistics and to support the statistical profession. The wide range of material available on the website includes useful commentaries on the idea of risk and a link to the RSS Centre for Statistical Education.
Many international bodies produce and disseminate large amounts of statistical information. These include (among many others) Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, (OECD), the World Bank, the United Nations Statistics Division, and the United Nations Development Project (the UNDP). The UNDP is a particularly good source of data comparing the different countries of the world on all sorts of economic, population, health and other measures, so if you want to know the number of Internet users in Croatia, this could be the place to look.
An organisation called Gapminder, based in Sweden, has developed a website and downloadable software that visualise statistics on human development. Most of the data behind the graphics come from United Nations sources (particularly UNDP). The site is a particularly good example of the way that patterns and changes in statistical data can be made far easier to see and understand when presented in pictures. The videos of Hans Rosling’s lectures to the TED conferences, linked from Gapminder’s pages, are among the best examples anywhere of how to get statistical ideas across in a dynamic and exciting way.”
The World-Wide Web Virtual Library page on statistics has a main site page dominated by lists of statistics departments in universities across the world, but if you scroll down, you will eventually come to other interesting material. The (UK) Higher Education Academy Maths, Stats and OR Network is, as its name would suggest, mainly concerned with the teaching and learning of statistics and related subjects in higher education, but also has links to material of more general interest. Many other official and unofficial groupings have interests in statistical data and the use of statistics; one site you might find interesting is that of the Radical Statistics group.
The BBC and the Open University are not responsible for the content of external websites.
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Content last updated: 05/01/2005
