Thursday, May 11, 2006

Google Gapminder Beta 2

Google have a beta visualization tool for the Gapminder data. See Google Gapminder.

It is interesting to watch the animations for things such as phone use over the last 20 years.

A more shocking result is seen by plotting life expectancy. Notice how this generally increases but moves backwards for the sub-saharan countries of Africa.

1 comment:

Craig Taverner said...

Very cool. Interesting to see internet use race to catch up and mostly match phone use over the last 15 years. Each country also seemed to go through a number of clear growth spurts.

The African life expectancy was mosrt revealing, with Africa consistently out of sync with the rest of the world, and suddenly taking a massive drop over the last 15 years as AIDS steps in. Consider Botswana, the highest income of contental Africa, sitting with most of the better-off third world in the middle of the graph for both income and life expectancy in 1990 (which correlated globally until AIDS came along). Then after 1990, the Botswanan life expectancy dropped from 64 to 35 over 14 years! At the same time as income generally increased. AIDS moved most of the African continent off the correlation line! We don't feel it here in Europe, but both my brothers are doctors in South Africa, and they certainly feel it there.