Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Cool World Data Visualizations and Presentations

This is a really interesting presentation that's well worth watching. TED is an annual exclusive conference of brilliant people exchanging potentially brilliant ideas. This presentation is from the 2006 conference. Hans Rosling is a Swedish professor of International Health and a co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999).

He also co-founded Gapminder, a non-profit organization "for development and provision of free software that visualise human development." They're also trying to make access to such data (as from the UN) much easier than it currently is. Check out the presentation, the graphics that they have for showing the data (such as world health and income) are really well done, even Tufte found them interesting.

If you're really into world data or statistical visualizations you may get more out of this 1 hour version of the talk given at Google by Hans' his son and Gapminder co-founder Ola Rosling. The one problem with both of them is they blur being about the data, that is the condition of people, and about the presentation, that is the software and sources of the data. You can download some of the software from gapminder.org and play with it yourself. Cool stuff.

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