Africa’s Destiny? The Impossible is possible.
It’s all about the frame of reference: putting human and economic development in a readily accessible and understandable context, Hans Rosling gives a powerful presentation of the potential that exists for progress in some of the world’s poorest countries in this talk from TED 2007:
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
When I saw Hans’ presentation for the first time I was floored by the visualization techniques. It made me recall the first time I tried to use animation to show changes over time. I was hoping to produce something like a moving weather radar map (my data was spatial). My audience just looked blankly at me and told me it was too confusing. My data was really not continuous over time and it had discrete jumps that made the visualization hard. That was a good learning experience.
Another big difference between my attempt to visualize things with motion and Hans’ approach is how smooth things move from one time period to the next. I think he interpolates the points in between each year which makes them extra smooth. The metrics he is using are also rather slow moving with a long time series which makes them easier to visualize and makes the movement slow.
Google bought Hans’ Trendalyzer software earlier this year (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/world-in-motion.html) and I figure at some point Google will buy Tableau Software and team it together with Trendalyzer http://www.tableausoftware.com/. At that point Google will be in the BI business and be competing with Microsoft on yet another front. Add a database engine to Google’s mix and things get really interesting.
So I guess I fall into the category of folks who focus on his presentation methodology and not the content…
BTW, I think this was at TED 2006.
-JD
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
For others who are into data viz pr0n, there are a series of Google videos on the topic. Here is a Gapminder presentation at a Google talk series:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7996617766640098677
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 pm
What an interesting ending! The man has talent in more ways than one.
July 4th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Actually JD this is 2007 - they loved him so much after 2006 they invited him back for this year!
You can see his profile here.
July 5th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Geeesh, I was unable to watch the video at work due to overly zealous firewall rules. After watching the video at home over the holiday, it was obvious that it was 2007. Sorry about the misstatement.