Sunday, July 6, 2014

The Ignorance Project

I came across the Gapminder Foundation recently and was amazed by the project and shocked at how little I knew. Not wanting to show any more ignorance I'm quoting below directly from the project site.


"
The mission of Gapminder Foundation is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. We started the Ignorance Project to investigate what the public know and don’t know about basic global patterns and macro-trends. We use surveys to ask representative groups of people simple questions about key-aspects of global development.


When we find large knowledge-gaps, we know what teaching materials we should develop. The first results from surveys in UK and Sweden were published in 2013. As the project evolves we will investigate many more countries. The test questions and results will be made freely available under Creative Commons Attribution License.


The Gapminder Foundation started as a spin-off from Professor Hans Rosling’s teaching at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He encountered broad ignorance about the rapid health improvement in Asia. He started measuring the ignorance among students and professors and the surprising results from the so called “Chimpanzee Test” were presented in his first TED-talk in 2006.


Since then, Gapminder has visualized lots of different data and presented it to lots of different people. During that work we have encountered all kinds of pre-conceived ideas and outdated concepts about our contemporary world. Our priorities have been guided by such ignorance-encounters. With the Ignorance Project we have now decided to start a systematic search for widespread ignorance about the world.
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Do visit Gapminder and check out the Gapminder World application. Its fascinating and gives a whole new perspective of presenting complex ideas and thoughts. In a simple, easy to understand way.



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