Data
&
Analysis

Now of course, nearly everyone in the world writes numbers in the same way these days,

using each place along to multiply by one more ten,

and filling any spaces with zeros.

And that way of writing numbers was thought up in India a long time ago,

and Arab muslim traders learned how to use the zero with numbers that way,

and those muslims also traded with Europe,

and that's how those numbers reached Scotland.

So nowadays in Scotland the way those numbers are written look a bit different to the way modern Arabs write them,

but you can easily see how they have come from the same place.

They have the same roots.

You can see how they calculate in the same way and get the same result.

And because it was suddenly so easy to work with numbers,

people realised that there was all sorts of information

about the world and about themselves

that they could find out by counting and measuring.

So they could collect lots of information about something they were interested in,

but to make sense of it they needed to organise it,

because by organising it they could see if they had all the data they needed, or if they needed more information.

And by organising the data they could start to interpret and understand it,

and to help them understand it they would look at it in different ways.

So they used line charts, and column charts, and pie charts to compare things,

and they could be used to display simple things and very complicated information,

in the way that a simple table written on a piece of paper could be turned into a spreadsheet on a computer,

showing all the numbers involved in running a giant company.

But because computers make it so easy to store and share data,

that also makes them dangerous.

Some information is best kept private in order to stay safe.

And also it is important to consider the kind of information that you share,

whether you share what you don't like about people,

or pass on encouragement and praise.

Do you choose to display what you share with other people,

or what makes you different and divides you?