Gapminder

A independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations that fights devastating misconceptions and promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.

The first time I was introduced to Gapminder was in 2006 when Hans Rosling who, alongside Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded the Gapminder in 2005, presented the project at TED. Since then his talk has become one of the most viewed and is not hard to understand why.

GamMiner is a non-profit venture focused on delivering statistical data in visual form so anyone can understand it.

Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Gapminder fights devastating misconceptions and promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.

In 2007, their bubble chart software, Trendalyzer, was acquired by Google, prompting the Gapminder team to relocate to Google's headquarters in California. During their time at Google, they integrated Trendalyzer into Google's infrastructure and enhanced the search engine's capability to display improved results for global statistics from large data providers.

In Gapminder there are 3 data axis. The standard X, Y and the third axis is the size of the bubble. You can change what each axis will represent; will it be life expectancy in correlation with income or with urban population? There are around 400 indicators on global development that you can combine as you wish. Note that not all indicators have 100+ years’ worth of data. But more about that later.

One feature I would have added is an interface with Google Trends that would automatically input news so correlating world events with data would be integrated and maybe make more sense of what we see. Like the example of Rwanda.

While playing with Gapminder I found an interesting thing that in Rwanda, if looking at life expectancy you can see a sharp decrease in around 1993/4 when life expectancy was ONLY 9.5 years. If we dig deeper we find why. It’s when the Rwandan genocide happened. Within 100 days around 662,000 people were killed.

The scale and brutality of the genocide caused shock worldwide, but no country intervened to forcefully stop the killings. Most of the victims were killed in their own villages or towns, many by their neighbors and fellow villagers. Hutu gangs searched out victims hiding in churches and school buildings. The militia murdered victims with machetes and rifles. Sexual violence was rife, with an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women raped during the genocide.

Now, where does all this data come from? There is no definite answer except that they “combine data from multiple sources into unique coherent time-series that can’t be found elsewhere”. They go on to say that “Most of our data are not good enough for detailed numeric analysis”. But it’s safe to say that most data is genuine UNICEF, WHO, UN Population Division, World Bank, and other data sources. Where there are gaps in data they fill in the void with extrapolation making it unsuitable for any professional research but if we take into consideration that their goal is to “revolutionize people’s worldview” it is more than good enough.

If we take a look at the Public Data section of Google Dataset we can see that a lot of datasets from which Gapminder draws its data but, as I understand it, in their unedited form. There, the Gapminder's older brother, the Trendalyzer, found its home.

As you would expect the foundation has a large focus on teachers and provides a large set of materials for them to use in classrooms free of any charge.

With a prominent position on their website, Worldview Upgrader is their focus now. It’s a quiz about the world through the lens of statistics and I’m amazed and shocked about how many “facts” I thought were correct turned out not to be.

So if you want a reality check from a nonpartisan, independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious, or economic affiliations take a test and upgrade your worldview.

ps> It physically hurt how wrong I was on some things. But that’s life, live and learn.