Hans Rosling gave the opening address at the 2007 it@cork Technology in Business Conference.
His talk was incredibly eye opening as the Trendalyzer software he developed shows how the world is “double inversely logarithmically unjust”.
Watch and enjoy!
I generated this graph on Prof Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org site.
The data shows, somewhat surprisingly that the increase in carbon emissions in countries like Ireland and the US from 1975 to 2002 are not in any way mirrored by any increases in China or India.
In the recent Bali talks (and the Kyoto talks before that) the US held up the developing countries as major polluters and refused to sign Kyoto (and created all kinds of fuss at Bali) because of the amounts of pollution being emitted by developing countries.
This is obviously delaying tactics for Bush’s friends in the oil business in Texas and Saudi. The US Ambassador to Ireland conceded that China may exceed the US’s total emissions in 2008. Compare the income per capita between the US and China again and even if Chinese total emissions do exceed the US in 2008, they are still far less polluting per capita than the US.
And the Chinese were looking for a stronger agreement at Bali than the US.
The sooner Bush and his oil cronies are out of office, the sooner we can move on with trying to clean up the planet.
After last year’s Le Web3 experience, my expectations for this year’s Le Web3 were very low!
However, Loic, the conference’s organiser obviously took all of the criticisms of last year’s conference on board and delivered a fantastic conference this time out.
The talks were great, the venue was perfect, the food was delicious, and the networking opportunities were tremendous. I had conversations with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, Stephanie Booth, Hans Rosling, Loic, Lee Wilkins, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Laura Fitton, Dave Sifry, Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Dave Weinberger, Om Malik, Rodrigo Sepulveda and many more too numerous to mention.
There were one or two minor issues, the wifi was poor but as Loic had contracted and paid Swisscom to make that work the fault for that is squarely on their shoulders.
From a speakers’ perspective I was surprised that the organisation charged with the AV only had a single wireless mic. This delayed my getting onstage as I had to wait while Janus Friis came offstage and had his mic removed before I could mic up and go on. Even more incredibly though, the AV crowd didn’t have a wireless ‘clicker’ to move the slides forward! This meant that I had to stand at the podium pressing the right-arrow key on my laptop to move the slides on! I like to walk around when I am giving a talk so this really interfered with my ability to be natural onstage.
Other than those minor issues, the conference was a roaring success. I didn’t hear any delegates say that they were disappointed that they had attended.
Kudos to Loic, Geraldine, Cathy Burke and their team.
Last Wednesday I had the very great pleasure of collecting Prof. Hans Rosling from the airport to bring him to the it@cork conference (where he kicked off the day with an inspirational presentation).
In the car, on the way to the conference though Prof Rosling made a comment which I thought was extremely unusual for a university professor. We were discussing someone he knew who has been successful despite not having finished his formal education when he said “Education only hampers learning”!
I think it is safe to say this is quite an unconventional view for a professional educator!
As Chair of the organising committee for this year’s it@cork Technology in Business Conference, I’m delighted to announce that the program has been announced and registrations are now open.
The conference is on the 28th of November in the Radisson, Little Island. This year’s theme is Connect and Innovate and we have a spectacular line-up of speakers including
Early registrants will have their name entered into a draw for free copies of Wikinomics.