In the modern history, the world has seen unprecedented decrease in human mortality – the result of the Demographic Transition. Initially, the improvements occurred only in the most developed societies, and by the mid XX century the world population was roughly divided in two parts according to mortality patterns (see the bi-modal distribution). After the 2nd World War, the developing countries started to catch up, and there was a clear convergence in life expectancy at birth, the most common summary measure of mortality.

Full reproducibility

To reproduce the plot from the scratch please see the gist.

R Documentation at Stack Overflow

One of the nice features of R is the ease of data acquisition. I am now working on the examples of data acquisition form different sources within an R session. Please consider contributing your examples as well to the Data aquisition topic.