Hans Rosling, the Gapminder Foundation, and the Trendalyzer Tool

Hans Rosling (see the Wikipedia article) is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. He co-founded the Gapminder Foundation (2005), which developed the Trendalyzer software that converts international statistics into moving, interactive and enjoyable graphics. The aim is to promote a fact-based world view through increased use and understanding of freely accessible public statistics. In March 2007, Google acquired the Trendalyzer software with the intention to scale it up and make it freely available for public statistics.

For an example application of Trendalyzer, see tools.google.com/gapminder/, which animates a graph of countries on an income per capita vs. life expectancy plot for the period from c. 1975 to 2004.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualizes human development. It collaborates with universities, UN organizations, public agencies, and non-governmental organizations. Gapminder Foundation enhances software developed earlier by the non-profit company Gapminder Ltd. Funding has been and is mainly by grants from Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) for the Trendalyzer project. Gapminder benefits from free and creative inputs from pilot-testers and other end-users in many institutions and organizations.

Presentations by Rosling at TED¹

• Hans Rosling’s talk at the 2006 TED Conference, “Debunking Third-World Myths with the Best Stats You've Ever Seen.” Rosling emphasizes the need for software to display and to search world development data, which is generally available (or should be available) in the form of “publicly funded data”—economic, health, and social data from such organizations as the UN, government agencies, and NGOs. He maintains that properly presented data is convincing but not generally accessible in a way that manifests trends and correlations. This illustrates Gapminder software used to produce 2D plots of development data that evolve over time.
• Hans Rosling’s talk at the 2007 TED Conference, “The seemingly impossible is possible.” Besides the animated 2D plots, this shows panoramas, arranged from low-income families to high-income families, illustrating economic conditions.

¹ TED (Technology Entertainment Design—see the Wikipedia article), founded in 1984, is an annual conference held in Monterey, CA and, recently, semi-annually in other cities around the world. TED describes itself as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value". Its lectures cover a broad set of topics including science, arts, politics, global issues, architecture, music and more. The speakers are from a wide variety of communities and disciplines.