Popthink: great population resources

Image above: Short video from Hans Rosling called 'Don't panic, The truth about population.

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Don’t panic: The truth about population by Hans Rosling

For many of us into spatial and visual literacy, the name Hans Rosling resonates as the epitome of creativity, innovation and fascination when talking about all things population.

Hans Rosling (born 27 July 1948) is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation which has previously been profiled on Spatialworlds. 

Gapminder is used in classes around the world (and as a critical resource with the AC:Geography GeogSpace resource) as an interactive graphic over time application to visualise population & development data. Hans is a bit of a Geography legend and influences politicians, teachers and students all around the world. Check out his Twitter feed to see the sorts of things that he tweets about on a normal day in 'Hans World'.

The ‘Geography for 2014 and beyond’ site uses Hans Rosling’s ‘Don’t panic: The truth about population’ resource  to develop classroom applications and fascinating pieces of student centered work for some great demographic thinking.  More about this useful teaching  site in another posting.

Harvesting world data

Whilst on about population, these two sites are useful to gather some up to date data on development indicators for some GIS mapping (just add the new field to a spatially referenced database of all the countries of the world).

* International socio-economic data on the United States Census Bureau site

* Index Mundi: An excellent site with up-to-date statistics on all countries

**** For an excellent summary of a country demographics just replace the country name in this URL.http://www.indexmundi.com/angola/demographics_profile.html   This is the data for Angola

* Currrent international GDP per capita data

These two sites are interesting examples of visualisations of data.

* A visualisation software called Manyeyes.

* A spatial visualisation of London growing over 2000 years
Researchers at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis collated vast datasets to map the capital's transformation from first-century Londinium to modern megacity.