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How Engineers and Scientists Cluster In the U.S.
First time accepted submitter DERoss writes "The National Science Foundation has published a research paper titled Regional Concentrations of Scientists and Engineers In the United States. The lead paragraph contains the sentence 'The three most populous states — California, Texas, and New York — together accounted for more than one-fourth of all S&E employment in the United States.' According to the 2010 census, however, those three states also contain more than one-fourth (26.5%) percent of the U.S. population. In other words, there is no concentration beyond how the general population is concentrated." The clustering is studied with finer granularity than the per-state level, though, and the paper names several places (like the Santa Clara area, and Houston) where such jobs are particularly prevalent.
Can someone please explain to me what the point of this is? Even the summary suggests there is no point. The is the worst slow-news-day posting I've ever seen here.
news at 11
highly educated people like to live in areas with good schools, lots of shopping and stuff to do. holy crap, unvbelievable
Has anyone done research on the regional concentration of first posters?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, they live on Goat Island, in the middle of the Goat Sea.
Here's a choropleth map based on the first table. Unfortunately the map generator doesn't seem to handle non-integers, so "1" really means "1.0 to 1.999" and so on.
Engineers cluster where the jobs are. So do most people. We're sort of past the question, which came first, the population or the jobs? Businesses build where they can acquire (1)people (2)space (3)economic benefits (4)access to transportation for goods. That describes most of the urban population centers (although #2 might require building in the suburbs).
The obvious conclusion is that people tend to cluster around scientists and engineers - they follow us wherever we go. Fear our Pied Piper powers!
I've made a table which shows (S&E population percent)/(U.S. population percent)! This is more useful because it shows density of S&E workers in a state population. PDF: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1W_IMAeewo2bVZMYmFkMUN0OTA/edit?usp=sharing
100% of all Scientists and engineers in the U.S. live in the U.S. On a serious note, I thought S&E jobs were located close to the fairchildren and military industrial complex.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Here is an interactive map showing where computer and mathematical occupations are overrepresented.
Ain't nobody got time to read stats.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Federal R&D funding agencies often have to justify why certain states get a disproportional amount of their funding. Information like this can be used to show why some states get a lot more federal funding than others. About 20 years ago I looked at DOD basic research funding per capita. As I recall Mass. got about $50 per person vs. 50 cents for Maine. NSF has a program called EPSCOR to set aside funding just for the have not states.
California might have the average number of engineers but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of them concentrated in the bay area. People concentrate for resource reasons being able to hire or change jobs, being able to locate funding etc. A state the size of California (especially surrounded by low population states) are too big to look at as a whole. You need to be within commuting distance for network affects to be of any use. This is the equivalent of stating that the country side in the 19th century was equally populated with fabric mills even though that clearly wouldn't be the case since they were using water wheels on rivers for power. Zoom out far enough and everyone is average.
The study is about testing a common-sense assumption. As other's have pointed out the study has basically confirmed that "a bear shits in the woods". But that's what most science is about, identifying a common-sense assumption that does not hold up under scrutiny, eg "time and space are constants". As in most cases, the common-sense assumption was upheld in this study. Sure it's not very interesting as a news story, but make no mistake, there is a point.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
1 - watch the movie "Real Genius"
2 - read some [expletive deleted] history
3 - read the "military industrial complex" speech, two or three time as a minimum
4 - watch "samaratin snare"
Then answer the question please, are you a Pakled?
To quote "Red" - dumbass - it is where the easy money is.
http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
For Graham, it's mainly about two things: nerds (that create tech startups) and rich people (that invest in said startups):
"I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.
Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full of rich people, it has few nerds. It's not the kind of place nerds like.
Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley. But Carnegie-Mellon? The record skips at that point. Lower down the list, the University of Washington yielded a high-tech community in Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin yielded one in Austin. But what happened in Pittsburgh? And in Ithaca, home of Cornell, which is also high on the list?"