Snazzy Data

I’ve seen more interesting presentations than this one by Swedish physician and researcher Hans Rosling–I think–but not many. He animates world-wide data to show trends over the last 40 or 50 years, thereby upending conventional wisdom at a number of points, and demonstrating that Swedish students are more likely to be misinformed than chimpanzees. It’s a fun 20 minutes:

The quality of data is critical, of course, and often unknown. One of Rosling’s themes is that we have very good data on the issues he is discussing, and need to make it more accessible to researchers and the public. In many instances, however–“global warming” is a prominent example–the quality of the data is lousy, so the more attention-grabbing the presentation, the worse.
Via InstaPundit.