Hans Rosling | mathoda.com

"5 of 5 stars to Game Change by John Heilemann http://bit.ly/aSFPHd" — mathoda

When will blogs start presenting data using interactive visuals alongside their stories?

06.01.08 | tech | Share | Share

The New York Times does a great job presenting interactive visual displays of data alongside the newspaper’s stories. For a story profiling Tiger Wood’s golf game, here’s the interactive display of how Tiger Woods wins majors. For a story on inflation here’s the interactive display showing how Americans spend their money and how that’s effected by inflation.

As Hans Rosling has shown, the proper visual presentation of facts can be illuminating, reforming opinions in a way that pure text often can’t do.

When will websites beyond the NY Times obtain and start to use such capabilities? It may be that displays like this only make sense when the effort put into making the data presentable is sure to reach a very broad audience, but some blogs are already reaching very large audiences. Here’s hoping more websites develop such capabilities.

An excellent graph is worth a million words

01.30.07 | issues, tech | Share | Share

You may remember my praise for the speech by Hans Rosling in which he talks about the state of the world and how it’s changed over the last few decades (see my earlier post: http://www.mathoda.com/archives/54).

Professor Rosling used some incredible dynamic graphing software, created specifically to fit his needs, that allowed him to show a tremendous amount of data at the same time, and then show how it changed through time.

That software, called Gapminder, and the data Professor Rosling used is now easily accessible here, for anyone to play with. Definitely worth checking out: http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

Tagged with: data • hans rosling • issues • quantitative • science • tech • visual data • visualizing data

Amazing presentations you must witness.

07.07.06 | business, issues, personal | Share | Share

I have seen some amazing presentations and heard some great conversations by scientists and inventors and entrepreneurs lately. I highly recommend taking a look at:

Hans Rosling’s presentation on how the world is changing. If there is simply one thing you must see, that will give you hope for humanity and a greater understanding of the world, it is Hans Rosling’s talk. It’s about how the countries of the world have changed over the last 40 years,and it’s super rich data presented in an amazing visual style: (http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html)

James Dyson’s presentation on his personal history of invention. (http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/362/)

Tina Seelig’s presentation “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20″. (click on Seelig’s video at http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/seelig060412.mp3)

Fabrice Grinda’s discussion of his entrepreneurial career. (http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/12/vv_show_21_fabrice_grinda_of_z.html)

Also, be sure to check out other presentations from the organizations that put up such interesting speeches:

TED (http://www.ted.com/)

MIT World (http://mitworld.mit.edu/)

Stanford’s ETL program (http://etl.stanford.edu/archive/)

Venture Voice (http://www.venturevoice.com/)

Truly inspiring stuff!