Datasets

[UPDATE: i remade the maps in green, hope that helps…] A recent survey reported in Science (“Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, but not in the Classroom”) found that biology teachers in high school do not often accept the basis of their discipline, as do teachers in other disciplines, and thus may not teach evolution appropriately. Read more here: New York Times. I took a little time to play with the data provided online along with the Science article. The data is available on the Science website along with the article, and the dataset I read into R is unchanged from the original. The states abbreviations file is here (as a .xls). Here goes: ...

I recently gathered fish harvest data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administarion (NOAA), which I downloaded from Infochimps. The data is fish harvest by weight and value, by species for 21 years, from 1985 to 2005. Here is a link to a google document of the data I used below. I had to do some minor pocessing in Excel first; thus the link to this data. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aq6aW8n11tS_dFRySXQzYkppLXFaU2F5aC04d19ZS0E&hl=en Get the original data from Infochimps here http://infochimps.com/datasets/domestic-fish-and-shellfish-catch-value-and-price-by-species-198 ...

Okay, so this isn’t ecology related at all, but I like exploring data sets. So here goes… Propublica has some awesome data sets available at their website: http://www.propublica.org/tools/ I played around with their data set on Recovery.gov (see hyperlink below in code). Here’s some figures: Mean award amount, ranked by mean amount, and also categorized by number of grants received (“nfund”) by state (by size and color of point). Yes, there are 56 “states”, which includes things like Northern Marian Islands (MP). Notice that California got the largest number of awards, but the mean award size was relatively small. ...