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Marley Felder

Mr. Spiller

Stats Advanced

22 August 2017

TED Talk: The Best Stats Youve Ever Seen

After watching Hans Roslings TED talk about the developing world, I have learned of

the common misconceptions and the ways to best represent them. Through Gapminder, Rosling

portrayed data in an understandable and interesting way to allow his audience to follow his claim

that the developing world has transformed over time and is no longer how we perceived it.

With graphical information on countries around the world, Rosling was able to refute

claims of developing and third world countries having larger families and shorter life

expectancies. If questioned, many students would believe that this is true, but the graphs show

that as time progressed, countries such as Vietnam have shifted to similar positions as developed

countries like the United States. Another example Rosling uses is the distribution of wealth in

society. There is no longer a large gap between the rich and the poor, and different types of

countries overlap economically. The overlap is also evident when Rosling shows the

relationship between child mortality and GDP. In the first graph, you see what is expected: the

poor countries on the lower end of the graph and wealthier countries farther up. When Rosling

gives each country its own graph, it shows that there are several types of people in all countries;

the rich and poor overlap despite typical belief.

To prevent further misconceptions, Rosling and his team developed this software called

Gapminder. This allows data to be shown in its honest. By using real world examples, Rosling
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used graphs and data to show that things are not always what they seem, and perception can be

proved incorrect with statistics.