Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Stunning Statistics:

Medic, visionary statistician and sword swallower Hans Rosling at TED, debuning the myth of a persistent and inevitable "third world".

Part One:


Part Two:

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is an extremely nice display but you might notice his scale is not consistent - so I think better not to draw too much for his analysis. It is mostly a catchy topic to market his animation tool

Auntie Em said...

I'm not sure what you mean by his scale not being consistent. He demonstrates various types of data on various axes, but I didn't notice an inconsistency. Can you tell me where it is in the talk, or give some more details?

Anonymous said...

I saw him talk at the RSS Conference. and remember noticing in the graph where the blobs explode that the y axis is not consistently spaced. This means that when the circle explodes the new blobs travel further making the animation more effective. However, the other point is that like a map one can tailor a graph to show anything you like. Without seeing the statistics we can only see the message he has decided to display, not make our own conclusions

Auntie Em said...

But it is the same axis for the blobs throughout the time series no? No more misleading than using a log scale surely?

The raw data is now freely and publicly available via the UN (the site details are given in his second talk).

Anonymous said...

Well I don't think it is a log scale, and the intervals should remain consistent on the y axis. He goes from something like 90, 95 ....100.1, 100.4 If the data has been transformed okay but it is not clear what that is here.

Auntie Em said...

I've watched them both again and the charts are all shown with Log/Log scales. Probably because of the exponential relationship between the factors shown. The labels chosen for the child mortality one might look unusual (99.7, 99.5, 99,..., 50) but the axis is log_2.

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