World developement, the internet and making statistics fun

[matgb]

Take twenty minutes out. Put aside the time. Watch this:
TED | Talks | Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen (video):

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation.

So very cool. And I think he's right; we have all the data we need, we just can't access it and don't know how to use it.

Look out for the bit where China jumps up on the US.

Comments

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

* luffs that chimps are 0.1 smarter than professors *

He's almost as cool as Peter Snow! I did like China looming over America like a scooby doo ghost as well

[matgb]

Random clicking is a better way to answer proper!science!tests!

That is wrong, right?

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

It's a great way to illustrate that we have preconcieved ideas about stuff, though. We always used to say in contract law that we'd be happy if we beat the monkey mark on the multiple guess questions...

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

That's very good.

There's a lot of good stuff on TED Talks: I once spent an afternoon trawling their archive. It is easy to spend a lot of time watching those!

[matgb]

Aye; I just killed the tab and restarted, I'd overloaded the memory anyway, but trawling through that was taking up all my time.

Very very nice though, I'd not heard of it before that I can recall.

[malkavelli.livejournal.com]

Impressive, interesting and fun. Many thanks for the link.

[matgb]

Aye; it was the combination of good software, well done presentation, interesting subject and great presenter, made it worth watching overall.

I now have to stop myself from trawling their archives...

[tiredstars.livejournal.com]

I'm pleased to say I got the test questions right, that's four years not entirely wasted...

I thought it was great. There's a real need for statistics to be presented in a clearer and easier fashion. For example, it's important to keep people informed of up to date statistics. That's not hard to do, given the right software and presentation. Another thing I thought was very good was showing countries with population size. If you look at raw data usually it's listed by country. But that's an entirely misleading emphasis if you're interested in people, since the number of people in each data 'point' can vary by a hundred thousand percent. Likewise, it's really useful to be able to look at the differences within countries, but that's something that's often forgotten about because the data isn't easy to get.

That said, can you imagine the effects of easily accessible statistics on the internet? When you start having people presenting innumerable variations of data in innumerable ways to prove their different arguments you'll start longing for the days when everyone just stated the opinions as fact without trying to provide evidence...

[matgb]

Yeah, but there's a big part of me that looks forward to being able to tell people to piss off and do their research knowing that it should be fairly easy. Debating with clueless morons is never fun.

It will instead switch to debating with morons who think their interpretation of the numbers is the Only!True!Way! Ah well.

(aside: the Recent Comments page on LJ got me here, email notification didn't arrive...)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I've only just seen this as when I first tried to view it it wouldn't stream quite fast enough to not have a pause every few seconds and it wasn't caching the video either - grr! So I downloaded the 195MB big version of it - since the small downloads, umm, wouldn't download for me...

Whatever, it was still worth it. Graphs and animations used well can make understanding things so much easier. And those confirmed my feeling that the world is a lot better off than it used to be. A few decades can make a huge difference.

[matgb]

Aye; I learnt the hard way at work that putting less information into a lot more space with a graph or three would win me funding battles a lot better than having all the answers in the report in the first place. Make the most important bits the most accessible and play around with the info.

I especially liked the way the different sized blobs were used for the countries, really helped getting the point across.