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Gapminder is a non-profit organization, that makes the world's statistics and data available in an easy to understand way. Living  up to its name, Gapminder seeks to bridge the divide between statistics, and our understanding of them. Gapminder is the brainchild of Hans Rosling, a global health expert, doctor and professor, who spent many years working in rural Africa. He is also the co-founder of Doctors without Borders, Sweden.

Whats so special about how he represents data? Well, its best to see the TED talks, and play the interactive features on the Gapminders website to get the real picture. But simply put, he has developed a software that makes understanding data much more fun, easy and intuitive. The representations are of statistics drawn from United Nations data. Most often, these are long, boring textual sheets, that make reading difficult. It is also hard for users to compare different regions, against different specific parameters. All these things become laborious processes when confronted with the typical statistical sheets. Gapminder however, allows you to see how numbers rise and fall. You can also compare specific regions or countries, or analyze one particular nation's growth. Its easy to  understand the population of different nations, by their various sizes, and you can also track the speed of growth. 

Visit Gapminder World, and hit the play button to see the amazing change in the world since 1800, across different parameters. This is a great way to learn history, and see the economic and social changes through the years. You can also compare countries on a specific topic, such as the USA of 1930 was similar to the South Korea of 2007 when it came to child mortality. 

In the Downloads section, you can get Gapminder Desktop, an application that allows you to browse statistics without the Internet. There are also pdfs and presentations, if you need to show it to a class. There is Gapminder for teachers, with a whole lot of interesting stuff there, and Gapminder labs, where there are more informative comparisons. Make sure that while browsing Gapminder World, you click the 'How to use' button, as the 2 and a half minute video shows the amazing extent to which you can use the application, and learn a lot about the world's development. Each little bubble is a country, and the size of the bubble shows the population. The bubbles are also colour-coded according to regions. Various buttons allow you toggle between countries, and different parameters. 

As Hans Rosling says, its not lack of data, but misconceptions among people that was the real problem, and this lead him to develop such an application thats links design to data. Design and animated graphics has helped liberate UN data, to make it much more accessible and understandable to many. Most often data is not accessed due to high prices, passwords, or simply because its boring. In TED talks (4 videos) Hans Rosling also mentions the very significant point that the improvement of the world must be highly contextualised. We cannot do it on regional basis, or by providing generic solutions to vast masses of people. It is also dangerous to use average data as there are huge differences within the same country. 

Gapminder is an amazing tool for anyone. The software actually visualizes the data, making it wonderfully easy to digest. It can give you the broad picture, or it can zoom you into small details about one specific query.   Just with a few minutes browsing you can learn a lot about different countries, and how economic and social growth are closely related. The good news is that on April 20, 2010, the World Bank has revealed that it will offer free access to a huge amount of development statistics. The great news is that Gapminder is going to make all that statistic browsing much more interesting, informative and fun.

By Armeen Kapadia
 


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