This Gapminder chart graphs the number of children per woman against the percentage of the population with access to clean water.

Have you ever wondered if the quality of a child's teeth is related to the GDP per capita of his or her country?

Thanks to a Swedish website called Gapminder, you now have the chance to find out — and to discover stranger correlations yet. The site gives users the chance to create graphs of everything from fertility to the number of broadband Internet subscribers in a given country. That way, they can explore the ways that these indicators may or may not be connected. The resulting charts make dealing with statistics not only easier than usual, but also a little bit addictive and fun.

Aside from the fun factor, the site is meant to be a serious tool: It aims to support the UN Millennium Development Goals by making relevant statistics more accessible, with data sets drawn from international organizations and corporations ranging from UNESCO to the British oil company BP.

I'm interested in women's issues, for example, and Gapminder makes it enjoyable for me to get an idea of how the average age of a woman when she first marries correlates with the life expectancy in her country. Watching the dots fly across to the screen in a good approximation of a slanted line tells me that the two factors do, in fact, correlate very well. Of course, the golden rule of statistics — that correlation doesn't equal causation — still applies, so I don't know if one of these factors actually caused the other. Did women get married later because they were living longer, or did getting married later contribute to population longevity when fewer women died young in childbirth, for example? Or — as seems more likely — does a population live longer and get married later because it's getting wealthier or more educated? My graph is sworn to silence on such questions, but Gapminder does make it easy for me to investigate further with a new chart and a different measurement, like GDP or education levels.

There are more caveats, too. Data isn't available for all years on all topics in all countries, partly because the data sets come from such disparate organizations and partly because these organizations weren't always around to do the counting. If you want to know how GDP per capita correlated with infant mortality in the early 1800s, you'll only have two countries to compare — Sweden and Austria. And any data set is only as good as the government or organization that collects it: a notice on the website points out that their population numbers for the U.S. before 1900 include neither African Americans nor Native Americans.

By providing open access to a tool that makes analyzing statistics easier, Gapminder is helping make such data more democratic, more transparent, and, perhaps, a little more honest.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs spearheaded the Millennium Village Project to create sustainable economies in villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Photo: kevin813 (flickr)

If you had millions in cash and a team of some of the most brilliant minds in development, could you transform a poor African village's extreme poverty to a viable economy in five years?

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) is trying to do just that. It is the ambitious, high-profile development initiative spearheaded by economist Jeffrey Sachs in 2004. Today the Millennium Village Project operates in 13 sites across sub-Saharan Africa. Each site has tailored projects aimed at improving health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, and commercial business, and relies heavily on local participation. According to their website, MVP says that by 2011 their role will shift from financing and implementing projects, to a more advisory one.

Jeff Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, recently visited one MVP site comprised of 11 rural villages in the Koraro region of Ethiopia. While he was there he wrote about his experience for the Nicholas Kristof's On the Ground blog.

Of the several posts he wrote, the "Sustainability Factor" was by far the most interesting to me. The MVP acknowledges that sustainability is crucial to success, but these villages aren't self-sufficient despite several years of support. Though Marlow found that huge gains were made in education and health, economic sustainability remains elusive:

What began as a five year initiative to end extreme poverty and send the Millennium Villages on their way toward further economic development has now ballooned into at least a 10-year program with no clear end in sight....

It’s hard to deny that the quality of life in Koraro has increased substantially: disease rates have plummeted, crop yields have gone up, and children are attending school at unprecedented levels. Does this mean the Project will accomplish its lofty goals and, as Sachs puts it, “end the dependency on help and create the kind of breakthroughs that will have a transformative effect on the world”? ...The Project faces fundamentally different challenges in scaling up and moving out than it has seemingly overcome in raising crop yields and cutting disease rates.

It looks like the millions in cash, brilliant minds, and local determination haven't succeeded in creating sustainable economic growth for these 11 villages. Maybe another five years will make the difference? We can only hope so.

Keeping with a UN target of committing 0.7 percent of national income to alleviating poverty and hunger, Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero the prime minister of Spain has pledged 1 billion euros to strengthen food security around the world.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the global food crisis has increased the number of hungry people to "an intolerable 1 billion."

Spain is giving a billion for a billion. Check out how other countries measure up at the Millennium Development Goals Monitor.