Hans Rosling - Gapminder

Hans Rosling was a Swedish medical doctor, statistician, and educator of health care systems along the world. I was about to put IS when I noticed he died a month ago. He was an amazing public speaker and he was deeply concerned with how to pluralize knowledge on demographics to show real problems of the world in a non-dogmatic way. I think he was a believer on the fact that we can search for solutions to our local struggling in other parts of the world and/or other times. After all, there is enough data to examine all of those spatial and time dependencies, i.e, other political systems, cultures, ethnic composition, not only geography by itself, and History. TED has prepared a playlist only with his conferences.

Let it be this a tribute to his teachings.

But, actually, I wanted to show this incredible website envisioned by Rosling, Gapminder. There you can play yourself with demographic variables (e.g., annual income per person vs. life expectancy) having the time-evolution embedded into the same graph. You can divide the data by region, by countries, compare two countries track to our current situation, etc. Have a look yourself, you can directly interact with data and learn from it. Then you can ask questions as, what happen to this or that country in this period, etc. I hope it would come handy.

Comments

RSA Animate - Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us - Daniel Pink

RSA Animate is a collection of 10 min cartoon-like animations on a whiteboard that partners with a synthesis of a conference given by renown academics in RSA Events . This series is put forward by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), who aim at a 21st century enlightenment . I first saw some of the short-film series while being in Cuba. I remember I was astonished by the amount of information they could compress in a 10 min talk. Then, I noticed that there was a great deal of post-processing after the 'natural' 30 min or so talk. Nonetheless, it is still amazing how they can manage to do it so smoothly. The animations deserve special attention. They are not only accompanying the talk but they actually supply complementary information, in terms of irony, cultural references, etc., while marking a step-by-step evolution of the speech in a better way than any slide show could do. Here is an RSA Animate example on "Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us", ...

VSauce - How to count past infinity - Michael Stevens

VSauce is a youtube channel created by Michael Stevens, graduated from psychology and English literature and turned educator and Internet personality. In my opinion, nothing in Stevens's academic career, other than his insatiable curiosity and his tremendous discipline, could have ever been used to forecast the success of his enterprise of weekly scripting, directing and hosting high level youtube videos concerning a variety of topics, ranging from human to exact sciences. The quality of the videos had been increasing since the beginning of VSauce back in 2010, not only in its visual appeal but also in the script, didactics, and the selection of subjects. Now VSauce is as mature as any TV show or documentary. Furthermore, the episodes (videos?) are incredibly profound and often self-contained. Here you have a recent example. It is very accurate in its mathematical definitions and the proofs for each statement, while conveying the message to any sufficiently interested audience i...

Men of Ideas - Noam Chomsky with Bryan Magee (1978)

Men of Ideas (1978) and The Great Philosophers (1987) are two BBC programs put forward and conducted by the philosopher and author, Bryan Magee. Both programs are based on the interview of an intellectual figure addressing a particular issue, either being current works of themselves that have had a great impact in the interviewee's field of competence (Men of Ideas) or History of Philosophy (The Great Philosophers). Needless to say, Bryan Magee within these programs is not just an interviewer, he is often driving the attention to very elusive or darkly explained subjects. Magee partners with the interviewee to engage in very deep philosophical debates while being an accomplice of the audience without any sign of condescendence. I want to share with you a great example of this kind of talks: an interview with Prof. Noam Chomsky on his works that has revolutionized the field of linguistics and that have had a strong impact in psychology. Chomsky is one the fathers of the cognitiv...

PingPong

Search This Blog