Hans Rosling: health insights, presentation excellence

Insights - wisdom and knowledge - are precious.  Too often information is lacking context, or context is lacking information.  News media is particularly guilty of this; most reports give scant weighting to the why over the what, and the event becomes mere spectacle.

Hans Rosling is a Swedish professor of global health.  I stumbled across his presentations in the context of software tools, but found myself riveted by Rosling's ability to communicate on his subject matter - something he brings alive, even for those who may not have an immediate interest.

Those presentations, available on the website of the excellent organisation TED (devoted to "ideas worth spreading"), are every one of them worth watching: entertaining yet full of information and insight.

In the first presentation in the above series, Rosling's discussion revolves around four dimensions: time, health, wealth, and location (region/country).  He gives his audience a good understanding of how the other three factors affect health outcomes, yet argues cogently for a more complex perspective on factors that affect health.

His second presentation is briefer, but includes an impressive feat which might seem gratuitous, yet he does it with purpose: to illustrate his point on achieving better health outcomes that "the seemingly impossible is possible".  I won't divulge the climax: something that has to be seen for itself.


Rosling is, first and foremost, a Subject Matter Expert.  But crucially he is a very effective communicator.  He presents with knowledge and clarity, in a way that engages the audience.  Part of the 'wow' factor lies in the fluid use of  the presentation software he uses, which leaves the world's Powerpoints for dead.  And if you explore the links, you'll find out that that software was originally developed by Rosling's foundation, no doubt to achieve the sort of communication at which Rosling excels.

SETI, Open source, and the socialisation of productivity

What does SETI have to do with Microsoft's furrowed brow?

We all know the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, whereby the universe is scanned for signals throughout the electromagnetic spectrum which can be interpreted as originating with intelligent life. Some of us have run SETI@home: you download a screensaver, which runs in the background, borrowing your unused computer time to run a parcel of number crunching for SETI. Everybody wins: only your idle computer time is used, and it can have some wider community benefit - you may even be responsible for the first discovery of extraterrestrial life.

That was the first distributed grid computing project to gain widespread publicity. But the software is now available to turn any general project requiring major computer time into a socialised project. The Herald recently ran an article on Australian use of such software: specifically, BOINC, The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. The article said over 32,000 Australians were currently running BOINC projects, out of 1.7 million people worldwide.

The scope is tremendous, not just for general scientific research, but also for any community-sector project that may not otherwise have the resources to get off the ground.

For the moment, here's a list of projects you may wish to take part in. Those are all scientific research, mainly in biology, physics and maths, but there's also a World Community Grid, which is specifically aimed at humanitarian projects.

As for Microsoft, the other side of community computing is software: open source, to be specific: generally an open source project is contributed to by many, with no profit-oriented copyright - and generally available for free. Open Office may be the most famous - a direct competitors to Microsoft's Office suite. And as a method of developing software that is freely available to all, it has gained acceptance in most areas of my professional focus, business intelligence. Apart from the well-known mySQL database, there are also open source tools available for most related areas. As well as database and BI software, there's also ETL, data profiling, and so on.

Over time, you should expect prices to tumble in all types of software directly affected by open source initiatives. Yes, the likes of Microsoft can expect some buffering from these forces due to brand-name strength. But yes too, Microsoft is worried enough that they are already working on alternative revenue streams, including jumping into the cloud. Those alternatives shouldn't see a collapse of capitalism any time soon, but the long-term trend can only benefit the public, particularly those who might not otherwise be able to afford such computer resources, particularly in the developing world.

In a wider sense, distributed computing and open source are simply harbingers of a globalisation and socialisation of productivity, for the benefit of all.

Criminality - the causes are the obvious

A couple of studies - of alcohol and prisons - suggest criminality is to a large extent due to the obvious factors of poverty, mental illness and alcohol.

A report from the Australian Institute of Criminology reveals that nearly half the homicides in Australia involved alcohol. Homicides that:
- happened on weekends or evenings; or
- involved male or unemployed victims; or
- involved a male killed by a female partner
all mostly involved alcohol.

Yet I suggest this study is very specific to Australia. In the USA, for example, where handguns are far more plentiful, the circumstances of homicide would likely be far more varied (homicide rates are elevated by increased opportunity - as presented by a proliferation of handguns).

And a survey of NSW prisons reveals remarkably consistent factors in incarceration, which must be a good proxy for serious criminal action.

About half of NSW's inmates were expelled from school; half were unemployed; risky drinkers; were intoxicated at the time of offence. Pretty much the usual suspects - although there was one unexpected finding: more than half had suffered a serious head injury.

The NSW prison system has been highly successful in keeping HIV at bay, with only 0.1% being HIV-positive (although five wrongly thought they were infected!) However, hepatitis B and C affecte one in four and one in three inmates respectively, signalling "iv drug use and risky sexual behaviour".

Yet only one in six inmates was aware of a sexual assault in jail last year, which was apparently an improvement on eight years ago.

The overriding impression is that poverty and lack of education (which is a direct factor in poverty) are significant indicators of criminality - which is exactly as one would expect. It's also reasonable to expect mental health issues to be significant, but the report-on-the-report is silent on that (apart from the 'head injury' finding). However, I did find mention of the previous survey (here) which, as a proxy, says 41% of male prisoners (and 54% of females) had in the past had mental health treatment or assessment.

Insights into teenage tech trends

A teenager on work experience for a bank has written a 'research note' on media technology that has reverberated around the world.

This despite the fact that the research was not quantitative: he consulted a few friends, then wrote up in one day a paper that has been praised for its [anecdotal] insights.

The bottom line was that in their formative years of consumerism, teenagers are great adopters of digital media, but take issue with both cost and advertising (don't we all?, but the sensitivity is much greater). They adopt most media because it doesn't cost, and only some media by necessity. Texting [and phone calls] and cinema are the main media that are paid. Music is either pirated, or consumed from internet stations for which they have more choice of content, and no ads.

in: good mid-range mobile phones (can be obtained at birthday/xmas), Facebook, Internet as search/reference resource, viral marketing (word of mouth, so to speak), cinema (esp while at kids' prices), game consoles
out: Twitter (costs), radio (ads), regular tv watching, iTunes or similar, newspapers

Teenagers will carry many habits into adulthood; the fact that this is practically the first generation to have access to a wide range of digital media technologies suggests some significant adjustments in markets and advertising are afoot.

Morgan Stanley's comments are largely limited to: "[the] influence on TMT [technology, media, telecoms] stocks cannot be underestimated." But I can't resist making a few observations of my own.

Since all this suggests it will be harder to wean people off a non-payment habit, the implications are good for innovation in areas that benefit from large-scale commodification (commercial markets such as devices and mass-market pop music), but bad in areas that commodification detriments (art).

Implications are particularly bad for most music artists, as they will find it harder to earn money from selling content. Particularly at the medium to low volume end, this can profoundly affect the market, as far fewer people will be able to make a living from their music. At the top end, there will be greater pressure to tailor music for the paying market, which may drive the quality even further down to find a lowest common denominator that sells in sufficient bulk. Yet ultimately the ramifications are not all bad, if you consider the New Zealand model. Being such a small market, the expectations of most New Zealand musicians in the 1980s were not high in an income-earning sense, so in a way they made music with less regard to commercialisation. As a result, New Zealand was a hot-bed of innovation*.

Implications are also bad for advertisers, who will not easily reach people as they pass from a consumer stage of life to an earning, choice-laden lifestyle. Most traditional venues for advertising are ignored, particularly print (however, since the writer was male, he may have understated the appeal of girl's/women's magazines).

Consumer technology in the last couple of decades has been driven by mass commodification of technology, which led to great innovation in areas of affordability, for example home computers and mobile phones. The suggestions are that hardware innovation at the consumer end will continue to be focused on mobiles, computers and gaming.

The report was written in London by Matthew Robson for Morgan Stanley, and can be read here.


*spoken in a past tense because I have no recent knowledge of that market.