In TOK we began to investigate Reason as our Way of Knowing, and how statistics relates to this. Two people came to mind:
Hans Rosling and his website Gapminder.org. Here is an analysis of statistics by Rosling using his website that is similar to the TED Talk we watched in class:
Chris Jordan and his Running the Numbers (An American Self-Portrait) Project. On his website he describes the project:
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
Below is one example, but the experience is best navigated on this website, where you can zoom in on every picture for the full effect.
Plastic Bottles, 2007
Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I find it interesting that in the last 200 years we have been able to get the life expectensy over 40 years, and that only 50 years after the time scale went off that the health was so low, considering that the industry kept growing you would have thought that life would also increase at that same time. What puzzles me the most is how China’s industry went backwards for the first couple of decades then shot up almost to where the United States was in 2009.
The idea of creating a virtual library for statistics is a facinating concept. The idea of being able to search quantitative data like you would qualitative on google would be a true testiment to the versitility of the human mind. I certainly enjoyed entering two countries into the engine and watchin Norway and Lithuania battle it out in a match to the death.
I agree that Gapminder provides dynamic models that allow us to conceptualize something that we cannot with numbers (or maybe some people can, who call themselves statisticians, but not most). In TOK class, I keep trying to allude to the power of models to help us rationalize something that is beyond our ability to conceptualize. The same goes for Chris Jordan’s art project, where he asks questions such as, “What does it look like to use two million plastic beverage bottles every five minutes in the US?” He then attempts at giving us a visual answer that is overwhelming and shocking.