Colleagues/

 

FYI

 

/Gerry 

 

NationMaster Makes Available Correlating Tools on Countries of the World

NationMaster.com, the world's largest online statistical database for country comparisons, has today announced free access to their correlation tools. This service allows the user to compare any two statistics (out of a database of over 5,700) in order to shed new light on information highly-useful to journalists, writers, professors and the general public. Correlations can therefore be used to inform debates on crime, politics, education, poverty and so on. 

 

[ http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php <https://exchange.iastate.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php>  ]

"We've seen NationMaster quoted in thousands of online debates," says John Steinmetz, Content Manager for NationMaster, "and it's true that statistics can be dangerous; they can be used to justify anything. We actually found a blogger using NationMaster's information to prove that there is a link between child poverty and the number of television sets in a country. It then occurred to us, why not develop a technology that would allow our users to take any two statistics from our database and compare them, revealing hidden statistical relationships."

Using NationMaster's correlations, strong links can be found between: 
* A large number of prisoners in a country and high teenage pregnancy.
* A high external debt of a country and a large population of elderly.
* A large population of couples with children and a high number of McDonalds in a country.

Rather than NationMaster.com coming to conclusions about a given set of data, these applications allow users to develop their own comparisons and, in effect, arrive at their own assumptions and conclusions. "Never has such a tool been applied to so much data, and available to so many people," Steinmetz says, "we are trying to start a statistics revolution. We want to give people access to information, and make it fun and interesting. We think there's something intriguing about Malaysia having the lowest rate of cinema attendance in the world, or Iceland having twice as many tractors per capita than any other country. These correlations take it to another level, bringing to surface a lot of questions that are never asked, some bizarre and entertaining, others enlightening and speaking volumes about our world."

This free correlations tool is just the latest in a series of statistical visualization technologies, which includes scatterplots and mapping applications. The website offers users a database on thousands of statistics in categories such as health, government, identification, mortality and people, as well as providing general country information, maps and flags, lesson plans for teachers, forums, and a student area. It was recently listed by NielsenNet ratings as one of the top ten fastest growing educational reference sites, viewed by over 1 million Americans last month.


[ http://www.nationmaster.com/pr.php <https://exchange.iastate.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nationmaster.com/pr.php>  ]

 

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

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