Chart of the Week-Mind the Gap!

Hans Rosling is a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He creates animated charts in an attempt to counter myths about the "developing world." Very basic shapes and colors make the patterns clear. Here is an example of his work, a chart showing child mortality vs. income for the countries of the world. The dots are sized by population and colored by region. Note the compass rose too.


However it gets more interesting to see these charts in action as they appear in his gapminder web site - the name inspired by London's Underground. While the chart above shows much of Asia and Africa lagging behind, the animations show the "developing world" catching up and improving at a quicker rate than much of the West did. Here is are some frames of a 200 year time sequence showing life expectancy vs. income. Click the frames to get the web page. You can also choose countries to highlight and hover over a point to get the country name.









If you have time and a decent internet connection, watch this video. He is entertaining and it may change the way you look at the world.

MOTW #46

This map was done as part of a study of food choices around University City High School in Philadelphia. The map lets you choose categories of food and recreational opportunities in an attempt to advocate for better opportunities to make healthy choices in an inner city neighborhood.

MOTW #1

Map of the Week #1

Program Note: Map of the week has been an e-mail list since some time in 2005. This was probably not the first one but it is the first map after I decided to keep track of them.
Note 2: Most of these first 50 or so maps did not have comments and some of them are unattributed. I will try to give credit where due fr these. Hopefully nobody gets bent out of shape about that.

This is a map of Avian Flu courtesy of the UN World Food Program.