Are you sick of looking at tables of numbers in books, and trying to deduce relevant information from them about, say, the relationship between income and infant mortality rates? Sometimes the statistics are dressed up in bar charts or pie charts, but it still tends to be tedious stuff. But now Gapminder has come up with a completely new way of presenting statistics which is far more useful and informative than any method I have ever seen.
The Gapminder charting tool is hosted by Google, and it’s free for anyone to use. Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software for visualising human development. One of its founders was Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He was also a co-founder of Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden.
Hans has given two amazing presentations at TED conferences in 2006 and 2007, demonstrating his software in a very entertaining manner. Both of these are available for free viewing online. The 2006 talk was entitled Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, and his 2007 talk was entitled New Insights on poverty and life around the world. The TED website has many other videos which are worth watching.