Category Archives: Development

GapMinder: development statistics for normal people

Posted on June 11, 2006 by | 2 Comments

I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte. Most normal people don’t get as excited by data visualisation as much as I do. So what kind of tools can Web2.0 provide to help make some of the more critical data more accessible?

Developed and managed by the Gapminder Foundation in Sweden (and hosted by Google), Gapminder presents a wide range of statistics in support of the Millenium Development Goals. Presenting statistics in an engaging way is difficult at the best of times, but Gapminder does it, with charts and maps. It’s easy to use, less easy to understand, and hard to beat.

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Posted in Databases, Development, Web

William Easterly versus the World (Bank)

Posted on April 6, 2006 by | 3 Comments

This week the Cato Institute (Full disclosure: I don’t share their politics, but draw your own conclusions) is running a series of articles entitled What Can Foreign Aid Do For the World’s Poor? The series is spearheaded by William Easterly, and if you recognise his name, you can probably guess what the Cato Institute thinks about aid. Unfortunately they’ve disabled comments, although the Institute urges readers to “enter into the conversation on their own websites, blogs, and even in good old-fashioned bound publications.” I find this quite comic, since it basically limits the conversation to people who have websites, blogs and (?) publications – if you had a conversation like that in the real world, there’d be a very limited number of participants. Luckily I have all three.

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Posted in Development