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...ell-travelled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling.
A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.
What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture usually hazy at best snaps into sharp focus.
Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful.
During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair. Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software which can be loaded with any data was purchased by Google in March 2007.
Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He’s also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro. As if all this weren’t enough, the irrepressible Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower a skill he demonstrated at TED2007.
Gapminder, the company he founded, is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.
He has been adviser to WHO and UNICEF, and he co-founded Médecines sans Frontiers in Sweden. He started courses and published a textbook on Global Health.
Rosling has given speeches at OECD World Forum - Istanbul 2007, TED 2007, Innotown 2008 to mention just a few.
The Foreign Magazine named him one of the "100 Top Global Thinkers of 2009".
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- Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics
- Debunking myth about the "Third World"
- The seemingly impossible is possible
- Social & Economic Development
- Future Trends - Looking at the Big Picture
- Global Health
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