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February 99 Column
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     To pack more punch in your stories, research, speeches, brochures, ads or manuals, you might want to dazzle your audience with statistics.  Here are a few ideas to get you started.

    Use www.yahoo.com, which has a category called “References” to get to statistics fast. Here are some of the Statistics web page topics: Agriculture, Business and Economy, Children, Crime,       Education, Energy, Environment, Government Agencies, Resources, Health, Internet, Labor, Population, Poverty, Regional, Social Sciences Data Collections, Trade and Transportation.  You can also access:
 

• “Infonation” - up-to-date statistical data for the Member States of the United Nations
• Global Statistics - general data on selected countries of the world, including administrative divisions (provinces) and major cities of each country
• Statistical Resources on the Web - index to statistical web sites and individual statistical publications arranged by broad subject category from the University of Michigan Documents Center: http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/stats.html

    If you use a search engine to search for statistics, try including your “key word (the topic) + statistics”—otherwise you could wind up with a mixed bag of mainly math and basketball stats.  If you’re searching for environmental statistics, for example, type “environment and statistics” and you should get a few hits containing both the word environment and statistics.  The quotes are often important because they include both words, not one word or the other.

    Try more than one search engine to increase the number and variety of your results.  Excite found 10 matches, but Alta Vista found only four for my sample topic.  The Excite web page gave me links to more statistic sites, many of which link to various universities that also keep statistics on varying topics.

    One of my favorite sites Excite linked me to: “Statistics Every Writer Should Know.”  This site recommends books on the subject for writers, journalists and reporters. “Tainted Truth” by Cynthia Crossen caught my eye.  Of this book, the site says, “A Wall Street Journal writer takes us through the dark side of statistics, showing how public officials and interest groups deliberately manipulate stats in order to fool writers and journalists. A cautionary tale for any reporter.”

    Here are a few sites I found in my travels:

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/phplib/bookmarks.phtml  -- UCLA page features links to International, government, teaching and scientific statistics

http://www.statistics.com/   -- offers statistic courses and software and a few statistical puzzles to try

http://broadway.vera.org/pub/ocjsites.html – has links to government and legal sites and University of Michigan’s statistical resources on the Web

http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/stats.html  -- University of Michigan’s statistical resources

http://nilesonline.com/stats/ --“Statistics Every Writer Should Know” & “Finding Data On the Internet: A Journalist’s Guide”

http://www.webcom.com/stats/home.htm (John emailed me this page from who knows where)

http://www.fedstats.gov  --lots of stats from various government departments

http://www.census.gov/  -- U. S. Census Bureau

http://stats.bls.gov/  -- Bureau of Labor Statistics

(February)