Unlocking the Power of Statistics: Understanding Our Data-Driven World

[Music] the world we live in is a wash with data that comes pouring in from everywhere

around us on its own this data is just noise and confusion to make to find the meaning in it we need the

powerful branch of science statistics believe me there's nothing boring about statistics especially not today when we

can make the data thing with Statistics we can really make sense of the world there's more

with Statistics the data Deluge as it's being called is leading us to an Ever greater understanding of life on earth

and the and thanks to the incredible power of today's computers it may fundamentally

transform the process of scientific discovery I kid you not statistics is now the

sexiest subject around foreign [Music]

than we usually like to admit in the last recession there was this famous calling to a talk radio station

the man complained in times like this when unemployment rates are up to 13 and income has fallen by five percent and

suicide rates are climbing I get so angry that the government is wasting money on things like collection of

statistics officially a statistician strictly speaking my field is global health

tomorrow but I got really obsessed with stats when I realized how much people in

Sweden just don't know about the rest of the world I started in our Medical University

Carolina Institute an undergraduate course called Global Health these students coming to us actually have the

highest grade you can get in Swedish college system so I thought maybe they know everything I'm going to teach them

about so I did a pre-test when they came and one of the question from which I learned a lot was this one which country

has the highest child mortality of these five pairs I won't put you at the test here but

it's turkey which is highest there Poland Russia Pakistan and South Africa and these were the results of the

Swedish students at one point eight right to answer out of five possible that means that there was a place for a

professor of international health and for my course but one late night when I was compiling

the report I really realized my Discovery I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically

significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees because the chimpanzee would score half

right if I gave him two bananas with Sri Lanka and turkey they would be right half of the cases but the students are

not that I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Caribbean Sky Institute that hands out the Nobel Prize

in medicine and they are on par with the chimpanzee there [Applause]

[Music] possible than ever before and I work with my team at the gapminder foundation

using new tools that help everyone make sense of the changing world we draw on the masses of data that's now

freely available from International institutions like the UN and the World Bank

and it's become my mission to share the insights from this data with anyone who listened and to reveal how statistics is

nothing to be frightened of I'm going to provide you a view of the global Health situation across

mankind and I'm going to do that in a hopefully enjoyable way so relax so we did the

software which displays it like this every bubble here is a country this is China this is India the size of the

bubble is the population and I'm going to State your race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red

Toyota down there and the brownish waterfall the Toyota has a very bad start down here and United States Ford

is going off-road then and the board quite fine this is the war the Toyota got off track and now Toyota is coming

on the healthier side of Sweden that's about where I saw the Volvo important Toyota

this was a Great Leap Forward when China fell down it was Central tanning by Mao situ China recovered and they said never

more stupid Central planning but they went up here no there is one more inequity look there United States

oh they broke my frame Washington DC is so rich over there but they are not as healthy as Kerala in India it's quite

interesting isn't it [Music] welcome to the USA world leaders in big

cars and free data there are many here who share my vision of making public data accessible and

useful for everyone the city of San Francisco is in the lead opening up its data on everything

even the police department is releasing all its crime reports this official crime date has been turned

into a wonderful interactive map by two of the city's computer whizzes its Community statistics in action

[Music] transporting is a map of crime reports from the San Francisco Police Department

showing you know dots on maps for citizens to be able to see patterns of crime around their neighborhoods in San

Francisco the map is not just about individual crimes but about broader patterns that show you where crime is

clustered around the city which areas have high crime in which areas have relatively low crime

foreign Street on Nob Hill quite a nice neighborhood

with the crime Maps show us is the relationship between topography and crime

basically the higher up the hill the less crime there is cross over the Border

into the flats [Music] essentially as soon as you get into the

kind of lower lying areas of Jones Street the crime just skyrockets [Applause]

[Music] so we're here in the Uptown tenderloin District

it's one of the oldest and densest neighborhoods in San Francisco [Music]

this is where you go to buy drugs right around here [Music]

we see lots of aggravated assaults lots of auto theft basically the huge part of the of the crime that happens in the in

the city happens just right in this five or six block radius [Music]

foreign if you've been hearing police sirens in your neighborhood you can use the map to

find out why if you're out at night in an unfamiliar part of town you can check the map for

streets to avoid if a neighbor gets burgle you can see is it a one-off or has there been a spike

in local crime if you commute through a neighborhood and you're worried about its safety the

fact that we have the ability to turn off all the nighttime and middle of the day crimes and show you just the things

that are happening during the commute is a statistical operation but I think to people that are interacting with the

thing it feels very much more like they're just sort of browsing a website or you know shopping on Amazon they're

they're looking at data and they don't realize they're doing statistics what's most exciting for me is that

public statistics is making citizens more powerful and the authorities more accountable

me we have Community meetings that the police attend and what citizens are now

doing are bringing printouts of the maps that show where crimes are taking place and they're demanding services from the

police department and the police department is now having to change how they police how they provide policing

Services because the data is showing what is working and what is not people in San Francisco are also using

public data to map social inequalities and see how to improve society and the possibilities are endless

I think our Dream government data analysis project would really be focused on live information on stuff that was

being reported and pushed out to the world over the internet as it was happening you know trash pickups traffic

accidents buses and I think through the kind of stats Gathering Power of the Internet it's possible to really begin

to see the the workings of the city displayed as a unified interface so that's where we are heading 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 it's a long way from where statistics

began statistics are essential to us to monitor our governance and our societies

but it was our rulers up there who started the collection statistics in the first place in order to monitor us

[Applause] in fact the word statistics comes from the state modern statistics began two

centuries ago once it got going it spread and never stopped and guess who was first

the Chinese have Confucius the Italians have Da Vinci and the British have Shakespeare and we have the

tabelvarket the first ever systematic collection of Statistics since the year 1749 we have collected data on every

birth marriage and death and we are proud of it [Music]

recorded information from every Parish in Sweden it was a huge quantity of data and it was the first time any government

could get an accurate picture of its people [Music]

foreign Sweden had been the greatest military power in northern Europe but by 1749 our

star was really faded and other countries were growing stronger at least though we were a large power thought to

have 20 million people enough to rival Britain and France [Music]

but we were in for a nasty surprise the first analysis of tabelberg is revealed that swedenola had 2 million

inhabitants Sweden was not only a power in Decline it also had a very small population the

government was horrified by this finding what if the enemy found out but the tabel market also showed that

many women died in childbirth and many children died young so government took action to improve the health of the

people this was the beginning of modern Sweden it took more than 50 years before the

austrians belgians Danes Dutch French Germans Italians and finally the British caught up with Sweden in collecting and

using statistics [Music] it was called political arithmetic there

was a lovely phrase that was used for statistics governments could have much more control

and understanding of the society Howard's working how it was developing and essentially so they could control it

better [Music] it wasn't just governments who woke up

to the power of Statistics right across Europe 19th century Society went mad for facts

and despite his late start Britain with its Royal statistical Society in London was soon a statistician's Nirvana

[Music] I love looking at old copies of the royal statistical Society Journal

because it's full out with such odd stuff there's a wonderful paper from the 1840s which shows a map of England and

the rates of bastardy in each County and so you can identify very quickly the areas with high rates of bastardy big in

East angler it always makes me slightly laugh that Norfolk seems to top the bastardy league in the 1840s

one of the founders of the royal statistical Society was the great Victorian mathematician and inventor

Charles Babbage in 1842 he read the latest poem by an equally great Victorian Alfred Tennyson

vision of sin contained the lines fill the cup and fill the can have arouse before the moon every moment dies a man

every moment one is born so key in the statistician was a Babbage that he could not contain himself he

dashed off a letter to Tennyson explaining that because of population growth the line should read every moment

dies a man and one on the 16th is born I may add that the exact figure is 1.067 but something must be conceded to

the laws of meter questions in the 19th century Scholars all over

Europe did amazing work in measuring their societies they were hoovering update on almost

everything but numbers alone don't tell you anything you have to analyze them and

that's what makes statistics when the first statisticians began to get to grips with analyzing their data

They seized upon the average and they took the average of [Music]

thank you foreign [Music] [Music]

ER had accidentally put her foot on the accelerator and crushed her friend against a wall devastating hideous

horrible thing to happen and then there was a second one about a young man who didn't have a driving

license was driving a car under the influence of drugs and alcohol and he bashed into a pedestrian killed him was

remarkable absolutely remarkable if you look at the number of people who die each year

in traffic crashes it's nearly a constant what

all these individual events somehow when you sum them all up there's the same number every year

and every year two and a half times as many men die in traffic crashes as women and it's a constant and every year the

rate in Belgium is double the rate in England they're these remarkable regularities

so that these individual particular events sum up sum up into a social phenomenon

let's see what Sweden have done we used to boast about fast social progress that's where we were in my lectures to

tell stories about the changing world I use the averages from entire countries whether the average of income child

mortality family size or carbon output okay I give you Singapore the year I was born Singapore had twice the child

mortality of Sweden it's the most tropical country in the world a Marshland on the equator and here we go

it took a little time for them to get independent but then they started to grow their economy and they made the

social investment they got away malaria they got the Magnificent health system that beated both us and Sweden we never

thought it would happen that they would win over three freedom

but useful as averages are they don't tell you the whole story [Music]

on average Swedish people have slightly less than two legs this is because a few people only have one leg or no legs and

no one has three legs so almost everybody in Sweden has more than the average number of legs

the variation in data is just as important as the average [Music]

but how do you get a handle of variation for this you transform numbers into shapes

let's look again at the number of adult women in Sweden for different heights plotting the date as a shape shows how

much their heights vary from the average and how wide that variation is the shape a set of data makes is called

its distribution this is the income distribution of China 1970. this is the income distribution of

the United States 1970 almost no overlap and what has happened China is growing it's not so equal any longer and it's

appearing here overlooking the United States almost like a ghost isn't it huh it's pretty scary

the statisticians who first explore distribution discovered one shape that turned up again

[Music] that he named it the normal distribution whether it was people's arms bands lung

capacities or even their exam results the normal distribution shape recurred time and time again

other statisticians soon found many other regular shapes each produced by a particular kind of natural or social

processes and every statistician has their favorite the poisson distribution is my favorite distribution I think it

says absolute cracker [Music] describes How likely it is that out of

the ordinary things will happen imagine a London bus stop where we know that on average we'll get three buses an hour we

won't always get three buses of course amazingly the poisson shape will show us the probability that in any given hour

we will get four five or six passes or no buses at all the exact shape changes with the average

but whether it's how many people will win the lottery jackpot each week or how many people will phone a call center

each minute the personal shape will give the probabilities the wonderful example where this was

applied to in the late 19th century was to count each year the number of Prussian officers Cavalry officers who

are kicked to death by their horses as some years there were none some years there were ones from years here were two

up to seven I think one particularly bad year and but with this distribution of how many years they were with Note one

two three four Prussian Cavalry officers kicked to death by the horses beautifully obeyed the price on

distribution [Applause] [Music]

foreign [Music] so statisticians use shapes to reveal

the patterns in the data but we also use images of all kinds to communicate statistics to a wider public because if

the store in the numbers is told by a beautiful and clever image that everyone understands

of the pioneers of statistical Graphics my favorite is Florence Nightingale [Music]

there are not many people who realize that actually she was known as a passionate statistician and not just a

lady of the Lamb she said that to understand God's thoughts we must study statistics for

these are the measure of his purpose statistics was for her religious Duty and moral imperative

[Music] when Florence was 9 years old she started collecting data her data was

different fruits and vegetables she found put them into different tables trying to organize them in some standard

form and so we have one of Bengal's first statistical tables at the age of nine

[Music] in the mid-1850s Florence Nightingale went to the Crimea to care for British

casualties of War she was horrified by what she discovered for all the soldiers being blown to bits on the battlefield

there were many many more soldiers dying from diseases they caught in the Army's filthy hospitals

so Florence Nightingale began counting the dead for two years she recorded mortality data in meticulous detail

when the war was over she persuaded the government to set up a royal Commission of inquiry and gathered her data in a

devastating report what has cemented her place in the statistical history book other Graphics she used

and one in particular the polar area graph for each month of the war a huge blue

wedge represented the soldiers who had died from preventable diseases the much smaller red wedges were deaths from

wounds and the black wedges deaths from accidents and other causes Nightingales Graphics were so clear they

were impossible to ignore the usual thing around Florence nightingale's time was just to produce

tables and tables of figures and you're absolutely really tedious stuff that unless you're absolutely dedicated

statistician is really quite difficult to spot the patterns quite naturally but visualizations they tell a story they

tell a story immediately and the use of color and the use of shape and you know can really tell a powerful story and

nowadays of course we can make things move as well first Nightingale would have loved to have played with she would

have been produced wonderful animations I'm absolutely certain [Music]

oh [Music] foreign

this image arose out of frustration with the reporting of billion pound amounts in the media 500 billion pounds for this

war 50 billion pounds for this oil spill it doesn't kind of make sense these numbers are too enormous to get your

mind round so I scraped all this data from various news sources and create this diagram so the squares here are

scaled according to the billion pound amounts when you see numbers visualized like

this you start to have a different kind of relationship with them you can start to see patterns you can see the scale of

them here in the corner this little square 37 billion that was the cost the predicted cost of the Iraq War in 2003.

as you can see it's grown exponentially over the last few years so the total cost now is around about 2 500 billion

it's funny because when you visualize statistics like this you understand them and when you understand them you can

really start to put things into perspective a heart of my own work too

I teach Global health and I know having the data is not enough I have to show it in ways people both enjoy and understand

now I'm going to try something I've never done before animating the data in real space with a bit of technical

assistance from the crew so here we go first the Nexus for health life expectancy from 25 years to 75

years and down here an access for wealth income per person 400 4 000 and forty thousand dollars so down here is poor

and sick and up here is Rich and healthy now I'm going to show you the world 200 years ago in 1810

here come all the countries European Asia red Middle East Green Africa Southern Sahara blue and the Americas

yellow and the size of the country bubble show the size of the population and in 1810 it was pretty crowded down

there wasn't it all countries were sick and poor life expectancy were below 40 in all countries and all the UK and the

Netherlands were slightly better off but not much and now why start the world the Industrial Revolution makes

countries in Europe and elsewhere move away from the rest but the colonized countries in Asia and Africa they are

stuck down there and eventually the Western countries get healthier and healthier

and now we slow down to show the impact of the first world war and the Spanish flu epidemic what a catastrophe

and now I speed up through the 1920s and the 1930s and in spite of the Great Depression Western countries forged on

towards greater wealth and health Japan and some others try to follow but most countries stay down here now after the

tragedies of the second world war we stop a bit to look at the world in 1948. 1948 was a great year the war was over

Sweden topped the medal table at the Winter Olympics and I was born but the differences between the countries of the

world was wider than ever United States was in the front Japan was catching up Brazil was way behind Iran was getting a

little richer from oil but still had short lives and the Asian Giants China India Pakistan Bangladesh and

Indonesia they were still poor and sick down here but look what is about to happen here we go again in my lifetime

former colonies gained independence and then finally they started to get healthier and healthier and healthier

and in the 1970s then countries in Asia and Latin America started to catch up with the Western countries they became

the emerging economies some in Africa follows some Africans were stuck in Civil War and others hit by HIV and now

we can see the world today in the most up-to-date statistics most people today live in the middle but

there are a huge difference at the same time between the best of countries and the worst of countries and they're also

huge inequalities within countries these bubbles show country averages but I can split them big China I can split it into

provinces there goes Shanghai it has the same wealth and health as

Italy today and there is the poor in line Province quite sure it is like Pakistan and if I split it further the

rural parts are like Ghana in Africa and yet despite the enormous disparities today we have seen 200 years of

remarkable progress that huge historical gap between the west and the rest is now closing we have become an entirely new

converging world and I see a clear Trend into the future with Aid trade Green Technology and peace it's fully possible

that everyone can make it to the healthy wealthy corner [Music]

well what you have seen in the last few minutes is a story of 200 countries shown over 200 years and Beyond it

involved plotting a 120 000 numbers pretty neat huh [Music]

we can begin to see things as they really are from tables of data to averages distributions and

visualizations statistics gives us a clear description of the world but with Statistics we cannot only

discover what is happening but also explore Why by using the powerful analytical method correlation

just looking at one thing at a time doesn't tell you very much is you've got to look at the relationships between

things how they changed how they vary together and that's what correlation is about and that's how you start trying to

understand the processes that are really going on in the world and in society most of us today would recognize that

crime correlates to Poverty that infection correlates to poor sanitation and that knowledge of Statistics

correlates to being great at dancing correlations can be very tricky I got a joke about silly correlations

that was this American I was afraid of heart attack and he found out that the Japanese

ate very little fat and almost didn't drink wine but they had much less heart attacks than the American but on the

other hand he also found out that the French eat as much fat as the Americans and they drink much more wine but they

also have less heart attacks so he concluded that what kills you is speaking English

cigarette [Music] yourself today the time the pace the

cigarette Waits tilt the best example of a really groundbreaking correlation is the link

that was established in the 1950s between smoking and lung cancer not long after the second world war a

British Doctor Richard doll investigated lung cancer patients in 20 London hospitals and he became certain that the

only thing they had in common was smoking so certain that he stopped smoking

himself but other people weren't so sure [Music] a lot of the discussion of the early

data linking smoking to lung cancer said what's not the smoking surely that thing that we've done all our lives that can't

be bad for you maybe it's genes maybe people who are genetically predisposed to get lung cancer are also genetically

predisposed to smoke maybe it's not the smoking maybe it's air pollution

that smokers are somehow more exposed to air pollution than non-smokers maybe it's not smoking maybe it's

poverty so now we've got three alternate explanations apart from chance to verify his correlation did imply

cause and effect Richard doll created the biggest statistical study of smoking yet he began cracking the lives of forty

thousand British doctors some of whom smoke and some of whom didn't and gathered enough data to correlate

the amount the doctor smoked with their likelihood of getting cancer eventually he not only showed a

correlation between smoking and lung cancer but also correlation between stopping smoking and reducing the risk

this was science at its best what correlations do not replace is human thought you could think about what

it means I mean what a good scientist does if he comes up with a correlation is try as hard as she or he possibly can

to disprove it break it down to get rid of it to try and refute it and if it withstands all

those efforts at demolishing it and it's still standing up then cautiously you say we really might have something here

forever brilliant the scientist data is still the oxygen of science the good news is that the more we have

the more correlations we'll find the more theories we'll test and the more discoveries we are likely to make

and history shows how our total sum of information grows in huge leaps as we develop new technologies

the invention of the printing press kicked off the first data and information explosion if you piled up

all the books that had been printed by the year 1700. they would make 60 Stacks each as high

as Mount Everest then starting in the 19th century there came a second information revolution

with the telegraph gramophone and camera and later radio and TV the total amount of information exploded

and by the 1950s the information available to us all had multiplied 6 000 times

then thanks to the computer and later the internet we went digital and the amount of data we have now is

unimaginably vast a single letter printed in a book is equivalent to a byte of data

printed page equals a kilobyte or two five megabytes is enough for the complete works of Shakespeare

10 gigabytes that's a DVD movie two terabytes is the tens of millions of photos added to Facebook every day

10 petabytes is the data recorded every second by the world's largest particle accelerator so much only a tiny fraction

is kept six exabytes is what you'd have if you sequence the genomes of every single

person on Earth [Music] but really that's nothing in 2009 the

internet added up to 500 exabyte and in 2010 in just one year that will double to more than one zettabyte

[Music] back in the real world if we turn all this data into print it would make 90

stacks of books each reaching from here all the way to the Sun the data Deluge is staggering but with

today's computers and statistics I'm confident we can handle it [Music]

when it comes to all the data on the internet the PowerHouse of statistical analysis is the Silicon Valley giant

Google the average person over their lifetime is exposed to about 100 million words of

conversation and so if you multiply that by the six billion people on the planet that amount of words is about equal to

the number of words that Google has available at any one instant in time Google's computers Hoover up and file

away every document web page and image they can find they then hunt for patterns and correlations in all this

data doing statistics on a massive scale and for me Google has one project that's particularly exciting statistical

language translation we wanted to provide access to all the web's information no matter what

language you spoke there's just so much information on the internet you couldn't hope to translate it all by hand into

every possible language we figured we'd have to be able to do machine translation

in the past programmers try to teach their computers to see each language as a set of grammatical rules much like the

way languages are taught at school but this didn't work because no set of rules could capture language in all its

subtlety and ambiguity having eaten our lunch the coach Departed

well that's obviously incorrect written like that it would imply that the coach has eaten the latch

it would be far better to say having eaten our lunch we departed in the coach

those rules are helpful and they are useful most of the time but they don't turn out to be true all the time and the

Insight of using statistical machine translation is saying well if you got to have all these exceptions anyways maybe

you can get by without having any of the rules maybe you can treat everything as an exception and that's essentially what

we've done [Music] what the computer is doing when when

he's learning how to translate is to learn correlations between words and correlations between phrases so we we

feed the system very large amounts of data and then the system is seeing that a certain word or a certain phrase

correlates very often to the other language Google's website currently offers

translation between any of 57 different languages it does this purely statistically having correlated the huge

collection of multilingual texts the people that build the system don't need to know Chinese in order to build a

Chinese to English system but I don't need to know Arabic but the expertise that's needed is basically knowledge of

Statistics knowledge of computer science knowledge of infrastructure to build those very large computational systems

that we are building for doing that okay so then I'm going to invite I hooked up with Google from my office in

Stockholm to try the translator for myself okay

okay so it says Sweden's Finance Minister has a ponytail and a gold ring in your ear

so I guess it probably means in this year it's amazing he comes one more sentence

[Music] in his same-sex Partnerships as Stockholm's new bishop and his partners

are three years on unusual okay so so that's those kinds of words

he sent her are one of the challenges in in Translation to get really those right in empty when it comes to Bishops one

can excuse it right right so that I guess more often than not it would probably be his I would write

okay when Sweden is taking part in Olympic goal is not to win but to beat Norway

I'll try oh very good very good this is absolutely amazing you know and I respect

this I'm very new to the language the translator is good but if they succeed with what's next that'll be

remarkable one of the exciting possibilities is combining the machine translation

technology with the speech recognition technology now both of these are statistical in nature the machine

translation relies on the statistics of mapping from one language to another and similarly speech recognition relies on

the statistics of mat mapping from a sound form to the words when we put them together now we have

the capability of having instant conversation between two people that don't speak a common language that I can

talk to you in my language you hear me in your language and you can answer back and in real time we can make that

translation we can bring to get people together and allow them to speak [Music]

[Music] the Internet is just one of many Technologies created together massive

amounts of data scientists studying our Earth and our environment

now use an incredible range of instruments to measure the processes of our planet

[Music] our sensors continuously measuring temperature water flow and ocean

currents and high in orbit are satellites busy Imaging cloud formations Forest growth and snow cover

scientists speak of instrumenting the Earth Galaxy is a very big place and it's got

billions of stars in it and so to put together a coherent picture of the whole galaxy requires having an enormous

amount of data and before you could do a large Sky survey with sensitive digital detectors that meant that you could map

many many stars all at once it was very difficult to build up enough data on enough of the Galaxy

large surveys of the night sky had to be done by exposing thousands of large photographic plates but these surveys

could take 25 years or more to a complete then in the 1990s came digital astronomy

and a huge increase in both the amount and the accessibility of data the Sloan Sky survey is the world's

biggest yet using a massive digital sensor mounted on the back of a custom-built telescope in New Mexico

and the sky night of the night for eight years building up a composite picture in unprecedented resolution the Sloan is

some of the best deepest survey data that we have in astronomy both on our own Galaxy and on on Galaxy's further

away from ours [Music] all this loan data is on the internet

and with it astronomers have identified millions of hithers to unknown stores and galaxies they also comb the database

for statistical patterns which will prove disprove or even suggest new theories

so we have this idea that galaxies grow they become large galaxies like the one we live in the Milky Way not all at once

or not smoothly but by continuously incorporating basically cannibalizing smaller galaxies they dissolve them and

they become part of of the bigger Galaxy as it grows it's a startling idea and in the Sloan

data is the evidence to support it groups of stars that came from cannibalized galaxies stand out in the

Sloan data as statistically different from other stars because they move at a different velocity each Big Spike on one

of these distribution graphs means Professor rocosi has found a group of stars all traveling in a different way

to the rest they are The Telltale patterns she's looking for

the evidence and so this is an important part of of understanding how galaxies form not only

ours but every Galaxy the more data there is the more discoveries can be made and the

technology is getting better all the time the next big survey telescope starts its work in 2015. it will leave

Sloane in the dust Sloan has taken eight years to cover one quarter of the night sky

the new telescope will scan the entire sky in even greater resolution every three days

the vast amounts of data we had today allows researchers in all sorts of fields to test their theories on a

previously unimaginable scale but more than this it may even change the fundamental way science is done

with the power of today's computers applied to all this data the machines might even be able to guide the

researchers [Music] with a potentially profoundly important

and potentially one of the most significant uh points in science and certainly one

of the most exciting uh where uh the potential to transform not just how scientists do science but even what

science is possible and what will power that transformation of of how science is done and even what science is possible

is going to be computation [Music] dynamics of the natural world like the

interplay between the rainforest and the atmosphere are so complex that we don't as yet really understand

but now computers are generating literally tens of thousands of different simulations of how these biological

systems might work it's like creating thousands of hypothetical parallel worlds

and every one of these simulations is analyzed with Statistics to see if any are a good match for what is observed in

nature the computers can now automatically generate tests and discard hypothesis

with scarcely a human inside new application statistics will become absolutely vital for a future of science

is creating a new paradigm if you like in science and the way in which we can do science which is increasingly

which will make characterizes data Centric or data-driven rather than being hypothesis driven or

experimentally driven so it's exciting times in terms of the science in terms of the computation

and in terms of the statistic is an individual feeling expressed by someone out there in a blog or a tweet

and when you click on a dot it explodes to reveal the underlying feeling of that person

this is what people say they're feeling today better

safe crappy well

pretty special sorry

alone so every minute we feel fine calls the world's blogs takes all the sentences

that start with the words I feel or I am feeling and put them in a database we collect all the feelings and we count

the most common they are better bad

good right guilty

sick the same like

sorry well and so on

and we can take a look at anyone feeling and analyze it right now A lot of people are feeling happy

we can take a look at all the people who are happy and break down by age gender or location since bloggers have public

profiles we have that information and so we can ask questions like are women happier than men or is England happier

than the United States we find that as people get older they get happier

and moreover we find that for younger people they associate happiness more with

excitement and as people get older they associate happiness more with peacefulness

and we also find that women feel loved more often than men but also more guilty

while men feel good more often than women but also more alone

as people lead more and more of their lives online they leave behind digital traces and with these digital traces we

can begin to statistically analyze what it means to be human [Music]

foreign [Music] [Applause]

so where does all of this leave us we generate unimaginable quantities of data about everything you can think of

and we analyze it to reveal the patterns and now not only expert but all of us can understand the stories in the

numbers [Music] thank you

[Music] instead of being led astray by Prejudice with

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 and the pretty exciting isn't it Longs oblique strategies these and so

much more can be explored in The Well of random down on the BBC sounds app to dip your inquisitive toes in now

coming up in a moment Bethany Hughes presents Genius of the ancient world focusing upon Buddha

[Applause]