Towards a world of free data with all the statistical insights that come from it, accessible to everyone, empowering us as citizens and letting us hold our rulers to account. ... Statistics are essencial to us to monitor our governments and our societies. But it was our rulers up there who started the collection of statistics in the first place in order to monitor us!

想要了解统计学，但是却意外的发现了这部Hans Roslin教授在世时拍摄的BBC纪录片。

Tabellverket:瑞典报表局的前身，也是统计学的发源地，非常有趣的是当时的政府通过报表局数据发现自己国家的人口在递减，从而进一步找到了原因：儿童夭折和孕妇因难产致死。因此能够改革社会条件，提升人口出生率。

"Political arithmetic" was a lovely phrase that was used for statistics,by David Spiegelhalter，Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, Cambridge University,

It wasn't just governments who woke uo to the power of statistics, right across Europe, 19th century society went mad for facts. Royal Statistical Society in London was soon a statisticians' nirvana.

In 1842 Charlse Babbage (the great Victorian mathematician and inventor) read the latest poem by an equally great Victorian, Alfred Tennyson. Vission of Sin contained the lines:

Fill the cup, and fill the can,Have a rouse before the morn, Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.

Charlse dashed off a leeter to Tennyson explaining that because of population growth, the line should read, "Every moment dies a man, and oen and 16th is born." The exact figure is 1.067😂

These individual particular events sum up into a social phenomenon. — Sir Michael Marmot (Prof of Epidemiology，UCL

Useful as averages are, they don't tell you the whole story. The variation in data is just as important as the average, for this you transform numbers into shapes. The shape a set of data makes is called its distribution.

The Normal distribution — Bean Machine

The Poisson distribution Shape describes how likely it is that out-of-the-ordinary thins will hapen. The exact shape changes with the average.

There are not many people who realise that Florence Nightingale was known as a passionate statistician and not just the Lady of the Lamp. "To understand God's thoughts, we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.”

The POLAR AREA GRAPH

With statistics, we can begin to see things as they really are. From tables of data to averages, distributions and visualisations, statistics gives us a clear description of the world. We can not only discover WHAT is happening, but also explore WHY, by using the power ful analytical method-correlation.

What correlations do not relace is human though, we've got to think about what it means. Try as hard as she or he possibly can to disprove it, to break down, to get rid of it, to try and refute it. If it withstands all those efforts at demolishing it and it is still standing up, then cautiously we say, we really might have something here.

Not only experts but all of us can understand the stories in the numbers, instead of being led astray by prejudice, with statistics at our fingertips, our eyes can be open for a fact-based view of the world. So more than ever before, we can become authors of our own destiny.