Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with stats
The video I’m referring to, ”Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen“, is an insightful TED talk given by Hans Rosling in February of 2006.
While debunking third-world myths may be interesting, Hans is make an even more powerful point with his presentation: we can challenge our beliefs and vastly improve our understanding of the world if we improve the way we visualize and interpret data.
In other words, the analysis of statistics and research data isn’t just an information problem, it’s also a design problem. How do we humans, with a limited capacity to understand vast quantities of data, represent statistics eloquently enough so that we may understand their meaning?
This question is the focus of Hans Rosling’s company called Gapminder, which he refers to in the TED talk. Him and others at Gapminder have produced an excellent piece of software, called Trendalyzer, which taps vast quantities of data and visualizes them with stunning clarity and interactivity. To see what I mean, try out Trendalyzer using this link.
The important thing to realize is that Gapminder isn’t creating the data, they are just improving the way we look at it. In that way, they are solving a design problem, not an information problem.
The concept is a powerful idea, so much so that it attracted the attention of Google. In March of 2006, Google acquired Trendalyzer and its development team from Gapminder.
Despite the sale of the technology, Hans is still using Trendalyzer to demonstrate interesting world trends on the Gapminder web site. Check it out.