On October 20, 2010, on an initiative by the United Nations (UN) Statistics Division, the World Statistics Day is being celebrated in more than 75 countries...

On October 20, 2010, on an initiative by the United Nations (UN) Statistics Division, the World Statistics Day is being celebrated in more than 75 countries. “I encourage the international community to work with the United Nations to enable all countries to meet their statistical needs”, says UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon about this date, which will be celebrated for the first time (in http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/docs/SecGen_LetterOnWSD_oct.pdf, the whole statement).

The UN site for the World Statistics Day is http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/. The Facebook page about the World Statistics Day is http://www.facebook.com/pages/World-Statistics-Day-2010/353189579699?v=wall.

The world is immersed in statistics. The countries that house around 80% of the world population are conducting population censuses this year or the next year (in 2010, China, USA, Russia, Japan Indonesia, Pakistan,, South Korea, Brazil and Argentina, among others; and in 2011, more 90% of the countries of the European Union, among others). At the same time, statistics on global economics have never stood out so much, after one of the worst economic crises of all times.

In Brazil, pre-election polls are printed in the first pages of newspapers, whereas inflation, unemployment, GDP, basic sanitation, infant mortality and illiteracy, among other indicators, fuel the debate on political platforms of presidential candidates.

Even not considering economic or voting conjunctures, it is possible to notice the permanent presence of statistics in medicine, public safety, enterprise productivity control, capital market, actuarial valuations (private insurance and social security), sports and consumption figures.

IBGE, through the National School of Statistical Sciences (ENCE), is pleased to invite all to the activities to celebrate the World Statistics Day, which will be conducted at ENCE auditorium (rua André Cavalcanti, 106, 3º andar, Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro). After the opening, at 15:00., the following lectures will be delivered: Innovations of the 2010 Census (Zélia Bianchini, IBGE, Substitute Director of Surveys, and Marco Antonio dos Santos Alexandre, Substitute Technical Coordinator of the Population Census, from 15:30 to 16:45); Anthropometry and nutritional status in Brazil (André Luiz Martins Costa, from the Consumer Expenditure Survey team of IBGE, from 17:00 to 18:15); and Statistical modeling for the prediction of soccer results: the case of the 2010 World Cup (Francisco Louzada Neto - Center of Studies about Risk of the Department of Statistics of Universidade Federal de São Carlos, from 18:45 to 20:00).