07 November 2007

Beauty in Statistics?

"Nocturne, of Chopin, so beautiful music. But few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to listen to the music to understand how beautiful it is.

"But often that's how we present statistics; we just show the notes we don't play the music."

Hans Roslings - OECD World Forum - Istanbul 2007


To see how this guy has worked to unveil the beauty of statistics watch these two videos from the TED conferences (he's plays with UN statistical data like a little boy who composes a drawing by telling himself the story as he draws each bit.):

2006
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92


2007
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140


His discussion of the components of ending world poverty and prioritizing them as both goals and means is very interesting! (near the end of second video)

The great visualization tools that he uses in these videos is available on-line to play with. There are also a great suite of presentations, too.

http://gapminder.org/

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