Posts Tagged ‘Hans Rosling’

Hans Rosling — RIP

February 7, 2017

Hans Rosling passed away today. He was born July 27, 1948 and was just 68.

He was, I think, to be compared with Richard Feynman for his ability to communicate difficult concepts to laypeople.

RIP.

From Gapminder:

Sad to announce: Hans Rosling passed away this morning

We are extremely sad to announce that Professor Hans Rosling died this morning. Hans suffered from a pancreatic cancer which was diagnosed one year ago. He passed away early Tuesday morning, February 7, 2017, surrounded by his family in Uppsala, Sweden.

Eleven years ago, the three of us, Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling & Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded Gapminder. In 2007 Hans decided to “drop out” of university to work only 5% as professor at Karolinska Institute. That was a great decision. The 95% he worked for Gapminder made him a world famous public educator, or Edutainer as he liked to call it.

Across the world, millions of people use our tools and share our vision of a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We know that many will be saddened by this message. Hans is no longer alive, but he will always be with us and his dream of a fact-based worldview, we will never let die!

We kindly ask you to respect our need for privacy during this sad time of mourning. Gapminder will announce info about memorial plans later.

Stay updated on Gapminder’s twitter and facebook

— Anna R. Rönnlund & Ola Rosling, Co-founders of Gapminder

For more info, please contact Karolinska Institutet.

 

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How The Lancet creates, and the UN spreads, lies — Hans Rosling in The Lancet

October 14, 2016

The UN can only mirror its member countries. While the UN (and for example the EU) are supposed to try and “level up” they very often “level down”. When that happens they disseminate “worst practices” rather than spread “best practices”. The UN’s executive and officers and bureaucrats are not either immune to the corruptions of being in privileged and protected positions. They also disseminate lies when advocating for their pet projects or causes. The problem is that when lies are sanctioned by the UN they take on a sanctity which is downright harmful.

Professor Hans Rosling and Helena Nordenstedt take the UN to task for spreading lies in a new comment to The Lancet. But they also point out the lie was first created in The Lancet itself and suggest that The Lancet should not publish advocacy articles without peer review.

rosling-lancet

They write

In September, 2016, at the UN General Assembly, the Independent Accountability Panel (IAP) of the UN’s Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health presented their first report. The IAP report states that 60% of maternal deaths today take place in humanitarian settings, specified as “conflict, displacement and natural disaster”. The “60%” has been trending in development aid advocacy ever since late 2015 when UNFPA stated that 60% of maternal deaths happen in “humanitarian situations like refugee camps”. The 60% has even made its way into policy documents and discourse. The only health data mentioned in the proposed policy framework for Sweden’s future international development cooperation are: “60% of maternal deaths take place in humanitarian emergencies”. We chased the origin of this seemingly incorrect percentage. We found it to be a Comment published in The Lancet, referring to the published underlying data sources and to a grey publication describing the crude calculation that yielded the 60%.

……..

We conclude that the “60%” is a fourfold inaccuracy. It is surprising that, in just 1 year, the false percentage made its way to a highly qualified panel at the UN. Global health seems to have entered into a post-fact era, where the labelling of numerators is incorrectly tweaked for advocacy purposes. The reproductive health needs in humanitarian settings should be reported without hiding that most maternal deaths still occur in extreme poverty. As recently noted in The Lancet, Nigeria’s Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, spoke the truth when stating that the real causes of maternal and child deaths are poverty, inequality, lack of financing, and poor governance.  The use of inaccurate numbers in global health advocacy can misguide where investments are most needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We, therefore, suggest The Lancet should only publish advocacy material after due referee procedures.

 

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Rosling’s health, wealth and statistics

January 31, 2014

Hans Rosling’s tour de force: 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

This is not new and I think I first saw it about 3 years ago.

But it is worth looking at not just for the content but also for the power of the presentation.

Just a reminder that the world is feeding more people than ever before, we are living longer than ever before, and things are not as black as some alarmists would have us think. And by 2100 total population will be declining.

The glass is more than half-full.

A much longer (20 minutes) presentation is also well worth watching.

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