Hans Rosling, founder and director of Gapminder, is one of the world’s “100 most important global thinkers” of 2009, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.

Hans Rosling comments the list on his Twitter-feed: “One of 100 top global thinker, Honored, but instead of #96 I had rather been placed after Valerie Hudson (#97).

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How can Swedish bi- and multilateral development cooperation be visualized?

The Swedish Agency for Development Evaluation (SADEV) maintains a database with time series data on Swedish bi- and multilateral aid allocation.

Using Gapminder bubble graphs, and free tools from IBM, we’re illustrating some aspects of this data in “Gapminder Labs”:

Gapminder Labs: Visualizing Swedish development aid

The illustrations help answer questions such as:

• How does Sweden allocate resources to UNDP and other UN organizations over time?
• How much of the development cooperation by SIDA is allocated to Education?
• … and within Education, or any other sector, which countries and regions are the main recipients?

At TEDIndia, the first ever TED-conference in Asia, Hans Rosling spoke about the rise of Asia and showed how the region has developed over the last 150 years.

The video will soon be availabe here on Gapminder.org, but until then it can be watched at TED.com.

» See video at TED.com

Monday 23 November, Hans Rosling will give an open lecture at Uppsala University. The title of the lecture is “Civil War, Aid, Competition and Latte – a fact based view on four types of countries”.

The lecture is given in Swedish and moderated by the science journalist Jan-Olov Johansson

Date: Monday 23 November, 2009
Time: 19:00 – 20:00
Location: Lecture room X in the University building

Read the university’s add in Swedish

Back in April Google launched a search function for US public data with interactive graphing. Today, Google has made this feature much more useful with the inclusion of 17 indicators from the World Bank, including the number of internet users, life expectancy, and a host of other indicators for most of the world’s countries.

Click this link to see South Africa’s life expectancy in the new graph. Click the graph in the search result to see an interactive graph where you can compare with other countries.

Note that this currently only works when searching google.com, not country-specific sites such as google.fr.

Also read Google’s official announcement:

World Bank public data, now in search