Health in 200 Countries Over 200 Years in 4 Minutes

December 5, 2010 | by

Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, one of Europe’s largest medical universities, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, a non-profit venture that promotes sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by the increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

Rosling’s lectures combine huge quantities of public data with a sport commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Here, he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers — in just four minutes.

Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Rosling shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

References

  1. The Joy of Stats. BBC. Accessed 2010 Dec 4.

More Education Decreases the Risk of Death

June 3, 2008 | by

Everyone knows that a good education is important for getting a good job. Now researchers are finding that being well-educated can lengthen your life. The study, published earlier this month in the journal PLoS ONE, finds that socioeconomic inequalities in the U.S. death rate between people with less than a high school education and college graduates increased from 1993 to 2001 [1]. The widening gap is due to (i) significant decreases in mortality from all causes, heart disease, cancer, stroke and other conditions, in the most educated and (ii) unchanged or increasing death rates in the least educated.