Gapminder

Image from www.gapminder.org

We just went to a lecture by Hans Rosling, who is Professor of International Health here at Karolinska. It was fantastic. Professor Rosling promotes a macro-view of world health and global development, and aims to replace myths with facts using beautiful gapminder views of global statistics and a complete lack of nonsense (when asked how he had arrived at a particular threshold value he said he used the powerful calculation of drawing a line on his graph). Throughout the talk he urged us not simply to produce pdfs of research for publication behind the copyright wall, and used toilet rolls to demonstrate how the global population will change in the next century.

The Gapminder World Map shown here was produced using the latest data about the world, and compares all UN members and other countries and territories with more than 1 million people, by income and health. If you have time, go to http://www.gapminder.org/, it will eat into your day but it couldn't be more worthwhile.

Laura