Hans Rosling is a strong and vocal advocate of “family planning”.

Here is another video, this time of [an earlier] presentation by Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, on [8] What stops population growth? (10 minutes)

Dr. Rosling’s presentation of dynamic graphs is excellent and very informative. He ends his presentation with, “The only way to stop population growth is to have small families.” That is technically correct, but it seems to me, going by the information contained in his presentation, that Dr, Rosling should have added the proviso, “and that can only be brought about by ending war and creating wealth for all.”

It should not be necessary to point out that the best and perhaps only way to create wealth for all is to make cheap energy accessible by all. It is neither humane nor practical to keep a quarter of humanity in the dark, without access to electricity and refrigeration.

Quoted from [9] An ecological and environmental nightmare, August 13, 2010

If “konzo is an epidemic paralytic disease first described by G. Trolli in 1938, who discovered it amongst the Kwango of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo),” ([10] Wikipdedia), then how can Prof. Hans Rosling claim that he discovered it as “a new epidemic paralytic disease, when serving as doctor in Mozambique 1979-81″?

Someone is not telling things quite the right way, either Wikipedia or Prof. Rosling.

By the way, as good as the Gapminder software appeared to be when I was first impressed by it, it does not quite live up to what it promises.

The availability of the data behind the graphs produced by Gapminder is free of charge, but that is not of much help. The references to the sources of the data at the Gapminder software are there alright, but the pointers they contain to indexes, for example at various World Health Organization websites, lead to some spreadsheets that contain no data.

Curiously, the instances of that which I found were only true when one would expect to find data on men rather than on women, such as for murder rates for men as murder victims, while references to women as murder victims lead to complete spreadsheet tables.

There are many other issues of a more technical nature that make it very awkward to use charts developed by the download version of the Gapminder software in other applications, such as in web pages or in blog postings. It is not even simple to print out Gapminder charts. They cannot be printed out through simple and direct print commands, unless one make a screen shot, saves that as a graphics file and then prints it out, but that is not progress.

So, I have given up on my hopes to be able to use Gapminder as a new tool for presenting data. It may still be a good tool for Power Point presentations, but I hardly ever make those now.

Still, what is the point of making presentation using data compiled by someone else when one cannot even ascertain that the source data truly exists. No, thanks, no Gapminder for me, not for as long as I can’t use the software for data that I can trust and actually see.

There is a bit more behind all of this. Hans Roslinger stated in numerous presentations of his I watched that he has no political agenda of any sort and no ulterior motives beyond working for free data availability for all throughout the world. However, he is a very vocal proponent of small families (family “planning”) and green technology. Moreover, the Gapminder software has apparently been sold to Google (the Gapminder charts display the Google copyright in the lower, right-hand corner). So, not all is gold that gleams (or perhaps that should be, “Anything imaginable is for sale, as long as the price is right.”)

I will look at Gapminder again when I can use it for data that I can trust and that I can prove can be trusted.