Data Dancing Through the Time Space Continuum

Hans Rosling’s data presentation made me cry. Who thought that data could do that? He has captured the data from 1960 to now on 50 different variables globally, and animated it in a progressive way to show the correlation between family size, life expectancy, income, GDP, and advances the data points on fast forward- to paint the portrait of a changing planet. The voiceover adds color- when significant policy decisions, wars, leadership changes have enabled progress and gap closing, and when they have hindered it- we watch with dismay as the life expectancy bubbles in Africa fall downward like tears, like falling dying children as the AIDS epidemic begins, while the life expectancies in all other parts of the world are falling. We are educated about sweeping generalizations- and shown the differences within Africa, within Asia, about distribution curves even within countries. And the need for us to be contextual about all the approaches we take with our solutions- context is king. And finally, with this beautiful data, which is public and tells such powerful stories in the hands of this master, we are challenged to unearth it and make it free. He gets a round of applause when he says- the data is there, in all the databases- but it’s hidden behind stupid passwords and fees- and presented in a boring charts, which are meaningless to the interpreter. Now, we take this public data, we put software over it that animates it, we iberate the UN’s information for analytics, and we are left with only one challenge- the fast aggregation and integration of all data from all these databases around the world- so that we can really mine it, picture it and understand it. The software for animating the data is at gapminder.com. And his dynamic racing intellect and kinetic energy may just change the world.