10/7 Essay: I want to introduce you to another source of sociology-focused data: Our World in Data, founded by Max Roser. Select a topic you are curious about from the dropdown “Articles by topic”. Technological Progress, for example. If the topic is lengthy, you can pick just a graph or two. Two cool things about the site are (1) there are concise descriptions of the topics, definitions of terms, and references; and (2) most ( if not all) the plots have their data available for download as a csv. Their COVID plots are some of the best and up-to-date. This one, for example is robust with its many metrics, but it’s simple and easy to manipulate as well. Similar to 9/30’s essay, write what topic (or graph(s)) you are looking at. Describe what you see. Are there trends? If so, what are they? Does anything surprise you? Where possible, connect what you see to previous readings, discussions, or your experiences. You have until 10:15.

While looking at the global land use chart, I was surprised that for all habitable land area in the world, there is only 1 percent of urban and built-up land. This means all around the world, there are thousands of cities with millions of buildings in which we spend most of our lives, but all of them together only occupies 1 percent of earth’s habitable land. For half of the 71percent land area on earth, it is used to develop the agriculture, which shows the importance of agriculture. What also surprised me is that although livestock take 77 percent of agriculture land, it only supply a small part of human calorie and protein supply. I think it is because plant-based agriculture land is far denser than livestock-based agriculture land. Therefore it is important to find ways to increase the land using efficiency in raising livestock. While observing the chart of agricultural land use in different countries and regions. I discovered that the area of agricultural in one country is only partly influenced by its total area. For example in China, USA, and Australia, there are huge amount of agricultural lands because the climate is temperate, most of the land is flat and is suitable for agriculture. However in Russia and Canada, although the area is big, most of the land is barren land and glaciers because of the cold climate.