Here’s a video of an incredible talk Hans Rosling gave at last year’s TED conference. On one level it’s a talk about trends in world health (Rosling is a professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden), but at another level it’s about the need for much better visualization tools so people can make sense out of all the data we already have freely available in public databases. The whole talk is an example, using tools developed by the non-profit Rosling founded called Gapminder.
After watching the video, check out Gapminder World, being hosted by Google.
(Thanks to my dad for the link!)