Saturday, February 16, 2008

Improvements to the world must be highly contextualized

I saw a wonderful video (TED talks) presented by Dr Hans Rosling. Dr Rosling is well known for his unique approach to data visualization. I highly recommend this video.
While it certainly is educational in its core area of poverty, what was truly inspiring to me was how it made me question my assumptions.

At one point in the video Dr Rosling says the challenge he was facing with his students was not "ignorance" but rather "prejudice". This truth applies irrespective of what you do in your life.

Watch this video, it is worth your time :-)

4 comments:

aswin said...

Fascinating stuff. Thanks .

Do the variation within the countries itself really mean that only smaller local govts can truly address/understand the various issues ? Well , the variation was in the economic scale and not geographical, so I guess it still should be national govts ....

The presentation itself was amazing , but thought it was too fast for the implications to truly sink in.

amusingt said...

I love the moving statistical data! This does "pop!" I want to buy it. I could make my graphs that I use in the classroom much more exciting with this.

amar rama said...

You and me both :-)
Google purchased his company but the product was available for download for a while. Maybe it is still available.

amusingt said...

I doubt the Google monopoly has allowed its release, but in due time. Dang! I missed the boat on that one.