How Engineers and Scientists Cluster In the U.S. 79
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.
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Has anyone done research on the regional concentration of first posters?
Re:first ! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, they live on Goat Island, in the middle of the Goat Sea.
What is the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: What is the point? (Score:1)
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It's the same place.
Probably why the GP said "are a leading cluster" instead of "are leading clusters".
Re: What is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's true to some extent, but lots of places have gotten some federal spending (both legitimate and pork). The DC area is an endless hog trough.
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You need to have rules of debate that ban sneaking non related items into the motion which is how a lot of the worst pork gets passed.
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Yes she was, but it was so secret at the time that she couldn't reveal what she was doing.
Almost as importantly, almost all of Fairchild's very early IC production was sold to the military.
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history of "engineering" - Da Vinci et. al. (Score:1)
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.
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DC, Maryland, and Virginia are a leading cluster.
If you drill down, you will see that "social sciences" are included, which is what boosts this cluster. Including "social" as a science fails the whole thing. They might as well have included the Dismal Science.
In related news ... (Score:3)
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The is the worst slow-news-day posting I've ever seen here.
Stick around a few more days; you'll see worse.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Funny)
stick around a few days and see the dupes of the worst
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The point is.... (Score:3)
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [xkcd.com].
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But then, even at the end of his post, Krugman concedes that there's not much point to the analysis.
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The summary is wrong. The submitter even contradicts himself. He states that the four biggest states do not have a population-representative number of scientists and engineers, implying there is clustering not in those states, then insists there is no clustering.
Re: What is the point? (Score:2)
What ever the case, IBM's three state side research centers are located in... wait for it...
IBM Research - Almaden: San Jose, California
IBM Research - Austin: Austin, Texas
IBM Research - Watson: Yorktown Heights, New York
For anyone who hasn't been to Austin, it's call Silicon Hills for a reason. Texas (Austin, Dallas, Ft Worth) is the second largest tech epicenter behind California. The rest of the jobs are in the DC / New York area, typically government contracts. These three places (CA, TX, NY/DC/
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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
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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.
Can someone please explain to me what the point of this is?
The terse answer is, beyond your grasp.
The sarcastic answer is, up an MBA's (More Bean-counting Assholes) ass.
A more realist answer, from my pointless of view is, sitting in an office somewhere away from the harsh realities of the field. Hence the name field engineer.
I'm sure there are good engineers out there, somewhere, maybe, but, if you want to find them, you need to look for them in their natural habitat, the field. Not in an office, although you will find them there. Not in a boardroom, though, the
engineers like to live in civilization (Score:3)
news at 11
highly educated people like to live in areas with good schools, lots of shopping and stuff to do. holy crap, unvbelievable
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Visualising concentration (Score:1)
where the jobs are (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:where the jobs are (Score:5, Interesting)
Businesses build where they can acquire (1)people (2)space (3)economic benefits (4)access to transportation for goods.
You forgot #5: happenstance. The best explanation for why Silicon Valley is where it is, is that Bill Shockley's mother lived there. He could have started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories almost anywhere he wanted, and either New Jersey or SoCal would have made more sense. Seattle became a big tech hub because Gates and Allen were from there, and they missed home more than they liked New Mexico.
Re:where the jobs are (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also the weather and demographics (especially crime rate) matters. The University of Illinois system, along with leading businesses in the region and nationwide, trying to recreate another "Silicon Valley" in the Chicago area, but to no avail. You get the money, you get the infrastructure, you get the people, people rather go elsewhere.
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As someone from Chicago, I can concur with this. The best schools in the state are Northwestern, UoChicago, and UoIllinois Urbana. UoC could arguably be the best school we have but is in the middle of the south side ghetto. UoI is in the middle of state and nothing but farm fields. NW is on the north side of the city and tends to feed Abbott and UOP and such, but nothing of a STEM cluster that pulls people in. And Chicago is as liberal if not more that SF.
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there have been a number of analysis done which showed that without the support of people who happened to be living in the San Francisco bay area, and the liberal support of the University of California system, Silicon Valley could not have happened
That's probably true, but there was nothing unique about the bay area when SV got started. Many other places had/have good universities, and most of the people who started SV weren't even from that area. The "gang of eight", for example, were all people who moved there because they got jobs at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories.
Attempts to replicate it have failed due to a lack of the right people or lack of economic support.
Or because Shockley and his mom are dead. It was really the IC that made SV, and inventions like that don't come along very often.
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fair enough. I can't argue with that; although, there have been a number of analysis done which showed that without the support of people who happened to be living in the San Francisco bay area, and the liberal support of the University of California system, Silicon Valley could not have happened. Attempts to replicate it have failed due to a lack of the right people or lack of economic support.
It's a mostly forgotten fact that the Sun in Sun Microsystems was from Stanford University Network.
Obligatory Paul Graham reference (Score:3)
http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html [paulgraham.com]
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?"
No No! - wrong way around! (Score:5, Funny)
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If they're not nice to us, we could lead everyone over a cliff. Errr, who goes first in that scenario?
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More useful data for us. (Score:1)
Statistics are pretty (Score:3)
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 [wikipedia.org] and military industrial complex.
Interactive map (Score:5, Informative)
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Fantastic link. That's much more useful than TFA.
Zooming down from a national view to the valley is a perfect example of how that map is useful. CA as a whole shows up as about average nationally. Zoom in a little, and Santa Clara County is a bright spot pulling most of the weight for the whole state. Zoom in further, and you can identify the tech mini-corridors like the Sunnyvale/Cupertino/Mountain View triangle (software-heavy), the North 1st Street chunk (hardware heavy), and SOMA (the app-development he
Put it in an infographic (Score:2)
Ain't nobody got time to read stats.
Federal Funding (Score:3)
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.
states too big a measure (Score:2)
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