Mind the Gap!

Last year we blogged about Swedish medical doctor and public health researcher Hans Rosling. Although Rosling is a well-respected teacher of international public health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he's well-known for two other reasons: his role in co-founding the non-profit organisation Gapminder, and a stunning presentation he delivered to the Technology, Entertainment Design (TED) symposium in California, which became an internet sensation.

Last evening I had the privilege to attend a lecture by Rosling, co-organised by the United Nations Economic Commission on Europe (UNECE) and the Permanent Mission of Sweden in Geneva. (If there was ever a country to appreciate statistics, it would be Sweden don't you think. Who knew they have a "Swedish Statistician of the Year?" ;-) )

If you weren't previously familiar with Rosling's entertaining and slightly 'nutty professor' style of delivery, the attraction of a one hour lecture at the end of the working day on the topic of 'the value of statistics' might conceivably be lost on you - especially as the earnest chaps at UNECE thought they'd provide the answer in the lecture invitation:

"Statistics allow us to measure and demonstrate progress, providing evidence for effective decision-making about how and where to target development programs."

Fortunately, the fun of the journey is in the getting there. Rosling's talk was indeed fascinating. And he was visibly enjoying himself as he gently pulled the legs of various important Swedish eminent persons and statisticians along the way.

Rosling also made some serious points. Not least of these, he showed through the graphics and animations Gapminder has developed to display statistical trends in development and public health that many of the assumptions held in the 'Western' world' are - and I'm quoting Rosling here - "bullshit". Rosling observed that many of the premises students accept date from when their teachers first read a textbook. He asked his students, for instance, what distinguished family structure in OECD countries from that in developing countries. The answer he was given: rich world = long lifespan, small families; developing world = short lifespan, large families.

The problem is, this is not true. Many parts of the so-called developing world radically differ from this model. Moreover, Singapore - a so-called developing country - has lower child mortality than Sweden. Vietnam's public health indicators put it approximately where the United States was when the Vietnam War ended. And South Korea's progress in the last forty years has been nothing short of stunning.

So life is getting better for some. But not all. What is striking from Rosling's talk is the level of disparity in wealth, not just between countries or regions but within countries. While around 20 percent of South Africa's population, for instance, has a standard of living similar to that of people in rich Western European countries, a significant proportion of its people have a similar standard of living to Uganda. Latin America has massive disparity in wealth, both within the region and within countries.

While recent decades have seen an increasing proportion of the world's people pulled out of abject poverty, Rosling observed that absolute numbers of the poorest people - those living on less than a dollar a day - has remained about the same. And these people may be living nearer to you than you think, for instance if you live in Eastern Europe, or Latin America or the Middle East.

This has big implications for security, not so much of the traditional national kind, but of the human kind. In my view, it perhaps isn't any coincidence that some of the most violent societies on earth - think armed robbery, murder, illicit gun possession - are among the most socioeconomically unequal.

Rosling raised another interesting point, one that doesn't arise in his TED video: rapid development to date has been based on use of fossil fuels. How will a world trying to respond to climate change reconcile these apparently conflicting imperatives? Rosling is an optimist - he notes how inefficiently resources are used at present, citing the huge cost of agricultural subsidies in many OECD countries, for instance. If these were to be reallocated "less stupidly", he argues it would make a huge difference to the world in developmental terms.

To me, there are other dimensions though, some of which link up to concerns in arms control. At present, compelling alternatives to fossil fuel-use to drive growth and development are in short supply not just for financial reasons, but because the technology doesn't exist. Even assuming that technology can lead to new alternative sources of green energy if enough resources are thrown at key problems, it's going to take time for these to come onstream.

In the meantime, nuclear power is an increasingly compelling alternative - as was clear from discussions on civil uses of nuclear technology at last week's NPT PrepCom. Environmental concerns to one side, there are major non-proliferation challenges ahead. So, Rosling's talk provides much to think about for arms controllers as well as development and statistics boffins.

John Borrie

You can have a go with Gapminder software here. If you had been wondering when Hans Rosling's amazing Gapminder data visualization tools would ever emerge from 'beta', it seems they have been sold to Google, which intends, he said, to put them on the internet for free eventually. Good on you Google... Now make it happen, and for Macs as well as PCs please!

Worldmapper

Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom reckons, “you can say it, you can prove it, you can tabulate it, but it is only when you show it that it hits home.”

Dorling and his colleagues are backing up this claim. Their research group on Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) has established the Worldmapper project in collaboration with Mark Newman at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan in the United States.

Worldmapper is a collection of some 366 world maps, in which territories are re-sized according to a chosen variable of interest. Indicators they’ve mapped range from wealth, education and health to population movements, goods production and natural disaster casualties.

The Worldmapper database also includes cartograms depicting military spending as well as violence and war statistics. I was particularly interested in a map representing territory size as the proportion of worldwide landmine casualties from 2003 to 2005.

The first image below is a classic world map. The second is the Worldmapper version, which visually depicts where casualties are occurring by appearing to swell or shrink areas according to their proportion of landmine casualties (click on the pictures to enlarge).



“Landmine casualty” here is drawn from the Landmine Monitor definition to refer to any “individual killed or injured as a result of an incident involving antipersonnel mines, anti-vehicle mines, improvised explosive devices, dud cluster munitions, and other unexploded ordnance”.

During the time period from 2003 to 2005, Landmine Monitor reported around 7,000 casualties from landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) worldwide per year. However, this figure “represents only the reported casualties and does not take into account the many casualties that are believed to go unreported.” The real number of new casualties from landmines/ERW each year is estimated by Landmine Monitor to be between 15,000 and 20,000.

As we can see on the map, the most affected countries in the time period 2003-2005 included Iraq, Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia. Together, these countries accounted for almost 4000—or 57%—of the reported number of casualties.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Worldmapper’s website: http://www.worldmapper.org .

Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) research group’s homepage.

D. Dorling, Worldmapper: The Human Anatomy of a Small Planet, PLOS Medicine, January 2007, volume 4, issue 1, edition 1, freely available online.

Analyzing armed violence: the Taback - Coupland model

Promoting human security will benefit from meaningful data. I recently attended a meeting organized by the Small Arms Survey (SAS) in Geneva, Switzerland, on the potential of using the Taback-Coupland model for human security mapping.


Nathan Taback, a Canadian statistician, and Robin Coupland, an advisor on armed violence at the International Committee of the Red Cross and former field surgeon, have developed a model that converts media reports into data in order to document and analyze the effects of armed violence.

The model is constructed around four parameters, which the researchers assume to be the “risk factors” for the effects of armed violence. It includes the nature of the weapon, the number of weapons used, the way the weapon is used, and the victim’s vulnerability. Coupland and Taback describe their model in a chapter of our third volume of research (“Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations”).

The idea is that, by extracting significant information from media reports – like the number of people killed, the number of people wounded, the type of weapon used, the number of weapons and the vulnerability of the victim (for instance, was there a wall to take shelter behind?) – then it’s possible to draw conclusions about the intent of the perpetrator.

This is pertinent to international criminal law. By providing a context, the Taback-Coupland model permits an “evidence-based” dialogue about the perpetrators and their intents and about the victims and their vulnerabilities.

A second way to use the model is to conduct probabilistic risk assessment of a country or a region and draw conclusions on which scenario is particularly risky for a specific vulnerable group.

Taback and Coupland tested their model using news reports on attacks on journalists, as these events tend to be well reported. Further applications – some already putting the model into practice, others at a preliminary stage – include a registry of explosive violence (Landmine Action UK), a registry of sexual violence in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and test-cases for country assessments carried out by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey (in Uganda, Nigeria, Mauritania and Nepal).

Many participants at the meeting pointed out the poor quality of media reports and their lack of reliability. However, although not comprehensive, media reports are the only day-to-day public source of information about human insecurity. While one should be be careful when using media reports, it’s sometimes the only information available and it’s nevertheless possible to glean useful information from it.

Moreover, a long-term perspective could be to develop the model as a tool for journalists, who could directly enter the relevant data of the events linked to armed violence they observe.

While there are international surveillance systems for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks, no such system exists (yet) to evaluate on a regular basis the effects of armed violence on peoples’ lives. With that in mind, the method developed by Taback and Coupland is a useful contribution to international efforts to enhance human security, including in disarmament.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Cost Working group meeting on Using the Taback-Coupland Method for Human Security Mapping in SAS Country Assessments, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, Switzerland, 3 September 2007.

Picture inspired by a scheme presented by Robin Coupland at the meeting.

For more information, see N. Taback & R. Coupland, “Security of journalists: making the case for modelling armed violence as a means to promote human security”, published in Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.

For a further introduction to the thinking behind the Taback-Coupland model see Robin’s chapter in our first volume of research, entitled “Modelling armed violence: a tool for humanitarian dialogue in disarmament and arms control”.

Gapminder or “Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics"

“Fun” and “statistics” aren’t words that normally fit together. Endless unreadable charts, incomprehensible graphs (what does x stand for, again?...), average, mean, median, standard deviation…Yes, statistics can certainly be boring. However, as illustrated by Gapminder, a non-profit dedicated to communicating and disseminating global-development statistics, this isn’t necessarily the case.

Hans Rosling, one of Gapminder’s cofounders, is a Swedish medical doctor and public health researcher. While teaching international health at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Rosling realized that the traditional way of presenting statistics was an obstacle to his students’ understanding of the health and economic trends shaping the world. So, helped by his son Ola, he developed a short animated movie illustrating the progress of states – moving bubbles, whose size represents population – along both health and economic indicators. As described in a BusinessWeek article:

"When the bubble started to move, people got very excited!" Rosling gleefully recalls. His students sat bolt upright as he began calling global development as if it were a horse race: And there goes China down the stretch, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall farther and father behind.... "It was a tremendous breakthrough in my lecturing," reflects Rosling.

Rosling’s presentation, “Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen”, was considered the high point of the 2006 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference, which is an American alternative to the stuffier Swiss-based World Economic Forum. (The TED Conference, held annually in Monterey, California, is modestly described by its organizers as “The ultimate brain spa,” “Davos for optimists” and “A four-day journey into the future, in the company of those creating it.”) Here’s the video of Rosling’s talk:



Rosling’s work, however, isn’t just about eye-candy like nice animations. Behind the Gapminder initiative is the idea that data about the world should be free, accessible and understandable. Adopting an “open-source philosophy” may highlight possible errors and omissions and therefore has the potential to improve data quality and transparency.

As in global development, it’s time to promote a “fact-based worldview” in the field of armed violence. In June I attended a workshop organized by the Small Arms Survey in Geneva on measuring and costing armed violence. It occurred to me there that principles and tools, like the ones developed by the Gapminder initiative, could greatly increase understanding of armed violence and of its cost, not least among multilateral policy makers.

We know this because in January, as part of the Disarmament Insight initiative, we held a workshop with nearly 30 Geneva based multilateral practitioners from diplomatic Missions, international organisations, Non-Governmental Organisations and think tanks. Our warm up for the day was to show them Rosling’s 20-minute TED talk above. It had every one of them transfixed.

In a subsequent Disarmament Insight workshop in May, the economist Paul Seabright (author of ‘The Company of Strangers’) showed participants that some dimensions of global armed violence are deeply counter-intuitive, something we’ll return to in coming posts on this blog. Obviously, if policy makers are unaware of these dimensions they’re less likely to be effective in tackling problems of armed violence.

A “statistics about armed violence for the rest of us”, please?


Aurélia Merçay


References

Gapminder: http://www.gapminder.org/

Information about the TED conferences is available at http://www.ted.com/. You'll find Rosling’s presentation here (it can also be downloaded for free as a video podcast from the iTunes Music Store).

Andrew Blum, “Graphing the Development Gap”, BusinessWeek, 22 February 2006, available online here.

Photo of Hans Rosling retrieved from his personal blog.