Tag: real data source

Influence Explorer: Data on Campaign Contributions by Politician and by Major Contributors

Influence Explorer is an excellent resource for assessing data about money in politics.

The website Influence Explorer has a lot of easily accessible data about the contributions of companies and prominent people to lawmakers. As a resource for civics research it’s really nice, but the time series data also makes it a useful resource for math; algebra and pre-calculus, in particular.

Ecological Footprints: If the World Lived Like …

What if the entire world population lived like the people in Bangladesh? The amount of land to produce the resources we’d need would take up most of Asia and some of Africa. On the other hand, if we lived like the people in the UAE we’d need 5.4 Earths to support us sustainably. That’s the result of Mathis Wackernagel’s work (Wackernagel, 2006) comparing resource availability to resource demand. Tim De Chant put this data into graphical form:

Ecological footprints needed to support the world population if everyone used resources at the rate of these different countries. Image by Tim De Chant, based on data from Wacknagel (2006).

I showed this image in Environmental Science class today when we talked about ecological footprints, as well as the one showing how much space the world population of seven billion would take up if everyone lived in one big city with the same density of a few different cities (Paris, New York, Houston etc.).

Wacknagel’s original article also includes this useful table of data for different countries that I think I’ll try to get a student to put into bar graph for a project or presentation.

Data from Wackernagel (2006).

↬ Zoë Pollock at The Dish

Snow and Ice Data

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has some interesting data-sets available, including a number of measures of the extent of Arctic sea-ice showing how fast it has been melting.

Current extent of Arctic Ice. Data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Easy-to-use Data Products page has a lot of real data that middle and high school students can use for projects.

Superfund Sites in Your Area – And Other Environmental Cleanups in Your Community

EPA's Cleanups in My Community map for St. Louis and its western suburbs.

Want to find your nearest superfund site? The EPA has an interactive page called, Clean Up My Community, that maps brownfields, hazardous waste, and superfund sites anywhere in the U.S.

Note:

  • Brownfields are places, usually in cities, that can’t be easily re-developed because there’s some existing pollution on the site.
  • Superfund sites are places where there is hazardous pollution that the government is cleaning up because the companies that caused the pollution have gone out of business, or because the government caused the pollution in the first place. The military is probably the biggest source of government pollution, particularly from fuel leaks and radioactive waste.