Category Archives: Science

The true size of Africa

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Last week, I saw this very interesting image posted on Facebook. It shows the true size of Africa! I thought I had a clue… obviously I don’t. Africa is as big as big parts of Europe, China, the US, India, Japan and the UK combined! The map shows countries by their area in square kilometers, and then fitted into Africa’s borders.

The map is created by Kai Krause as means of combating immapancy, or insufficient geographical literacy. Something, I’m sure, most of us suffer from.

Our perception that Africa is much smaller remains from a seemingly outdated mapping project, The Mercator Projection from - 1569! Read more under Uses, (more myths!) regarding the Marcator Projection. Google Maps and other similar services are based on a variant of the Mercator Projection. This is how we view the world - and it’s WRONG!

Read more here and here. Some critique here.

Ahhrgg! All these myths that we surround ourselves with, and base our world view on, REALLY bug me…

xo,

Evelina

Starting to spread the word about our research

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I’m very excited to announce that we (as in Michael Bauer-Leeb and I) are preparing to go out and talk about our research on facilitating business relationships between social entrepreneurs and business angels.

This is what I dreamt about all last year, during the reading and writing, to tell people about our findings. And perhaps more importantly – to engage in dialogue on how to develop the sphere of social entrepreneurship. And definitely most important – to conduct better business in order to take better care of ourselves and our planet.

Here are some of the topics we’re going to talk about.

  • What is social entrepreneurship (and why it is so difficult to define), and its role in the currently changing economic paradigms.
  • How to enhance communication between social entrepreneurs and investors and increase social entrepreneurs’ chances of finding an investor.
  • Differences between social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship.
  • How can my business benefit from including social and environmental, along side profit seeking in the core business.

Read more over at The Good Tribe.

Let me know if you have any interesting and fun people we should talk to! :)

In general I’m very proud to say that there’s loooootttss of stuff happening behind the scenes in The Good Tribe right now. Stay tuned!

Have a great weekend!

xo,

Evelina

Photo: Rupert Pessl

The world changed the last 30 years. Time to get an update!?

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The other day rock star statistician Hans Rosling published a column in Dagens Nyheter (one of the biggest Swedish daily newspapers). Hans Rosling establishes, based on a recent poll, that the Swedes’ world view is based on what the world looked like 20-30 years ago. That’s very bad indeed. (Ping Swedish schools and media!)

Hans Rosling points out that nor is there a division between industrial countries on the one hand side, and developing countries on the other, neither is there an ongoing population explosion. The division isn’t valid anymore (it was valid in the 1960′s) since more than half of the world’s population live on middle-income countries. And the population explosion happened 20 years ago, nowadays population growth, globally seen is rather stable.

Hans Rosling also advocates that foreign aid should be redirected to reach the 2 billion  poorest in the world to secure a “healthy, knowledgable, and stable” population.


Hans Rosling’s initiative Gapminder is great for learning more about child nativity, population growth, literacy, life expectancy etc. 

Hans Rosling’s washing machine story is epic! Thank you washing machine for my, and many other women’s freedom! 

xo,

Evelina

Board games similar to maths?

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From yesterday evening’s round of Pandemic when we managed to save the world. The round after we lost… I think we were a bit too new year’s tired. But it was great fun anyway!

I’m really not a board game gal. When somebody talks about Settlers or Dragons… what ever it’s called… I can’t even pretend that I’m interested. It just bores me to death. The games take hours and hours, and I can think of a million other things that are more fun to do than to wait for somebody to conquer some fictional part of the planet.

But believe it or not, something like a year ago somebody introduced me to a game that I happen to really like, Pandemic. It’s a collaborative game, where the goal is to save the world from a pandemic. (Anybody surprised that I like it? Collaboration! Save the world!) All players work together to come up with the best strategy to combat disease, find cures and heal infected populations. There are quite a few rules to learn, but ones you have them it’s easy to understand. There are many ways to loose the game, and outbreak of different viruses can happen extremely fast. So the game is quick, and you have to keep track of all parameters at all times. Full focus is a must! I can really recommend Pandemic for some spare time fun with family and friends.

A few weeks ago Rupi and I were invited to play some board game with witches, thieves and whatnot together with some friends and friends of friends. The people were all fun and friendly. One girl (super pro player of everything board game for sure) sat next to me and tried to explain the rules to me. Actually she had to explain them over and over again, and I still didn’t get it. I felt extremely stressed out, because the information just wouldn’t stick. Afterwards when I though about my stress, and inability to remember and understand what she had just told me, I realized I react exactly the same way most often when somebody tries to explain some new maths example to me. I hear them talking, extremely stressed out I nod and say “yes, I understand”. Two seconds later when I’m alone with the example my mind turns blank, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. Perhaps board game rules and maths are somehow in the same part of my brain…


The winning team! Typical Austrian photo ;) Lined up people, showing off what they’ve accomplished.

xo,

Evelina

Jill studies her own stroke

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There are so many amazing speeches on TED. I got the tip listening to this one from a radio podcast with Fredrik Härén, a swedish author.

Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist who got a stroke. In the speech she tells her story of investigating the stroke from the inside with a scientist’s eyes. A beautiful and important speech! Who do we choose to be!?