I'm a big fan of Hans Rosling and his Gapminder, but even his wonderful graphics program falls under the old GIGO rule, i.e. Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.
Take a look at this graph of the U.S. population (and click on the link below to work with it!) 
The U.S. population
Now, follow this link so that you can compare it with the first graph.
The immigrant population in the U.S.
Pull the slider on the first graph all away to the left, and watch what happens. The entire population disappears. Isn't that strange? What happened to the native population, i.e. the American Indians? You could say that well, they were not part of the U.S. population, but then again, why do we count the non-citizen immigrants in the second graph?
There is only so much an automatic tool can do. You still need human judgement to get it right. I'd like to see an updated map where we can see the shrinking native population as the first few rounds of (mostly European) immigrants arrive and spread. It would be a more disturbing picture, which is often the case with the truth.
Hans Sandberg
4 days ago
3 comments:
Dear Hans,
Thank you for alerting about the lack of specifications on the axis about what population the numbers reefers to. We agree that it would have been best to show the native population, but we have not found any such time series. Gapminder only have the resources to display existing dataset and make them freely available. We will consider the terminology and info in the toll tip for population, and eagerly wait for information on where we can access estimations of the native population per state.
Kind regards Hans Rosling, Gapminder.
Dear Hans,
I understand that Gapminder depends on available public data, which as you have shown in your presentations can do wonders for our understanding of complex data, but the raw data are not allways there and not allways collected in an optimal way. Gapminder is still a great tool.
All the best,
Hans
Dear Hans Sandberg,
Thanks a lot for your feedback. Now we have changed the name of the indicator (US citizens), and also added some explanations in the tooltip bar, which could be seen when you hover your mouse on the indicator.
If you need further information about historical population of the United States, please have a look at this link:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pp59adS3CHWdzxSyMtIkLXA&gid=2
Best regards!
Zhang from Gapminder
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