There is so much pain and suffering in today’s world, it is not uncommon that people in need may go unnoticed due to overshandowing of more successful societies.
Selim Jahan starts out by giving his definition of human development which is the process of enlarging human choices. Some of the issues he discusses that need to be focused on are child and gender labor. Another issue he covers is the difference between employment/jobs and work. He says that we should focus more on work rather than employment. Work can include care work or voluntary work. These can take place after a crisis or any other time where work is needed and the perosn is not compensated for their work. Feeding off of his earlier definition of human development he also says that human capabilities must be enhanced and in turn create opportunities with those capabilities. The different measures incorporated into the Human Development Index according to Jahan are a long healthy life, knowledge, and decent standard of living. Rosling, on the other hand, uses several examples to support his claim that health was a precursor to wealth. He was using a data program which showed a countries age expectancy on one axis and their average wealth on the other axis. To his point the countries that gained more wealth over the years started at a higher age expectancy. His data also showed a much faster movement to higher wealth in countries where they were already healthy. The countries that had bad health to start still moved upward on the wealth axis, but at a much slower rate. Rosling’s warning about using averages when describing development was that within a country, there can be a vast difference between certain cities. A country may seem like it is doing well because the average says so, when in reality there could be many groups of people living in poverty. This is dangerous because some people may go unnoticed due to their data being thrown into the aggregate of higher income societies.
Between the two data scientists, Jahan and Rosling, there are some certain similarities in their goals and methods. One part of Rosling’s talk that sounded like Jahan was when he was talking about losing data in the aggregate. This was similar to Jahan because they both see the importance of getting help to societies that actually need it. They both care deeply about this subject and it shows in both of their talks. One difference in the two talks was that Rosling focused a lot more on data available to him to prove his points. Jahan on the other hand focused more on concepts and his beliefs to get his point accross. An example of this is when he explained the difference between work and jobs.
The two talks by both men are important because they are trying to change the way we see big data and how to help those who are in need rather than those who don’t need it.