Hans-Rosling

The world reached a population of 7 billion people at the end of October 2011. United Nations symbolically chose Danica May Camacho, a girl born in Philippine, to mark this global population milestone. I recently wrote about the world population getting older, about non communicable diseases becoming the most dangerous threat to health ( here too) or about World Population Day(11th of July 2011). We are now 7 billion and new projections tells us we will be 9.3 billion in 2050. When I heard all the news around this, I couldn’t help but think about Hans Rosling’s presentation on population growth at TED Cannes, in 2010. ...

In the previous post, I shared a video of David McCandless giving a talk about information visualisation. One phrase caught my attention and a bit of research lead to a very good discovery. The phrase and context is (emphasis is mine): We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, " Let the dataset change your mindset". And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior. ...