You Can See in Numbers

‘We are extremely sad to announce that Professor Hans Rosling died this morning. Hans suffered from a pancreatic cancer which was diagnosed one year ago. He passed away early Tuesday morning, February 7, 2017, surrounded by his family in Uppsala, Sweden.’ Anna R. Rönnlund & Ola Rosling, Co-founders of Gapminder. He died aged 68.

Hans Rosling, preparing his presentation in Geneva, 2009-10-30              Photo: A. Grossenbacher

In 2009, the Swiss Statistics’ Meeting took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Hans Rosling was there and his talk’s topic: ‘Unveiling the beauty of statistics’. He wanted data to be free, free from legal and technical barriers. His ambition – and his success – was to disseminate these data beautifully … in order to change the world.

A difficult task. In an interview in the Guardian, in 2013: “It’s that I became so famous with so little impact on knowledge,” he says, when asked what’s surprised him most about the reaction he’s received. “Fame is easy to acquire, impact is much more difficult. …. He’s similarly nonplussed about being a data guru. “I don’t like it. My interest is not data, it’s the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers.”  (Taken from the Guardian interview 2013).

And that’s why statistics and the world need more people like Hans Rosling – more than ever!

IMAODBC 2010: And the winner is . . .

The Bo Sundgren Award of the International Marketing and Output Database Conference IMAODBC 2010 in Vilnius goes to Vincenzo Patruno from Statistics Italy ISTAT. In his presentation about Data Sharing Vincenzo Patruno demonstrates the use of widgets for the dissemination of statistical informations. Widgets are small pieces of code which can be embedded in a website and interact with an application, i.e. a database. Once embedded the information they provide is always updated automatically whenever the application itself is updated.
See some examples on Vincenzos Blogespecially the post How to Share a whole application on the Web. The small table with figures for Rome on the right hand-column of his blog is such a widget.