Hans Rosling on Poverty and Life Around the World

Instructor Peter Cho recently shared this TED talk with us in our Communication Design 3 class. Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute spoke at the TED conference in 2007 about poverty around the world and what countries are doing to get themselves out of it. The entire talk was profound, but what was great was how Rosling demonstrated the visual data, using his own cheerful and humorous personality and visual graphic animations to contextualize poverty changes over the year.

You can listen or watch his talk at TED.com as well as read more about Rosling himself.

In general, TED.com is one of my most highly recommended sites to listen to just about anything intelligent and inspiring. If you want to know of a place where you can listen to bunch of smart people, look no further.

San Francisco Center Directory goes Interactive!

I was home in San Francisco for part of my break and decided to go shopping at the recently rennovated San Francisco Center in Downtown San Francisco. I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) there 1) to be a better environmental citizen and 2) because the BART conveniently makes a stop right under the mall. How convenient is that?

On my way out, I saw one of the Directories and noticed it wasn’t your standard stagnant printed directory – it was the iDirectory. It came equipped with a sleek touch screen interface (think of a giant iPhone screen) that could help you find what you needed at the huge mall. What more, the BART train schedule and map was available for viewing.

Nice!