[CapTVK]

Most readers only know him as a statistician, gapminder (which he founded) and the ted talks but he also had a medical background and was prepared to go straight to work during the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia. He called and jumped right in.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/star-statistician-han...

"After he arrived in Monrovia, Rosling started by doing simple things, such as proofreading the ministry's epidemiological reports, which he says nobody had time for. He changed an important detail in the updates: Rather than listing "0 cases" for counties that had not reported any numbers—which could be misleading—he left them blank. Next, he tackled the problem behind the missing data. Some health care workers couldn't afford to call in their reports, because they were paying the phone charges themselves; Rosling set up a small fund to pay for scratch cards that gave them airtime."

Rosling says he's tired of the portrayal of Africa as a continent of incompetence, superstition, and rampant corruption. “I am astonished how good people are that I work with here, how dedicated, how serious,” he says. When The New York Times reported that governmental infighting was hampering the Ebola response, Rosling tweeted: “Don McNeil misrepresents Liberia’s EBOLA-response to win the MOST INCORRECT ARTICLE ABOUT EBOLA AWARD.” His self-assurance and impatience with opinions he disagrees with can grate on others. “I find him quite irritating,” says one Western colleague. “Mostly because he turns out to be right about most things.”

That last line is the ultimate compliment.

He will be missed.

[agumonkey]

The view on Africa is doubly sad I believe, because it reinforces the psychological bias that African immigrants are worthless, coming from natural resource only places; which in turns I'm sure fuels the racism from Caucasians in Europe. Even if a French "hate" an English, he knows the two are similar and so cannot think himself above much.