Gapminder: amazing resources for teaching

I have become a big fan of Hans Rosling recently after seeing some of his programmes about statistics on TV.  Today I discovered Gapminder, a brilliant site full of dynamic graphs and diagrams illustrating inequality between countries over time.  They use the power of statistics and of the internet to demonstrate how overall global prosperity has risen over the past 200 years, and how different countries' prosperity has risen, fallen, and risen again during wars, famine, industrial growth, political change, etc.  Rosling argues, unfashionably, that inequality is in many ways being reduced overall....and there are similar dynamic charts on HIV and on health.  This is the best site I have seen for a long time.      

How to give the perfect TED talk

This is very funny and clever, but also has serious lessons for powerpoint users I think:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html

Thought for the day

'Data is not the plural of anecdote' - except possibly in the world of blogging!