Contemporary Management 325 - Dr. Rosling

Dr. Rosling was a statistician who came into popularity since 2006 for his unique way of illustrating data through animated data visualizations. He was a professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Apart from his academic profession, he was involved in many humanitarian efforts, one of which was his involvement during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia where he assisted the government to track cases and pinpoint missing data. He was also declared as world’s 100 most influential people in 2012. Latter in his career he was much more involved with his foundation Gapminder. His vision and mission in the world was to make data readily available to everyone and have a fact based worldview. He suffered from pancreatic cancer which took away his life on February 7, 2017 surrounded by his family in Uppsala, Sweden.

Dr. Rosling was asked to teach global development to his Swedish undergraduate students He wanted to know what his students knew about global health, so he created a list of countries and asked them which country had the highest child mortality. To his surprise, most of the students chose countries that were considered third world or underdeveloped to have highest mortality rate where in fact that was not the case. He said that students had the “we” and “them” biases where they considered we as the more developed first world countries and them as the less developed third world countries. They also assumed that the third world countries had larger family size. He believed that the test result was due to their pre-conceived notation about third world countries and not ignorance.

To have visually appealing and entertaining data, he used a special software that used animation to show various information about his topic which revolved around child mortality in different countries. As assumed by his students, he illustrated countries with large families and mortality rate from data obtained from 1965. As animation started, he was able to showed that as years progressed the family size decreased which corresponded with decreasing child mortality rates. He was able to select which countries he wanted to compare and use animation tools like trail to show the change in graph.

To show the distribution of income in the world, he used an animated logarithmic chart. He put population of countries earning from $1 to $100’s