My Political Philosophy professor spent our 80 minute class today telling us stories about her time in the Philippines and playing with Gapminder. It’s yet another technology which makes data visualization fun. Unlike ManyEyes, it does not let me upload my own data sets. What it does do is give me access to between decades and centuries of demographic data (data for population size starts in the 1500s; for kilometers of paved roads in the 1990s).
Here is a great TEDTalk using the software:
She was making the point that we couldn’t design an ideal world without an empirical understanding of our world. Below is my favorite graph of the presentation above (from 7:30):
Inspirational Quote:
“The copper bosses killed you, Joe,
They shot you, Joe,” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man,”
–Joe Hill
