The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) report, Graduate Enrollment and Degrees 2007 to 2017 (Oct 2018) provides data on enrollment and degrees in graduate school by gender and race. For example, the graph here is Figure 2 in their report and provides enrollment data by field of study and gender. …
Read More »How many ways does NASA use pi?
At least 18 according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA based on the article for pi day — Oh, the Places We Go: 18 Ways NASA Uses Pi. Number 12 on the list: Keeping rover wheels turning: Rover wheels have distinct designs on them that leave patterns on the …
Read More »0 to 6 or 1 to 7, Does it matter?
The Decoded/Pew Research Center article On a scale from 1 to 10, how much to the numbers really matter? by Jonathan Evans reports on their experiment using a 0 to 6 scale and 1 to 7 scale. To carry it out, we randomly assigned respondents in France, Germany and the …
Read More »How do we humanize data?
When comparing countries or even within countries, we can talk about GDP, Gini coefficients, poverty rates, etc., but sometimes (all the time?) it is hard to know what this really means for people. If a picture is worth a 1000 words then Dollar Street has 30,000,000 words as they “visited …
Read More »How important are clouds to our climate?
The Quanta Magazine article, A World Without Clouds A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century by Natalie Wolchover (2/25/19), reports on recent finding published in Nature …
Read More »What is the current information on wages trends?
EPI has released its report: State of Working America Wages 2018, Wage inequality marches on – and is even threatening data reliability by Elise Gould (2/20/19). The report includes 19 tables and charts. The data and charts are easily downloaded, such as the chart here. The report is thorough and …
Read More »What do SSPs have to do with modeling climate change?
The CarbonBrief article Explainer How ‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP)’ explore future climate change by Zeke Hausfather (4/19/18) provides a detailed overview of modeling future climate change based on future societies: The SSPs feature multiple baseline worlds because underlying factors, such as population, technological, and economic growth, could lead to …
Read More »What are the differences in the college aspirations of teens?
Pew reports results of a detailed survey in their article Most U.S. Teens See Anxiety and Depression as a Major Problem Among Their Peers — For boys and girls, day-to-day experiences and future aspirations vary in key ways by Juliana Menasce Horowitz and Nikki Graf (2/20/19). Here, we highlight college …
Read More »What is the peak quarter for utility revenues?
The question is answered in the Census Bureau post Census Bureau Data Show Third Quarter is Peak Time for Electric and Water Utilities by Justin Jarrett (1/5/19). During just this year, U.S. electric utility revenue (NAICS 2211) for the third quarter of 2018 was $137.9 billion, an increase of 20.1 …
Read More »Why should we care about insects?
The Guardian article, Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’ by Damian Carrington (2/10/19) reports on the recent Biological Conservation paper Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers by Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris A.G.Wyckhuys (1/20/19). More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, …
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