Hans Rosling 2007

We had this entry almost a year ago. This year Hans Rosling gives yet another talk titled “New insights on poverty and life around the world”. The talk is great, and the ending is quite shocking.

In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels. Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.

The software for video presentation is quite useful. You can see the outline of the talk and jump to the section that you are interested in by overlaying the cursor on top of it.

4 thoughts on “Hans Rosling 2007

  1. This software seems very cool. I went to the google site and looked at the few demos that are up. One interesting graph is of Carbon Dioxide emissions, based on the depiction of the data, over the past 40 years, the dioxide emissions across the most countries is relatively stable, fluctuating slightly, but those in oil rich states increase dramatically. I haven't heard a lot of discussion of focusing global warming reforms on oil producing countries, more on China and US. Just a thought…

    Google is also looking for researchers to collaborate with to produce new trendalyzer reports. So if you have data you want showcase. Contact them. It would be nice to get the software standalone, but I wasn't able to locate a way to get that.

  2. Never watch the sequels…

    I was amazed by Rosling the last year and annoyed this year. I had an impression that people laughed just because they expected him to be funny – it's like watching a sitcom with too much laugh.

    On the content: US in 1915 had the same GDP as India in 2007, so they should presumably have to have the same infant mortality rate. And since they don't, the US is "on the money side"? As an MD, Rosling should know that the medicine made some little progress since then.

    Valuing the human rights above health is just a western ranking of priorities. I wonder whether an Asian would not put it the other way around and possibly add some goals which were not on the list at all.

    As for the conclusion: amazing, but hardly adds to the point, does it?

    Rosling, his software and what he does with it are of course great, but this presentation is more about the show than about anything else.

  3. Janez, while one can disagree with some details in Rosling's "goals", he's making a really important distinction between economic growth as "means" and not as a "goal". A lot of policy is being made placing economic growth (or even its face-lifted twin of "sustainable development") as the only developmental goal.

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