This blogg will be used to comment on how world development is presented in relation to the best available "facts", as well as to the uncertainty of these "facts".
In the sidebar, Professor Rosling relates some of his accomplishments and associations, among them:
Co-founder of Gapminder, a non-profit ICT-venture for increased use and understanding of UN statistics. Lecture on Global Change using animations from www.gapminder.org
At Gapminder it says:
OUR VISION:Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics!
Download and distribute free software for a world in motion.
At a wild guess, the Professor and I will probably have our differences of opinion, but anybody who launches his blog (after a brief intro), by politely requesting that UNICEF update its portrayals of Bangladesh, and then points out what a more accurate portrayal would be, well...
Rosling clearly has more respect for the UN than I do - and recommends contributing to UNICEF, which I used to do but have long since stopped doing. But, hey - if he can encourage the UN to hold itself to a higher standard, all the more power to him. Somebody needs to do it. And it looks like he's not going to be shy about pointing out when things aren't as bad as they used to be. (Yay! I am soooo tired of academics who insist upon painting the worst possible picture they can cobble together, based on "facts" they cherry-pick, twist or edit to suit their purposes, or conjure out of thin air.)
I should probably warn you that Gapminder, at present anyway, comes with pop-up ads that get past my pop-up screening devices. One of the ads was impossible to close out - at least I never figured it out - and I had to exit the website and try again. (Grrrr.) But if you can outmaneuver the ads, the animated charts I've looked at so far are an interesting - and easily readable - way to see how the UN looks at the world.
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