The February 2016 Scientific American article on "Six Billion in Africa" by Robert Engelman projects Africa's population growth drives global population growth based on the fertility rates. Such extreme growth threatens Africa's development and stability. The United Nations' current prediction is that by 2100 the world population will exceed 11 billion. We decided to see if there is a correlation between throughput derived from PingER measurements and fertility rates.
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From this we created a bubble plot of x=Fertility Rate, y=throughput, bubble volume=population and colored the bubbles by the region. We also added an exponential trendline. The PingER derived throughput is inversely proportional to the Round Trip Time (RTT) and the RTTs are relativley short since they are measured from SLAC in North America. Thus the throughputs for North America are abnormally high so they are not included in the plots.
It is apparent that there is a negative correlation between throughput and fertility rate (i.e. countries with a lower Fertility Rate have a higher value of throughput). It is also apparent that Africa leads the world in Fertility Rates.
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