I have a new idol. When I discovered this web site, thanks to the referral in the “Getting and Cleaning Data” MOOC on Coursera, little did I know about the gapminder.org web site, about Professor Hans Rosling from Sweden and his work as a Statistician and Global Health expert. But what really is gapminder.org? In their own words their mission is:
“Fighting devastating ignorance with fact-based worldviews everyone can understand”
They do their job pretty well, by creating amazing animated visualizations and providing both the data and the tools for everybody to reproduce them. Their history begins in 2005, when the Gapminder Foundation was founded in Stockholm by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling.
The initial activity was to develop the Trendalyzer software, which unveils the beauty of statistical time series by converting numbers into animated and interactive graphics. The current version of Trendalyzer is available since March 2006 as Gapminder World, a web-service displaying time series of development statistics for all countries. A downloadable offline version also exists.
The gapminder web site is filled with videos and data and it is an invaluable reference for any teacher who wants to give to their students a prejudice-free, fact-based vision of the planed where we live. I suggest to go on the website and see for yourself, and try the animations. Here below you will find just two screen-shots from one of the most famous examples you can get from the site.
