Sri Lanka or Turkey?
Poland or South Korea?
Russia or Malaysia?
Pakistan or Viet Nam?
South Africa or Thailand?
When Hans Rosling asked his Swedish health policy students these same questions, they averaged 1.8 correct responses out of 5 (a chimpanzee would average 2.5; score yourself using the following answers obtained from EarthTrends).
Concerned about the ability for even the educated public to understand and visualize trends in global development, Dr. Rosling developed GapMinder, a software tool that "turns boring time series of development statistics into attractive moving graphics." The results can be captivating, even for those of us who have been trying to make sense of these numbers for a long time. See Gapminder's animations of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report statistics here. My personal favorite is the Trends section (#7), where one can view, for example, how Egypt and China followed different paths to realize the same net gains in health and income.
Source: GapMinder, 2007.
Dr. Rosling presented GapMinder in person at the Techonology, Entertainment, and Design Forum last year (see the video here).
RELATED LINKS
Some other interesting visualizations of global statistics (unofficial and advertisement heavy, but entertaining nonetheless):
Worldometer: Global statistics updated in real-time, see http://www.worldometers.info/.
Global RichList: Compare your income to the global average at http://www.globalrichlist.com/index.php.
