The Importance of Quantitative Information in Understanding Long-Term Trends

We have economist Max Roser from University of Oxford to talk about his Our World in Data project where he visualizes the social, economic, and environmental history of humanity up to the present day.

Our World in Data is a remarkable project that Max started on his own and worked on little by little in his spare time until it evolved into a full website with plenty of interesting data, presentations, and visualizations to to better understand humanity.

The nicest thing is that it provides a quite positive picture of the world and about the many ways that we are improving our conditions. Go to the website (http://ourworldindata.org/) and take a look at War and Violence, Poverty, Global Heath, Etc.

On the show we talk about how Max started his work; the process behind finding a topic, collecting, and curating the data; and producing these nice visuals that people can easily understand. We also talk about human biases, persuasion, and how Max learned to build web sites and visualizations.

Enjoy the show!

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This episode is sponsored by Visualizing Well-Being, the Wikiprogress Data Visualization Contest 2015. Enter the contest to win a trip to Mexico! To find out more, visit the Wikiprogress website (www.wikiprogress.org) or the facebook page or follow @wikiprogress on twitter.
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LINKS

• Our World in Data – http://ourworldindata.org
• Some of the projects:
  • War and Peace – http://ourworldindata.org/data/war-peace/war-and-peace-before-1945/
  • Suicide – http://ourworldindata.org/data/health/suicide/
  • Violence http://ourworldindata.org/VisualHistoryOf/Violence.html#/title-slide
  • Chartbook of economic inequality
• Pinker’s Book: Better Angles Of Our Nature
• Notebook software – Circus Ponies
• Scott Murray’s D3.js Book
• Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Presentation
• Zdenek Hynek – http://www.geographics.cz/