Speaking of disseminating information to interested groups via the Internet:

The publicly funded data is down here, and we’d like flowers to grow up on the net.

Myths about the Developing World Hans Rosling, TED Talks, 2007

Back in the 1960s there was the rich world with low birthrate and long life expectancy and the poor world with high birthrate and low life expectancy. Nowadays there’s much overlap and many countries that were formerly in the poor camp are almost indistinguishable from the rich camp. Seeing China climb up one way and then the other over time sinks this concept in more effectively than reading about it.

Prof. Rosling has a visualization organization, called Gapminder that can take assorted data from various public databases and present it in readily-understandable interactive graphical form. Since I last looked at it a year or so ago, they’ve added the above video of his TED talk, and a google search feature. Sure, he could have provided similar facilities locally at his university, but then the rest of us would never have seen these presentations. And while he could have, it’s not clear that he would have, since feedback from web users elsewhere has to have helped develop this thing. As an optimist, I tend to think that better understanding of the real demographic situation in the world and how it got that way should reduce the risk of inappropriate actions by individuals or governments.

-jsq