Watch 200 Years of Global Growth In 4 Minutes 270
kkleiner writes "A professor of international health in Sweden, Hans Rosling has a long history of exploring the facts and figures that surround our changing world. In the a segment of the BBC series, Rosling gives one of his most famous lectures with a new twist. Using 120,000+ bits of data and augmented reality, the exuberant professor takes us through the last 200 years of global history and its uneven growth of wealth and health." This is really worth watching. Seriously.
Re:I saw a more indepth version of this some time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The lone red dot remaining in the Sick & Po (Score:4, Informative)
Is the lone red dot remaining in the Sick & Poor quadrant North Korea by chance?
Nope, it's Afghanistan. (I know because I replicated this graph using their website gapminder.org)... Just so you know, GapMinder World will color Afghanistan turquoise, not red.
Re:The lone red dot remaining in the Sick & Po (Score:4, Informative)
It's pretty clear the lowest life expectancy in Asia is Afghanistan.
Re:What horrible graphics (Score:3, Informative)
1) This is a show. Watch the ted talk if you want proper backgrounds and so on. Television needs to be entertaining if you want people to listen to you until the end.
But I fail to see that accurate data presentation is in conflict with entertainment.
2) His Y-axis is not distorting the truth one bit. With zero health-care, people tend to live into their late teens. That's your comparison point. Low and behold, the bottom of the graph corresponds to.... late teens! It's debatable whether there's an upper limit or not.
Did you read the link on lie factors?
You need to think.
Although you may disagree with me, please be polite about it. (Insert tongue-in-cheek pejorative here)
Re:Family size (Score:4, Informative)
More than just infant mortality (Score:5, Informative)
That's not entirely true. While the increase in average life span is not as dramatic if you remove the effect of infant mortality, there is still a huge increase in the last 150 years. For example, if you look at the life expectancy for a 10-year-old white male [infoplease.com], in 1850 it was 58 years, in 1900 it was 60.59 years, in 1950 it was 68.98 years and in 2004 it was 76.3 years. There are lots of factors other than infant mortality that have improved over that time: safer working conditions, access to health care, even refrigeration (an astonishing number of people died of food poisoning in the "the good old days" speaking of "crap we try to kill ourselves with").
And guess what? (Score:4, Informative)
All that data is available. Turns out he's not some asshole saying "Trust me on this, you don't need to see anything." He's got a site where you can play with his data in his amazing graphing software, http://www.gapminder.org/ [gapminder.org]. You can toy with the graph and run it backwards and forwards, and break out the information, you can download the raw data in excel format or view it on the web. All Creative Commons licensed.
It is quite open and available, and not hard to find to anyone willing to do even a cursory amount of research. Just key his name in to Google.
To me it seems like the GP isn't actually interested, just being a pedant whiner. "Oh his methods are flawed and it is too simple!" Of COURSE it is simple, it is a 4 minute spot for the BBC. It is not a dour academic presentation. That doesn't mean there isn't good data behind it, or that it isn't available. If you actually care, well then I'd say you should do research. After all that is what we are talking about. In this case, literally all you'd need to do is key "Hans Rosling" in to Google and the first site is his, with all the data and so on.
To the parent: Good analysis of why the GP is incorrect about his complaints.
To the grand parent: STFU and spend 30 seconds doing some research before being a pedantic whiner. If you care about facts and accuracy the least you could do is get them yourself.
Re:What horrible graphics (Score:4, Informative)
At the same time, this guy needs to read a bit more about data presentation.
Hans Rosling needs to "read a bit more about data presentation"!? Lol ---- that's like looking at some of John Carmack's work and saying "yeah it's OK but this guy, whoever he is, needs to learn a bit more about 3D programming". I'm not sure you realize who you are talking about; Hans Rosling has been one of the 'pioneers' of modern data visualization since probably before you were born. Your post is a classic example of the instinctive need of so many /. posters to try prove how smart they are by being "contrarian" and immediately criticizing something. The graphics isn't even horrible at all, it's pretty damn cool, and everything was very clear to me when I watched it, so perhaps you frankly if you struggled to see it I suggest you see an optometrist.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
That's definitely not true. For the most part, Asian nations forced out European invaders, whereas Africans didn't do as well, and the American Indians completely failed at defending their territory.
China pushed the British and other Europeans back to Hong Kong through sheer numbers as much as anything else. Japan adopted a different strategy, and basically submitted to the trade agreements the western powers wanted in exchange for advisors who gave Japan the technology and skills needed to kick the western powers out. India was in pretty bad shape before Gandhi convinced the Brits to leave using nonviolent resistance. Afghanistan has also resisted repeated invasion militarily, but the constant takeover attempts are a large part of why they're in such bad shape.
Compare that to Africa, where there were definite attempts at resistance (notably the Zulu War), and some limited success (independent Ethiopia lasted until WWI), but in general the African nations had spears and bows against muskets and cannons, and any Civ player can tell you that that isn't a winnable fight.
And of course, compare that to the Americas, where not only were the locals outmatched technologically, but much of the population was wiped out by disease.
Re:shows economics and politics over time (Score:5, Informative)
He slows the presentation to show World War 1 and the Spanish Flu epidemic but he didn't mention the Cultural Revolution in China during the 60's when the large circle representing China takes a HUGE dive.
The Culteral Revolution in China didn't begin until 1966, after China was on it's way back up. It was actually the Great Leap Forward [wikipedia.org] that put many Chinese on the verge of starvation. Then during 1958-1961 several natural disasters occurred which, when combined with the existing problems, resulted in the Great Chinese Famine [wikipedia.org].