Last week, as I was working and re-working through the logistics of my feasibility plan, I took a break and came across this amazing TED talk by Hans Rosling | http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
I was completely mesmerized by his amazing skills of combining data with design, and felt that everyone should spend the 20 odd minutes viewing this presentation. But it was not just the fancy demonstration of statistics that makes this talk great, it is the content that is delivered. Dr. Rosling is able to walk us through the unbelievable changes in global trends specifically in economies of various countries and their health using the power of freely available data.
As we all work on our ideas to change the world, good data plays an ever important role in understanding the various aspects of local or global trends and it becomes ever so trying to sift through all the junk that is cluttered across the various websites in cyberspace. We have already discussed how several "legit" data sources such as the World Bank, the UN, the World Health Organization, etc can not only have a variety of differences in their researched numbers, but also be extremely difficult to interpret. So, then, what Dr. Rosling is trying to attempt, i.e., create a search engine that can efficiently sift through all these institutions but also envelop it with a simple software platform that can depict these data in a coherent and logical manner.
However, obviously, statistics is not simple, and as some people critiqued, cannot be and should not be simplified. Personally, I do not entirely agree with that viewpoint. For me, depiction of data that is able to move me (and like Dr.Rosling mentioned, the statistical differences in depiction of data in this manner are much smaller compared to the differences presented by the data) and forces me to question my presumptions is definitely more interesting, than just trying to read through raw tables that might make no sense whatsoever.
And so I leave the judgment on whether this is an accurate representation of world facts to each of you, individually. However, some of the key things I took away from his talk, and he has given quite a few at several TED events, are:
1. The current economic state of affairs across the world is completely different from what it was a few years ago, and hence before categorizing countries as developed and developing, it is important to really understand what the round reality might be.
2. Countries in a continent like Africa have populations that lie on a wide diaspora of social, economic and health spectrum, so using the same set of starting parameters when designing a product idea for Ghana would not work for Sierra Leone.
3. And finally, to put into Dr. Rosling's words, "... Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.”
PS: The software that is demonstrated in the talk can be found at http://www.gapminder.org/
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