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.

Today's Weather Forecast-Sunny in the Deserts, Rainy in the Rainforests

I was looking something up on CNN when I came across these weather maps. What's remarkable (or not) is how well they seem to conform to the climate zone patterns of the world. I poorly stitched together the southern hemisphere continents minus Australia (too hard to deal with the scale difference there). I had to rotate Asia for projection issues. Anyway here's a comparison.


CNN's weather forecast for the southern hemisphere.

World Precipitation from Encarta.