Why making statistics free can save lives
In today’s Guardian, in Uncovering global inequalities through innovative statistics, we look at Hans Rosling’s call for governments to stop hiding away their potentially useful data “
Despite the encouragement that the internet provides, and the hunger of the public for better ways to analyse that data, governments are reluctant to open their databases to the world and make them searchable. “People put prices on them and stupid passwords,” says Rosling. “And this won’t work.”
Rosling has a very interesting interactive system at gapminder.org where you can plot all sorts of UN data for various countries against each other – such as carbon dioxide emissions vs gross national income, or child mortality against internet connectivity (is there a link? The data should show it).
There’s also his enormously impressive TED talk – watch this, and then you might start to see the point of free data, if you haven’t already.
(Our thanks to David O’Brien of Glasgow for pointing it out to us.)
Update: you can also see the (rather longer, at an hour) video of a Google campus talk by the Gapminder team on the same subject, which covers the same ground as Rosling at TED but in more depth. (You can also download it for Windows, Macs, video iPods and PSPs if you want some offline viewing.)
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Late, but anyway: New Zealand makes (some) statistics free - but why? (27 July 2007; score: 38.52%)
- Is the new Statistics Board the right model for free data? (18 January 2007; score: 34.06%)
- In The Guardian: a year of Free Our Data campaigning: why is the Office for National Statistics free? (22 March 2007; score: 26.65%)
- Why making satellite navigation data expensive isn't helpful (20 April 2006; score: 24.38%)
- New Zealand makes statistics data free to encourage business - but where's the logic? (15 June 2007; score: 23.66%)
January 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
[...] On of my fave blogs is the Free Our Data: The Blog from the UK Guardian. Imagine educated journalists writing intelligently and critically about access to public data! Compare that to Canada’s journalists who only use the four letter word – data – via the word census! Our Civicaccess.ca group will hopefully change that this year.Today, a fantastic article Why Making Statistics Free Saves Lives features the work of Hans Rosling a professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden demonstrates how public data in the public’s hands can yield much better decisions to improve people’s lives. He developed a series of excellent multimedia visualizations about using statistics to enlighten. Hans also produces content for Gapminder.org a website dedicated to:Making sense of the world and having fun with statistics and isa non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations. Be sure to go and play with the data in their Google Graphs tool! Fun! And for great education viewing watch the 18 min video on Ted blog where Hans demos some of his work. I was also just alerted to a google talk (via Robin). True, the tools are in flash, but alas, until which time the geeks produce some nice and easy to use graphical UI open source and standards tools/widgets/modules to create these kinds of visualization we will have proprietary one off objects! Sooooo…… Comments » [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Thanks for the acknowledgement. I should point out that my colleague, Trudy Anderson, first alerted me to Hans Rosling’s work, and his appeal to free the data held by publicly-funded organisations.
But I couldn’t agree more that gapminder.org is a perfect example of how much more valuable publicly-funded data can be when delivered freely back tp the people who paid for it in the first place. It’s a simple, beautiful and extremely powerful view of how the world has evolved over the last couple of decades.
January 11th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
David (and Trudy) – thanks again. You were credited in the printed story but because of the tyranny of making things fit, your name was omitted. I hope this will suffice in the meantime.