Absurdity, Allegory and China

Do yourself a favor and go have a look at Hans Rosling’s latest TED talk given in June 2009 at the US State Department. (I have linked to Professor Rosling’s site rather than TED, since you ought to have a look at some of the things he and others are doing there.)  This man has so much on his mind that I have no idea how he gets to sleep at night. In this 20-minute look at stats, history and how things look when the numbers are freely obtainable and collated, Rosling does what he always does: challenges the traditional mindset with the graphic display of his dataset so that anyone who cares to look can easily see that there is, oftentimes, a great gap between what we think is happening and what is actually happening in the world. He is very complimentary of the State Department for not only their data gathering, but also their development efforts over the last half-century. Good stuff here. And a visit to his site, Gapminder, is always an educational trip as he makes us laugh while demanding that we think, which is the hallmark of a great educator.

So the problem that I had was that the world view my students have corresponds to reality in the world to the year that their teachers were born.

That’s Hans Rosling and why we should be paying attention to him.