2017 Forbes Wealthiest Americans

October 21, 2017 at 5:14 am · Filed under Lists

This latest iteration features the 400 wealthiest people in the country; Bill Gates leads the list again as he has now done for almost a quarter of a century. Each entry presents biographical tidbits along with the individual’s ranking on other Forbes-generated lists. You can filter the list by age, sex, industries, or states (here is the New Jersey result) as well as searching by company name; for example, how many billionaires from Google are on the list. Another feature of interest is the ability to track their wealth on a real-time basis.

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Jersey City Scores 100% on “Municipal Equality Index”

October 20, 2017 at 9:52 am · Filed under Jersey City, Surveys

“The Municipal Equality Index examines how inclusive municipal laws, policies, and services are of LGBTQ people who live and work there. Cities are rated based on non-discrimination laws, the municipality as an employer, municipal services, law enforcement and the city leadership’s public position on equality.” Forty-four separate criteria are used in this survey of 506 cities. Jersey City in the only municipality in the state to receive the top rating.

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Terrorism in Great Britain

October 19, 2017 at 6:54 am · Filed under Security

Terrorism in Great Britain: the statistics presents a brief background to events leading up to its enactment of the Terrorism Act 2000.  It then proceeds to enumerate the various instances of terrorism as extracted from the Global Terrorism Database that pertain to Great Britain as well as detailed information of the perpetrators. The dates of coverage run from 2001/02 through 2016/17. A plethora of data are presented succinctly.

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The Moon Once Had an Atmosphere

October 18, 2017 at 6:29 am · Filed under Science

It may not have been breathable, but it was once surrounded by a blanket of gas. That is according to this recent article – Lunar volcanism produced a transient atmosphere around the ancient Moon – from Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

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Senator John McCain’s Speech in Philadelphia

October 17, 2017 at 1:23 pm · Filed under Awards, Government, Speeches

Here is an excerpt:

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

A video of his full speech is here.

 

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Latest Data on College Graduation Rates, Financial Aid, and Admissions

October 17, 2017 at 10:00 am · Filed under Education, Statistics

This impressively entitled NCES report –Graduation Rates for Selected Cohorts, 2008-13; Outlook Measures for Cohort Year 2008; Student Financial Aid, Academic Year 2015-16; and Admissions, Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2016 – presents nationally aggregated data on the above topics. For the first time, part-time and transfer students are included in tracking completion rates of 100%, 150%, and 200%. (Please read Expanding College Success Rates to Reflect Today’s College Students. It explains the rationale for inclusion of part-time and transfer students thusly :”…over the past decade, the number of non-traditional students has outpaced the increase in traditional students, mostly driven by growth in those who have transferred schools.”)

Types of financial aid are listed along with the average amount of the award, and the all-important net price of attending college.

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Earthquakes Caused by Human Activity

October 17, 2017 at 6:43 am · Filed under Databases, geology

It’s bad enough when earthquakes occur naturally (and if you have lived though a bad temblor, you’ll know what I mean), but with various extraction industries boring into the earth and in certain cases injecting material, it is no wonder that humans now cause some earthquakes. The Human-Induced Earthquake Database, hosted by Dunham University (UK), presents an interactive map tracing these anthropogenic disturbances. Each incident report includes the year, the magnitude of the quake, the magnitude type, and what caused it in the first place.

This accepted manuscript for Earth-Science Reviews – Global review of human-induced earthquakes – presents the scientific scaffolding for this database. Other links of interest include: Risk of Human-Triggered Earthquakes Laid Out in Biggest-Ever Database (Scientific American); Induced Earthquakes (US Geological Survey); Injection Induced Earthquakes (Science); Induced Seismicity Potential in
Energy Technologies (National Academies Press); 2017 One-Year Seismic Hazard Forecast for the Central and Eastern United States from Induced and Natural Earthquakes (USGS); and Triggered Earthquakes (Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. N.B. This is from 1986 so this topic is not as new as some may believe; in fact, the bibliography attached to this piece has relevant references dating back to the 1940s.)

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