In-House Counsel

Chimpanzees smarter than undergraduates and college professors?

As part of our policy work, I regularly share with governments statistics, studies and other research that help to bring across the need to effect change in a country. Quite accidentally, I recently came across these two video clips featuring presentations by Dr Hans Rosling that blew my mind away about how such data can be presented. In the video, Dr Rosling compared and contrasted national statistics of different countries in a graphical and animated way which I thought brought across his points very well and was most effective in busting some of the commonly held myths about developing countries.

Clip 1
Clip 2

Particularly relevant to our work is the last set of statistics that he showed on Internet penetration in Clip 1 (about 18 minutes into the 20-min clip). His graph showed a correlation between Internet penetration and GDP, and the steady growth of Internet penetration trending towards the flattening of differences between the developed and developing countries. He presented it quite briefly, but you get the idea of how this can be used to draw other conclusions from data presented this way.

Why do I raise this?

Full post as published by Cisco High Tech Policy Blog on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).