Development Statistics Geeks of the World, Unite!

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Behold, another super-cool gadget from Google. It’s called Gapminder World, and it was developed by the Gapminder Foundation, which describes itself as “a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development.” You can track almost any country in the world on a chart where you can make the x- and y-axes any one of more than a dozen development indicators. You can color the points differently based on region, or resize them based on population. You can see which countries are making progress and which are lagging behind. You can scale data logarithmically. Basically, it’s the coolest thing I’ve found on Google in a while. That’s saying something.

Just check it out.

— Nick Baumann

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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