In some ways, at least. Our old friend Hans Rosling (previous Contrarian appearances here, here, here, and here) brings us up to date, and highlights the amazing recent prograss in (parts of) Ethiopia: Rosling's Gapminder data visualization software now has some tools you can download to your own computer....

12 June, 2013

Our old friend Hans Rosling, the Swedish public health statistician whose Gapminder software brings demographic trends vividly to life (previous menions here and here), is back with a new BBC video tracking the health and wealth of nations over two centuries: If you'd like to drill down into the data and watch a particular country's progress or compare two or three countries, the Gapminder file on which this video is based will let you do that. You can also download the software to your own desktop. Amazing stuff, and should give pause to those who are certain the world is going to...

19 December, 2010

In his latest Ted talk, population guru Hans Rosling says improving child survival rates is the counterintuitive path to population control: Previous Rosling post here. View more of Rosling's Gapminder graphs here (click on "browse example graphs," at lower left)....

19 July, 2010
Contrarian's submission to the National Consultation on Copyright focuses on an issue that has received little attention in the consultation, an area in which current Canadian law provides a striking lack of balance, an issue in which Canadian law is not decades but centuries out of date: the issue of Crown Copyright. To view the submission, please click the "read more" button.
13 September, 2009

One of the great things about running a blog is that when you write about something interesting that you know little about, readers rush in with a wealth of further information. Contrarian friend Andrew Weissman directed us to an extraordinary TED talk by Hans Rosling illustrating the phenomenal potential of the digital graphs we touched on this morning. Rosling is a professor of international medicine at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet (the organization that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine). He discovered Konzo, a previously unknown paralytic disease associated with hunger in Africa. He also co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the...

05 August, 2009