The power of a good graph
There are those who don’t understand the power of a good graph. I try not to be one of them. Take for example this cool widget from google labs.
It is a cool web thingy (technical term) that displays several kinds of data, population, median income and life expectancy for each country over time.
The first time I looked at it I just saw all the moving things and thought ‘wow that is cool.’ However, being someone who likes graphs and data I looked for interesting trends in the data. Things like big shift in population size or income. Then my eye stuck during the movement on one little blue ball in about the middle of the graph. It goes up from about have the time then drops straight down. Hmmm… what is that?
The blue ball is South Africa and the axis is life expectancy. Life expectancy climbs till about 1992 when it hits 63 then drops to 43 by 2004. I watched the ball couple of time trying to figure out what happened before it hit me. The answer is AIDS. Similar drops can be seen in Rwanda and Zimbabwe. It did not take me long to confirm my guess.
To me it was always a more personal or political issue. I have close friends who are HIV positive and I have lost a couple of them to the disease. I know the faces of the campaigns and wore the ribbon. This is the first time I have seen the effect in a graph of normal everyday data. I see the clearly visible effect of the disease in data world population data. This is not data about a disease or a political point of view. It was just about statistics from around the world in a cool widget. The power of a good graph.