Statistics, Damn Lies or a Damn Shame?

March 25, 2004 8:41 AM

How Rich am I? Heard a talk today from the founder of Gapminder, a non-profit company that creates Flash and shockwave pieces that are somewhere between information visualization, socially motivated art, and interactive educational pieces. Be sure to check out the Human Development Trends, and the Dollar Street (photos of real homes of real people who live on $1-2 per day, $2-5 per day, to $100 per day). See also: Understanding USA for more nice pictures of statistics.
posted by zpousman (6 comments total)

love the interactive chart that shows how income is increasing. choose china and the usa, move the slider from left to right, and watch the world change...
posted by andrew cooke at 9:11 AM on March 25, 2004

The Gapminder graphs/animations are very interesting, but I ran into browser errors when viewing some of them. Understanding USA has very cool looking graphs, but I really had to squint to read the text.

Other sites that help you compare country stats are NationMaster and IndexMundi.

Check for example this comparison between India and the US.
posted by miguelbar at 9:14 AM on March 25, 2004

This is really, really good. Thanks, zpousman.
posted by Tlogmer at 1:49 PM on March 25, 2004

These are pretty cool.
posted by crazy finger at 6:30 PM on March 25, 2004

miguelbar - thanks for the comparison but i'd say the india vs US one needs to have a normalized scale for both graphs for a more useful comparison (sorry, i hate misleading graphics)
posted by NGnerd at 10:40 PM on March 25, 2004

Plus, the bar charts don't make it real. Looking at people's houses (and bathrooms), what they have on the walls (and what the walls are made of), what their kitchen table looks like -- these are the things that make the statistics real to me. There's lots of data in the world; what we need is information.
posted by zpousman at 6:11 AM on March 26, 2004