from the horizon

I’m a big fan of the TED (Technology, Engineering, Design), which is an annual conference. Although attendance costs $6000, all of the presentations are available online, and can be downloaded. The latest presentation by Hans Rosling is a gem (It’s 20 minutes long, but well worth it, especially for the surprise at the end). Hans Rosling was initially a doctor, has worked in Africa, and is involved in international development. One of his focuses is development statistics, and making them more accessible.

For the link to the video on TED, with download options, go here.Hans Rosling, co-developed the GapMinder software, which can display a wide variety of statistics. The software allows you to choose from a variety of variables to display of the X and Y axis’s, eg life expectancy vs. income per capita, and displays each country as a bubble, with a diameter proportional to it’s population (or any other variable). Each country is color coded according to which continent it is in. The most interesting feature you can what the statistics change over a period of time.

This is a great example of how technology has changed the way we look at information. Instead of only looking at 2 dimensions of information on a static graph, we can now simultaneously look at 5 dimensions of information. I think that this will give us a much better understanding of the world.

Interestingly, the Gapminder software has been acquired by Google. Although they have made it accessible to the public, they were no doubt more interested in the tool for ways in which it could help display information to help people with their online advertising (let’s not forget, that Google is just a high tech advertising company).

In contrast to Gapminder’s very qualitative information, Hans Rosling also showed the very quantitative Dollar Street software, which takes you on an interactive tour of the houses of people living on different income levels.

Unfortunately you can only view this by downloading a 128 MB file, it seems Google doesn’t have any incentive to show you the living conditions of people in poverty.

I would how software could start to link qualitative and quantitative information more. Could we click on the bubbles in Gapminder to zoom into photos and videos, to give us a better idea of what an annual income of $1000 looked like?

But Hans Rosling’s presentation wasn’t all pretty graphics. In his words: “we have to get serious, and how do we get serious, you make a PowerPoint”. I agree with him absolutely! I’ll try to replicate his power point here:

The Dimensions of Development

He was talking about the difference between the “Means” of how we do development, verse the “Goals” of why we do it. I thought that his ideas were very insightful, and potentially controvesal. I would have personally given the environment “+++” for goals.
It is interesting to separate the practicalities of how development work is implemented, from the intrinsic values which we are aiming for. I can understand why it may be more important for a poor country to focus on creating jobs for people than it is for them to protect the environment. However I believe that it is always a dangerous thing to separate the means from the goals, lest we loose touch of the bigger picture.
After all, which of these lists better represent the current values of the “Developed” world?