Stockholm: Hans Rosling has achieved what most scientists would call "enough." Having studied statistics and medicine for seven years at Sweden's Uppsala University, he worked in Bangalore and Mozambique — discovering, in the latter in 1981, a formerly unknown paralysing disease which (with the research group he then oversaw) is now known as konzo.

But Prof. Rosling has done far more since. His latest work asks why governments think it is better to hide their data in silos, and deny its usefulness, in the face of the work that he and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he is Professor of international health, are now doing.

New life

Prof. Rosling excels at bringing potentially dry statistics to life. In his hands, mundane-sounding arcana such as carbon dioxide emissions, gross national income, infant mortality and life expectancy suddenly come to life. Plot one against the other, compare different countries' performance, animate the graph over time, and suddenly one begins to see what has truly changed about the mean income of the population of China compared to that in the U.S., or the disparities in life expectancy between Latin American countries.

The classic example is his talk last year to the TED forum (tinyurl.com/f7owr), an annual conference for visionaries about technology, entertainment and design, in which he shows what those statistics can look like when brought to life.

The inspiration, he says, was a test he set 10 years ago for incoming students at the Karolinska, in which he asked them to choose which of five pairs of countries had the higher infant mortality. But given the choice of Sri Lanka/Turkey, Poland/South Korea, Malaysia/Russia, Pakistan/Vietnam and Thailand/South Africa, his students got, on average, only 1.8 correct - "demonstrating," as Prof. Rosling jokes , "that Swedish students know statistically significantly less than chimpanzees" since the chimps would choose randomly, getting an average of 2.5.

Presentation

Why don't people know the correct answers? Because they have never seen them presented usefully. Prof. Rosling set about changing that, creating in 2004 a non-profit organisation called Gapminder (gapminder.org), which provides a Flash-based interactive method to generate any sort of graphic from the available statistics for various countries — such as the above.

"We find that students get very excited when they can use this, and policymakers and the corporate sector would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why does not this take place, why are we not using the data we have? We have data from the U.N., from the national statistical agencies, in universities, in non-governmental organisations. Yet all that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly funded [government] statistics," he told the audience.

Patterns

This, after he had run an animation of how life expectancy plotted against size of family had changed over the past 40 years — with countries from the Third World shifting from large, shorter-lived families to smaller, longer-lived ones, and demonstrating that life expectancy improved in Vietnam even during the war there, and that life expectancy and family size there is now comparable with the U.S. in 1974.

Prof. Rosling answered his own question: "Because the data are hidden down in the databases." Despite the encouragement that the Internet provides, and the hunger of the public for better ways to analyse that data, governments are reluctant to open their databases to the world and make them searchable. "People put prices on them and stupid passwords," says Prof. Rosling. "And this won't work."—

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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