brunobergher::blog

The title is a direct quote from the TED page presenting Dr. Hans Rosling presentation back in 2006, as one of the most accurate possible. This may come as old news to some, but my last post on Dr. Jill Taylor’s TED presentation made me realize I should have written something about this at some point in this blog.

So, if you’re not familiar with the fun and outstandingly engaging speaker that is Dr. Rosling—or his work with GapMinder, for that matter—behold one of the best talks you will ever watch:

This is the good stuff. This is as good as data visualization gets. It may lack a bit in the aesthetic sense of it, but doesn’t really make a difference. Because this is dense, useful, mattering information, presented in ways people never even imagined.
I mean, there are a lot of data visualization projects with beautiful results, working with sometimes interesting data, but it dwells frequently in process or tools experimentation. I’m no critic: I’m a huge admirer; hell, I had been actually working on a few experiments of myself. But this is a whole different ball park.

This is the kind of stuff that molds minds, that feeds leaders with the information they need to make good, evidence-based decisions for their people. It’s the kind of tools that promotes the insight that allows populations to demand from their policy makers choices based on the experiences of other countries. That allows people to get their mind around seemingly unsolvable problems and vote and act their way through it.
You add on top of that the passion with which Dr. Rosling’s narrates the development of countries and world events with the excitement of a sportscaster. This involves you with information with enthusiasm in a surprising way.

It doesn’t end there, since in a brief presentation he manages to explain clearly the differences between means and goals, and how we most frequently mix them up, making choices that are not as productive as we think.

That is as good as it gets.

And, as a bonus, Dr. Rosling’s returning talk on TED2007, with some new insights:

Please don’t miss these. You’ll thank me later.

And if you want to check on how GapMinder is doing, check their website.

The good people at TED are nice enough to be already releasing some this year’s presentations, which happened just a couple of weeks ago. One of the few videos they released so far is this perspective-shifting presentation by Dr. Jill Taylor.

She’s a distinguished neural anatomist, which took the unfortunate event of her having a stroke and turned into a life changing experience, of a huge level of unexpected learning, especially for such an accomplished scientist. Direct link.

The ending is what’s core to the presentation, and needless to be commented on, but I must say I found the beginning, with the clear explanations on the differences between each of the brain hemispheres also quite enlightening. Having the notion of what is going on inside, and the fragility of how the brain accomplishes the very sophisticated processes we take for granted every day, well… it makes you think.