Age shifts around the world

The world is getting older overall. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby broke it down by country with a set of animated frequency trails, along with charts for more demographic shifts. I like it.

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Good Country Index

The Good Country Index is an effort to highlight and rank the countries that are doing good for the rest of the world. Select the metrics that are pertinent to you, and the ranks adjust accordingly.

I just heard about this project, but it’s been around since 2014. Still relevant.

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Official LEGO world map set

We’ve seen maps made out of LEGO bricks before, but LEGO is about to release an official world map set. And cartographers everywhere rejoiced.

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Posted by in Lego, maps, world

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Inverted world map

Frans Block wondered what the world would look like if water and land were flipped. The deepest spots in the ocean become the highest mountains and the highest mountains become the deepest part of the sea:

It is an extraordinary planet, this inverted world. It has more than twice as much land available as our own Earth. Which does not mean, however, that twice as many people can live there, because only a small part of this surface is green. After all, the rain must come from somewhere.

Particularly Pacifica, almost completely surrounded by high mountain ranges, is one big desert. Great for the fans of desolate stony plains, and I count myself among them. But not very suitable for agriculture.

[via kottke]

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Hans Rosling wrote a book on Factfulness

Hans Rosling was able to build excitement around data like no other. Truth and progress was his rally cry. Before he died, he was working on a book with his Gapminder co-founders Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling. The book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, is out now. Ordered and looking forward to it.

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Global Health Security Agenda

A man waiting in the airport watching a plane take off

The Plan for 2016: CDC and the President’s Global Health Security Agenda

2015 was a powerful reminder that a health threat anywhere is a health threat everywhere.  In 2016, CDC and partners are looking forward to continuing work on the President’s Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), an initiative led by the Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2012, only 1 in 6 countries reported being fully prepared for disease outbreaks. As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa tragically demonstrated, it is often the countries with the fewest resources who are hit hardest by public health emergencies.  To better protect people everywhere, the United States has committed more than $1 billion over the next 5 years to help 31 countries better prepare for the health impacts of natural and man-made disasters.  More than half of this historic investment will focus on the continent of Africa to help prevent future outbreaks.

World map of pixels in gray and light gray
There are 31 GHSA countries: Bangladesh • Burkina Faso • Cameroon • Cambodia • Côte d’Ivoire • Democratic Republic of Congo • Ethiopia • Georgia • Ghana • Guinea • Haiti • India • Indonesia • Jordan • Kazakhstan • Kenya • Laos • Liberia • Malaysia • Mali • Mozambique • Pakistan • Peru • Rwanda • Senegal • Sierra Leone • Tanzania • Thailand • Uganda • Ukraine • Vietnam

Global Health Security Agenda Goals

The vision of GHSA is to stop disease outbreaks as quickly as possible.  Partners will work together to build a global network that can respond rapidly and effectively to disease outbreaks and help countries build their own capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to public health emergencies.

The GHSA focuses on accelerating progress toward a world safe from disease threats by supporting enhanced surveillance and biosecurity systems, immunization campaigns, and curtailing antimicrobial resistance. Establishing national laboratory and disease reporting systems will help detect threats early.  In addition to building epidemiologic and laboratory workforce capacity, GHSA also focuses on incident management system training and establishing emergency operations centers around the globe.

As President Obama said at the Global Health Security Agenda Summit in 2014, “We issued a challenge to ourselves and to all nations of the world to make concrete pledges towards three key goals:  prevent, detect, and respond.  We have to prevent outbreaks by reducing risks.  We need to detect threats immediately wherever they arise.  And we need to respond rapidly and effectively when we see something happening, so that we can save lives and avert even larger outbreaks.”

CDC’s Role in Global Health Security
CDC is improving preparedness and response internationally by building close relationships with ministries of health and other public health partners abroad to encourage public health and emergency management capacity building. The agency also provides GHSA countries with resources such as funds, administrative support, and dedicated personnel, including experts in emergency response, electronic surveillance systems, and specific health threats. CDC also links emergency response efforts to recovery efforts to ensure systems and processes that have been put in place for one response can be ready for the next public health emergency.A person is giving another person a vaccine.

Ebola has reminded us that  to protect its citizens, each country should be equipped with a core set of public health capabilities to detect a threat when it emerges, respond rapidly and effectively, and prevent it wherever possible. All countries need to be prepared, since disease monitoring and emergency response begin at the local level.  Local responses will be quicker, more efficient, and more cost-effective than responding from a great distance. However, epidemics do not stay within borders and are not the problem of individual countries or regions. GHSA is an important step toward helping build capacity in other countries and ensuring that when national capacities are overwhelmed, the world moves immediately and decisively to contain the outbreak.

Statistically ignorant

Immigration

Ipsos MORI, primarily a marketing research group I think, released results of their study on public perception of demographics versus reality, on numbers such as immigration, religion, and life expectancy. The key takeaway is that out of the people they polled from fourteen countries, the average person typically over- or underestimated — by a lot.

This grows to be an issue as officials form policies driven by public perception, which is a similar takeaway from the Gapminder Foundation's Ignorance Project.

The Ipsos MORI study also provides an index of ignorance, placing Italy at the top and the United States at number two. (Interestingly, Sweden, where the Gapminder Foundation is based, is last on the list i.e. lowest ignorance.)

Before you go nuts, remember not to take these ranking estimates too literally. Even though 500 to 1,000 people were surveyed for each country, I'd be curious to hear more about the sampling methodology. Was each country's sample really representative of the population?

I mean, based on the chart above, the average guess for immigration percentage in the United States is 32. So people thought a third of the country's population is from somewhere else? That seems high to me. Or maybe I'm just ignorant about ignorance. [via The Guardian]

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