TED Talk: Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling challenges common perceptions we have about the developing world by presenting data in new ways.

He transforms boring statistics into a dynamic race - showing how different countries, represented as bubbles on a chart, dance around each other to the top.

Gapminder.org shows how it's done, and allows users to interact with the data and even upload their own.

Rosling focuses on the state of the world since the 1960s, when international organizations started keeping good records of various statistics in countries all over the world. He shows how despite the devastations of the war, Vietnam worked it's way to having the same life expectancy and family size as the U.S. by 2003.

We tend to underestimate the tremendous changes happening in the developing world. The gap between rich and poor is not widening, but shrinking, he claims - and he shows this graphically.

Sure, the richest 20% of the population produce 74% of the world's income. Most people are in the middle, and this middle class generates 24% of the world economy. I believe this statistic is influencing a new model of how to help developing countries - not by simply just giving them aid but by harnessing their spending power.

Rosling is not just trying to put a positive spin on world progress, but hopes that his tools can help people make better decisions about how to help countries in need. People talk about "solutions in Africa," but he uses his graphics to show how Africans are all over the spectrum in terms of income and life expectancy. You have to break the data down to tailor the solutions to the specific needs of a country or even community.

"Improvement of the world must be highly contextualized," he says.

We have the data - we're just not using it. The reason? It's hiding down in the databases. It's difficult to access, and people think it's boring.

We need design tools to get people interacting with it.

"What we really need is a search function, to copy data, search it, and to get it out into the world."

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has a solution for Rosling in his own TED talk - the next version of the web, called the Semantic Web.