3:48PM
Gapminder
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 3:48PM I first saw the Gapminder tools Sunday night and emailed the usual suspects from around this weblog. A lot of you must read the same sources I do, because Tom got a couple of emails the next day asking if he had seen them yet.
I should have known Bradd Hayes would have already seen them. After all, he is Senior Director of Communications and Research at Enterra, the Editor of Steve DeAngelis' Enterprise Resilence Weblog, and long-time collaborator with Tom. In fact, he said:
1. He'd seen it several years ago.Gapminder is a 'non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development'. And despite how it rings for us, the name has no official connection to Tom's work:
2. He's prepared slides for Tom using that data base, and
3. He notes it in a draft of the Development-in-a-Box white paper.
Gapminder work are due to a feeling of filling a gap. There has been a market failure in distributing global data. A lot of people are interested in the data, but do not get access to it (if they manage to access the data, they need to be advanced skilled statisticans to analyse it). Gapminder want´s to make the data more accessible and easier to use for instant analysis. We belive decision makers, politicans as well as education about society at almost all levels lack adequate tools. We want to develop these tools.
If you have an application or a particular chart that references Tom's work, please leave a comment here or email me.
Reader Comments (3)
The google tool is a neat toy. One thing I found interesting is that after taking the following steps,
1) Organize the chart by map
2) Colorize the circles by income
3) Click play
One Click version
I noticed that most circles got larger, and a few new circles appear while others disappear. One thing that doesnt change is the color of any of the cirles. Now there were a lot on there, so I may have missed one, but I do not think so. Does this mean that no nation has improved its financial status? I maybe interpretting the chart incorrectly also. Is the measure used relative, such as percentiles, rather than a fixed per capita GDP?
Damn, that was supposed to link. I need to brush up on my html.
Matt: you opened with a ["] and closed with a ['], but i fixed it. easy mistake to make. thanks for the comment!