Ghiasi.org

The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized.

-Hans Rosling

This is one of the gems that I’ve stumbled upon in recent memory, thanks to /.. Recently it was reported that Google has snaped up Karolinska stats tool for an ‘undisclosed sum’ ;). This tool was developed by the Hans Rosling (a professor of international health at Swedens’ Karolinska institute) and his son under the wing of Gapminder. The objective of the tool, called the Trendalyzer software, is to gather and present a variety of data from public data-bases that are normally inaccessible to the public in the same place in a comprehensive yet elegant manner.

So what? Companies spend millions of dollars a year attempting to improve their statistical analysis tools to compete in the market– after all, you don’t want to sell to the individual, the individual varies too much, you want to sell to the masses, and to do that you must understand the mind of the population. Good statistical analysis tools are even more important in the public arena where the report quotes Rosling stating that “public organizations around the world invest 20 billion dollars a year producing different kinds of statistics.”

What is apparently fantastic about the Trendalyzer is its ability to present a multitude of data in a way that is simple and visually attractive, and really expresses the association between different parameters. You can view a sample “graph” at Google:

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

The video below, however, really shows Rosling’s tool in action. Watch Rosling (and his dynamic personality) in a few slides essentially dispel the notion of a divided world and show the diversity that is present in regions that are often ‘lumped’ together… to those of us who would rather die than attempt to understand statistics. It’s fascinating!!

http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling

I thought maybe they know everything I am going to teach them about. So I did a pretest, when they came. And one of the questions from which I learnt a lot was this one: Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs. And I put them together so that one in each country has twice the rate of mortality as the other… so I got a confidence interval which was pretty narrow. And I got happy of course. At 1.8 out of 5 answers possible, that means that there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. But one late night, when I was compiling my reprot I really realized my discovery. I have shown the Swedish top students know, statistically less significant about the world than the chimpanzees. Because the chimpanzees would score half right. If I gave them two bananas, with Sri Lanka and Turkey, they would be right half of the cases. But the students are not that. The problem for me was not ignorance, it was pre-conceived ideas. I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute that have some of the noble prizes in medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzees there. So this where I realized that there was a need to communicate…

-Hans Rosling

So much potential! First, I am very excited to see how Google will expand this project (I still can’t get over the awesomeness that is Google Earth :heart:) and second, man, someone please give me a ticket to Sweden! I am very impressed with their international health program… and I need to take this professor’s lectures.