Pushing back ignorance, one fact at a time

Gapminder is a "fact tank" founded by Hans Rosling, who was the Swedish population scientist/epidemiologist up until his death two years ago, along with his son, Ola Rosling, and daughter in law, Anna Rosling Rönnlund (Gapminder, 2020a; Wikiprogress, 2020). Ole Rosling created the 'Trendalyser' software used in the early Gapminder videos, which was purchased by Google in 2007 (Wikiprogress, 2020).

Gapminder's mission is - more or less - to lower the level of global ignorance through providing free and easy to understand statistical graphics. They say "The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand" (Gapminder, 2020b). An example of their graphical work can be seen here, showing a comparison of income and life expectancy by class since 1800 (Gapminder, 2020c).

Since Hans's death, Ole and Anna are carrying on the fact-finding work. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports them, along with a number of Scandinavian families (Gapminder, 2020a). Both Ola and Anna have produced videos during Covid-19 to help push back ignorance, a few facts at a time (Gapminder Foundation, 1 May 2020, 25 April 2020):





Pushing back ignorance, one fact at a time.


Sam

References:

• Gapminder Foundation (1 May 2020). Most are wrong about the number of old. https://youtu.be/Jmqcd_IImLI
• Gapminder Foundation (25 April 2020). Corona is canceling flights but not teaching us to solve global warming. https://youtu.be/-_asLII6J0k
• Gapminder (2020a). About us. https://www.gapminder.org/about-gapminder/
• Gapminder (2020b). Ignornance. https://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
• Gapminder (2020c). Income level versus life expectancy by nation and class. https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2019&delay:241.367741935484;&entities$filter$;&dim=geo;&marker$axis_x$domainMin:null&domainMax:null&zoomedMin=240&zoomedMax=152481;&axis_y$domainMin:null&domainMax:null&zoomedMin=1.569&zoomedMax=211&scaleType=log;&size$domainMin:null&domainMax:null&extent@:0.016666666666666666&:0.4166666666666667;;&color$which=income_groups;;;&ui$chart$trails:false;;&chart-type=bubbles
• Wikiprogress (2020). Gapminder. http://wikiprogress.org/articles/archive/gapminder/