Hans Rosling and Big Data

The class started with a Ted talk by Hans Rosling about big data. It was very interesting to see how this professor had focused on this for a long time. A part of the video was the definition of We and Them, as Western world (long life for small families), and Third world (shorter life for big family). Big data is not always negative, as we can see in this video, it can bring to us very important information about all the people around the world, and throughout the years. He talked about a concept about how data, and the internet works. In a great metaphor, he describes the data as the underground roots, the internet as flowers, and the public as the sun that takes the data, and makes the internet grow, with the help of other tools. He suggests that design makes the data more comprehendible, so that is why Internet is represented by flours, and we should understand that design matters in order to make the data more interesting and eligible.

What Rosling is proposing is to disaggregate the data in order to look at what is actually happening instead of looking at preconceptions about countries. If we do this, we start seeing the causes, and understand why things change and exactly where.

We also had the chance to look at a book, which was a colorful explanation of technology around the world in form of statistics. I was amazed by some of them, specially the entire net image. It was represented by nods, separated in several groups, that would differ in color, and they would represent either .com or .org or any other possibility. The entire image was full of nods of different colors but we could easily notice that the blue ones (.org) were the most common ones. It was impressive to see the size of the web in images. Other statistics were in the book, and some representative of how technology has evolved, and one of them was very fascinating because it had the evolution of some brands throughout the decades, and for me seeing that Apple had computers and many other devices way earlier than what we remember was very surprising. This brand had to work on their image, and concepts, and we can see the jump they did from one decade to another, and that is why they became a popular as they are now.