Who cares about STEM?
I want to analyze what I think is a pretty cool dataset: which countries are the Polylog viewers from. I will assume that this correlates with “how much people care about STEM in each country“
So, which countries are STEM friendly?
Data
Here’s the data points I want to analyze. The x axis is the population of a country, the y axis is number of views Polylog channel got from there. Zoom in by double-clicking and move by dragging. The dashed diagonal line represents constant per-capita views.
A quick crosscheck
Are these data saying something about STEM, or just about YouTube adoption? Fortunately, there’s a quick test we can do. With Tom Gavenčiak, we wrote a page Bayes, bits, brains about theory behind ML, and I am tracking visits.
I plotted only countries with >10 hits. If all countries had the same ratio between the two numbers, they would lie on the red Baseline. There are a few outliers
What are we even looking for?
Looking at previous graphs, the main story is not very surprising. More views per capita come from richer countries with larger Internet adoption. What else is new?
That’s why I will consider two baselines that I will measure our data against. The first one is GDP per capita (PPP). If a country watches more STEM videos than its neighbors with comparable GDP, surely there’s some romance with STEM going on there.
The second benchmark is the number of hits to any Wikipedia page per capita. This estimates the Internet activity in a given country.
Let’s see what we got!
GDP x YouTube
I didn’t know what to expect there. Was the graph going to look like a straight line on log-log plot? (views = salary^C) I actually predicted that the plot should be quite “flat” – if views = salary^C, I would guess C<1. But if the polynomial fit even makes sense for the plot below, then it seems C should in fact be larger than 1!
My intuition stemmed from my experience with Czechia and other Eastern Europe countries. Even if the salaries are substantially smaller than in the West, I don’t think the STEM culture difference is big. That in fact seems to be true if you zoom in to the top end of the plot. However, it seems to be an Eastern-Europe thing that does not generalize to the overall picture.
STEM-lovers?
From this picture, I would somewhat arbitrarily classify these as the most STEM-loving: Nepal, Kenya, Morocco, India, Philippines, South Africa, Ukraine, Serbia, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, New Zealand, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Denmark.
Wikipedia x YouTube
The next plot has less variance than the previous one, but still more than our crosscheck plot with the Bayes, bits, brains website. Hopefully, we are still measuring something of use. The dashed red baseline again corresponds to the baseline that would contain all countries if they had the same ratio.
STEM-lovers?
Very arbitrarily, I would say those: Kenya, Nepal, India, South Africa, Philippines, Romania, Portugal, Hungary, Slovenia, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands.
Countries in both lists
The first-world winners seem to be Kenya, Nepal, and Philippines. But there’s a clear confounder: Our results will clearly favor English-speaking countries. I guess we could try to come up with a formal correction, but let’s not overcomplicate it. Looking at the plots, I think the English mostly explains Kenya and Philippines.
Nepal is weirdly off, but it’s a small country with only 7000 hits to our channel. First, I wanted to discard it as a fluke, but my friend told me she gets many EA-related applications from there. So maybe something is really going on there. But what?
BRICS winners are India & South Africa. Again, it seems like English to me.
In the first-world countries, I see a lot of English-speaking ones, as well as northern Europe + Switzerland + Israel, known for their great English. But still, if this was just English, then it seems that people there speak more English than actual English. Also, Australia & New Zealand are pretty high above others.
And then there’s Eastern Europe countries, many of which are doing well in at least one of the two graphs. Speaking from experience, nobody can accuse us of being good at English, so I take it seriously. Hungary especially is doing really well.
So, the winners are:
Is any of that surprising?
Probably not, except for the Nepal. Really, what’s going on there??
