All posts by Sebastian Lacoss

Cleaned Data Charts

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_SyG7DYP2z2_vFuKPFZzfrgtO47I2x1gHiognl10Fgo/edit?usp=sharing

This particular chart , whose data comes from from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF , shows the population of all students from  the 23005 area code above the age of 3 who are enrolled in some sort of school program. Each grade group is represented by a different color on the pie chart, ranging from preschool and daycare, all the way to graduate and professional programs. As you can see, the college undergraduate section has the most students enrolled with high school coming in second, and nursery school having the lowest enrollment.

I chose this particular dataset because I am from this area, and was curious to see how many students were enrolled in the local schools. Deciding that it looked the best our of all justifications, I aligned the  legend to the right of the pie chart. I chose a pie chart because I wanted to see groups as part of a whole, rather than just as numbers. In addition to this, I chose not to put the numbers directly on the pie chart, as it would have been too crowded with them. These exact figures may be viewed by clicking on the chart, and mousing over each individual piece.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L4cYfjfyyD8c8RqB5yxAFeBoc6N8yNutQYQE9ulUoAk/edit?usp=sharing

This chart’s data came from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF , and it showcases the number of people in each age group from 0 to 90+. This data is more specifically from the 23005 area code, which, as I mentioned before, is where I am from. The group with the most people in this area are between 19 and 24 years of age, which makes my other chart make a lot of sense. If most people attending school in the area are college undergraduates, then it makes sense that many people who live in the vicinity would be 19 to 24 years old, as most undergraduate students are between 18 and 22 years of age.

I chose to leave the legend on the bottom this time so that readers would not have to keep looking back and forth between the legend and the meat of the chart, if you will. I honestly chose the blue because I liked it. I wanted to use red, but red is such a violent color that it is not appealing on such a busy chart. The blue is a cool color, and is pleasing to the eye. I used a bar graph here because I was not interested in parts of a whole as much as I was the actual numbers. For this, I wanted to know the exact number of each age group.

Shots in the Dark for Students

 

The US Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos is now considering allowing federal funds, which are meant to be used for the enrichment of students, to be used to purchase firearms.  Putting guns is schools is said to be for the safety of the students. I, however, disagree. I firmly believe that arming teachers would not only be fruitless for preventing school shootings, but cause more harm than anything else. Arming teachers could potentially give students access to guns, all they would have to do is  know where the firearms are kept, and then sneak the guns away from their teachers. Furthermore, teachers are supposed to make students feel safe, not like their instructor could kill another student, if they really wanted to. The aforementioned funds are intended to aid the education of our nation’s young minds, not create an impression of militarization in our already overly-armed, aggressive country.