Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Knowing where the engineers cluster, and why, can help plan industries or plan job hunting. The clustering also strongly affects engineer salaries and competitive skills, and where to plan conferences of engineering or computer science. And fine granularity can be very helpful for start-up companies, advancing to mid-size companies, who need a larger pool of qualified employees as they move to larger offices.
Conversely, knowing where the _managers_ like to work is important as well. I know competent engineers who literally can get nothing done because their managers call them in for 3 or 4 meetings on the same day, demanding status reports on the projects the engineers would be working on if they weren't in meetings. This is partly because they are in cramped offices where the managers can reach them too easily and keep trying to micromanage the engineers, asking "when will you have a fix for this" and recording it on Gant charts.
Yes, they live on Goat Island, in the middle of the Goat Sea.
stick around a few days and see the dupes of the worst
Can someone please explain to me what the point of this is?
The point is to give someone an excuse to post a link to the relevant xkcd.
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!
by this measure, DC, Maryland, and Virginia are a leading cluster
It's called "pork". I frequently travel to the Rockville-Gaithersburg-Germantown corridor of Maryland on business, and I never fail to be amazed just how much STEM work is there, and in nearby areas, mostly sucking off the government teat. I know it extends well beyond STEM, but that's the part of it that's most visible to me. It's nice to know the rest of the country's tax dollars are going towards keeping the people there fat and happy, while most of the rest of the country limps along.
The summary says that there is no state-level clustering shown by the 3 most populous states, not that there is no clustering whatsoever. (I think the main implication is that these states are so large that they behave like they are more than one state.)
Table 1 shows 4.1% of all workers across the country are in science and engineering, and the spread for NY, CA and TX is 3.6-4.9, so they're pretty close. However, there are other states that stray quite far from this, such as Mississippi at 1.7% to DC at 10.7%.
The paper then goes on to suggest that there may be clustering at the municipal level or by field, but unfortunately does not show the "intensity" figures for those cases.
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.
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.
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.
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?"