Professor Hans Rosling gave this talk at TED in 2006 and this follow-up talk in 2007. It already made the blog rounds a while back, but I thought I’d post it anyway after re-watching. Incredible use of information visualization. It’s like, “understand the world in 20 minutes.” No wonder Google acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software.
Check out what you can do with some world data yourself.
This kind of visualization will start to become more widespread, I predict, particularly in niche markets. So it’s (once again) a timely acquisition by Google. The future will not about having information or even having access to information. It’ll be about how you make sense of it, and you have to be able to do it quickly. Trendalyzer is a big step in that direction with lots of potential.
EXPERIENCING INFORMATION 
The talk you linked to is actually his follow up talk of TED 2007. So there are two talks of him on the TED-website. Both brilliant and mind blowing.
Thanks, Johannes. I’ve updated the post to include both links now anyway.
How can we get the American Government Data available in this format, and also the range in the Data that Dr.Rosling shows in his TED talks.
I would very much like to see a decent description of the reality without the spin and hiding.
Sorry, I’m not sure about Hans Rosling format of source data. In his talk he mentions it comes from the UN.
For US data, you might want to try http://www.census.gov/
But what would it take to be able to have Gapminder software read the US Census data, and perhaps other data sources in the government as well.
I understand that Dr Rosling built the Gapminder on United Nations data, and perhaps the most complete set is put to the bets test. My question is what it would take to translate the data to a standard Gapminder display that folk could see and look at specifics.
If the software translation of the database could be made, then many more folk could make sense of the info than the way it is presented now, and perhaps see things that would not be the intention of those in chargeof the Government.
im at dff123@hotmail.com
how can i get software for my research
i see help file at gapminder but no software download
am i missing something
Freedem & Daniel:
Sorry, I have nothing to do with the software and don’t know how to get it or how to get the data–I was merely pointing to it.
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