Brian and his co-founder Dmitry Dimov also discuss company and data-related news on their official company blog Swivel This, where Brian recently posted a great TED talk video by Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and founder of the non-profit international health data site gapminder.org. Hans' animated slides, which you can download, put most academic science talks to shame.

In his talk, Hans says the problem with publicly-funded databases is that people charge a lot of money for them (to build or to access?), require "stupid passwords" and provide "boring statistics." I would also add that ivory-tower types like to pretend that anyone without a Ph.D. isn't mentally capable of analyzing scientific data and use that as a justification for dragging their feet when it comes to providing data access to the public. I personally would love to see private citizens writing their own research papers and putting them up for peer-review on sites like PLoS ONE. In addition, considering that roughly half of Ph.D.'s don't go into academia after graduation, there are potentially a lot of Ph.D.'s out there with scientific training who could make very good use of publicly available scientific databases. Do you really need to belong to an institute to do great research? Einstein himself did his best work while working as a patent clerk.