honoring the clan of uncertainty

Today, 20 October 2010, World is celebrating the first World Statistics Day.
.. an attempt to acknowledge services we get through Statistics which are innumerable and pay a tribute to Statisticians all over the world.

PS: I didn't write this as a statistician, but as a common man who accepts how the world is continuously benefited by this science; and how the functioning of everything, which means theres nothing that would be in the complement,  around will paralyze if even for a moment we lack its support.


I heard of this 3 days back, when a friend emailed me the information about a quiz and tech-talk scheduled for the day to celebrate the occasion. After subsequent search on internet we got to know more about it. United Nations has decided to celebrate this day as the World Statistics Day, starting from 2010. So today is the first of its kind.

To be very frank I am still not very sure why they chose this day. But it looks like whole world has accepted it, and celebrating it in their own ways. Here are some ideas to do that. SAS Research and Development has organized a tech-chat and a quiz on the occasion. Alas.. in the Worlwide Celebration Activities, for India, details are yet to be announced.

Last night one of the alumnus suggested to have a celebration in our department too, to mark this day. But it doesn't seem very much possible, with such a short notice. Still I hope, being an advanced entity in Statistics, from next year onwards we will have something to contribute to the celebrations of the day.


..and now in words of a non-statistician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is immortalized because of his brain-child Sherlock Holmes,

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. 
                               

PS:  Sincere thanks to Akanksha and Saurabh, for the reasons they know.