To continue what was talked about at the end of class today,
I thought that I would post some examples of where hard to visualize data was
shown easily.
If there was ever a person that has figured out how to
describe big data it was Professor Neil DeGrasse Tyson . In the video below he
rebuffs a comment about not affording NASA using three great visualizations:
- He says that the federal budget of the United States is 3.something trillion dollars. To give some perspective, if you started counting today and counted one number per second every second of the day, you would hit one trillion in one thousand years.
- The NASA budget, from its foundation till his statement, it was less that the bailout of the US banking system.
- The NASA budget in percentage of the federal budget is 0.4% or as he explains: four tenths of a penny of the American tax dollar. Better still if you were going to cut that percentage off a dollar bill horizontally, it wouldn’t touch the ink.
The video can be found at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i2QDpGRQKc
In this theme I thought that I would give a little insight
into the sequestration that just took effect. Here a few examples that have an
effect on Auburn
- One of the things the White House has said that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would haft to reduce onsite inspections by 1,200 a year. I couldn’t find the number of inspections for 2012 but in 2011 OHSA did 40,648 inspections. So this doesn’t sound like much. But to think about the sayings there, if ten sheets of paper are created in a single inspection, you saved 672 pounds of paper or the equivalent of 4 trees.
- The White House has also stated that because of the sequestration, the National Science Foundation will issue fewer research grants affecting 12,000 scientists and students. The foretasted number of scientist and research involved in NSF funded research for the 2013 fiscal year was 148,020. This means that this reduction accounts for only 8.1%. To put that in perspective a little, that’s like taking the town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota and telling all of the public High School and Middle School students that because of budget cuts they can no longer go to school.
- Maybe a little easier to make an example still related to education, the White House has said that 70,000 young children would be kicked off Head Start, 10,000 teacher jobs would be put at risk, and funding for up to 7,200 special education teachers, aides, and staff could be cut. That's the equivalent of as many people that fit in the stands of Jordan Hare Stadium.
http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2013/pdf/05_fy2013.pdf
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/08/fact-sheet-examples-how-sequester-would-impact-middle-class-families-job
http://www.osha.gov/oshstats/commonstats.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_Falls,_South_Dakota
Joshua,
ReplyDeleteGreat post. Thank you for the insights on the sequestration and for sharing the video.
Fadel