Week 8 - Comically-oversised pointers.

Hans Rosling had an absurdly large pointer. He had to lay that sucker down across three chairs.

"Don't panic, it looks nasty..."

If I had been in one of the front rows of that presentation, I may have deserved a crack upside the head with Hans's five-foot pointer for getting bleary-eyed when he unleashed those first "nasty" looking graphs. I bet it was warm in that room. Those seats looked pretty comfortable. Even if infant mortality statistics were, like, as good as it got for me, I could still see having a hard time staying attentive while trying to interpret all of that data. My man Hans, though, he gets it. Make those same, boring graphs move around, and it's pretty much like watching a movie. Seriously. People friggen loved it. The bright colors didn't hurt, either. There must be something about witnessing data unfold that makes it more compelling than showing up once the party's over. Like, seeing exactly how the Swedish infant mortality rate fluctuated and ultimately fell--literally seeing it rise and fall--was much more satisfying than seeing that same data as a lifeless statistic. Kind of like how watching a sports game is more satisfying than just reading what the score was.

Hans summed things up at the end of his presentation and hit on like several different levels by saying "we need to have a modern concept that fits with the (modern) data." The most practical application of his modern concept are his moving bubbles. Infant mortality is certainly not a new phenomenon. Kids have been dying for as long as they've been being born! With a topic as seemingly old and rigid as that though, Rosling took the opportunity to conceptualize these long-running statistics in a modern way. "Averages are not a fair representation." That's right, Hans, because they're fricken boring. Give modern statistic viewers what they want and expand those averages in real time and narrate the whole thing like it's the Kentucky Derby. THAT will get people gassed about child mortality.

Just a cursory glance at some statistics can lead to generalizations that wouldn't necessarily occur if you were to expand the same data. I realize that a statistic is just that because it is a concise means of representing a large amount of data, but Hans showed that stats can sometimes misrepresent the data they were interpreting in the first place. When, for example, you lump sub-Saharan Africa into one category and measure it's decline in infant mortality, the resultant statistic is far less compelling than if you were to look at each sub-Saharan nation, individually. The bubbles showed three very different trajectories for the Congo, Kenya and Ghana. To combine the three nations statistics and derive an average is to deny credit where credit is due. Stats can be spun. Especially when they exists as static numbers.

The end result here is that I care way more about infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa than I did 20 minutes ago, and all it took for me were some colorful, moving graphs. Here is a very real example of how effective presentation methods can be used to convey a message that needs to be heard. Seriously, in less time than it takes to watch a TV show, Hans sufficiently informed me about this planet-sized problem.

Lisa, you're great, but I bet Hans would be a bitchin teacher.