I'd like to consider myself pretty passionate about learning about the world and I thought that I was doing decent job by traveling, talking, meeting people from different cultures, etc. While all of these things are very important in developing an accurate perspective, my viewpoint is still skewed by preconceived notions and it is still very difficult to see the big picture when one can only be exposed to a relatively small view of an new environment and is left to form an opinion from that experience. That is why it is important to also understand the actual facts from behind the scenes - facts which are usually hidden in survey, statistics, and databases which one must search for, aggregate, normalize, visualize, etc, etc - things the average person isn't going to do or be interested in.
Earlier this morning I watched a lecture by Hans Rosling, a Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of the Gapminder Foundation. He gives an amazing demonstration of a statistical visualization software which he has helped developed for the purpose of "Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view." After watching his lecture I was really blown away at the potential for this type of data visualization in the energy field and haven't gotten a single thing done today besides read about Gapminder.
I encourage you to spend twenty minutes to check out the lecture - it's well worth it.
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