Several weeks ago there was an article in The Economist about how falling fertility is going to affect the world, for the better. It was an interesting article and it had an especially interesting chart showing fertility versus GDP on a global scale. The chart came from gapminder.org which of course I looked up.
Gapminder has developed this really neat piece of software, called Trendalyzer, that can show statistics in a meaningful and interesting way. The data that they use comes from organisations such as the UN, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. (In the meantime Trendalyzer has been bought by Google. Surprise, surprise.)
Go and check it out. Have a play with the Gapminder World software. I recommend watching the video tutorial as there are lots of buttons to play with. It’s also worth your while to go and watch some of the videos by Hans Rosling, the brain behind Gapminder, who is a very entertaining public speaker. He has just recently given a TED talk predicting when Asia will overtake America in terms of average income per person. Fascinating stuff.
4 Comments
ben gras · November 27, 2009 at 13:39
i’ve seen the ted talk by that guy about statistics of africa; he is a phenomenal speaker :). and i love statistics/visualisation, so that talk was delicious.
ben gras · November 27, 2009 at 13:55
saw the 2nd talk. great stuff.
jennie · November 28, 2009 at 2:08
Hi Ben,
Yeah, I think I’ve found a new hero. He’s great, eh? I so envy people who can entertain a whole auditorium, especially with what would normally be a very Sahara-desert topic. And BTW, thanks for being such a faithful and loyal reader! At least I know *some*one is out there ;-)
bye – jennie
ben gras · November 28, 2009 at 9:27
it’s always more than you think :-)