So hi. I'm in need of help and I thought I'd resort to the only Forum I use.

I'm doing a course that requires me to do a year of subjects, of which include "Quantitative Methods" (Which is as unrelated to my actual course as possible, I might add), and I need to find a data set for some coursework. I tried asking the lecturer, but, being as useful as possible, he didn't even know how to get data. I've been scouring the internet for a week without success. I must be missing something simple.

I need to find raw data. 50 or so pieces of data to put into a spreadsheet. For some stupid reason, I'm not allowed to make up the information as I have to reference it. All data in the series has to be related. It's also Raw data, so it can only be data pertaining to one subject.

I ALSO need to find grouped data for the coursework.

This all needs to be handed in by tomorrow and it's getting stupidly hard (and irritating that I can't get help from the actual guy incharge) to find this information.

If anyone could point me to some nice statistical data so I can get on with my work, I'd be greatly appreciative. I have NO idea where to look. Thanks.

(Gotta love the British educational system. Pay extortionate amounts for a bad service!)

Can it be statistics from anything? How about the number of votes for each of the top 50 movies on IMDb?

Possibly. Link?

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top

They keep track of more in-depth data too, if that's more interesting. Stuff like average score for different ages and genders. To get to that click the movie title, then on the vote number next to the score.

Thanks, works fine

I'd just like to ask something, if anyone happens to know what's going on.

I need to find the Standard Deviation (population and variance) of this raw data. However, I have no idea how to do this. All I can find on the internet are examples of 10 or so peices of data. I know he doesn't want me to create a giant 50-long table for this, but I'm not sure how to go about this otherwise (as you may have guessed, this chap aint exactly the best teacher in the universe). Going to be fun to "use six other functions", too..

Thanks again, for any help.

Are you using a statistics program (like SAS, SPSS, JMP, etc.)? Or just Excel? If you're using Excel, this website explains how to calculate mean & standard deviation: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/research/Normal/stdexcel.htm

It sounds like an introductory class, but if your instructor is teaching you stats using Excel, that's not a good sign. I wouldn't trust Excel to do any stats more complicated than means, standard deviations, and maybe simple correlations and regressions. If you're using another stats package, most programs use a "descriptive statistics" function to calculate the mean, SD, etc.

I've taken a gazillion stats classes and it's actually one of my minors in my PhD program now, so feel free to ask me any stats questions! I don't have any data sets on short notice that would be simple enough for your assignment, but if you get into more complicated things I might be able to help you out. But, if it's on short notice, keep in mind I'm not always on here regularly (although I try to check in once a day at least).

Excel will do fine for simple stats which I believe is requested to you. For more advance, I advise you Tanagra or better, for sophisticated anolysis and machine learning algorithms, http://orange.biolab.si/. I wrote numerous technical papers using Orange and the results are quality.
For your statistical sample, the web is full of data, just look at countries stats for example.

Thanks for the help guys.

Managed to hand in my coursework on time and completed. (not completed WELL, but completed nonetheless )