Geography of Jobs in the United States

BY ELIZABETH BORNEMAN




Where Are the Jobs? is an interactive map of the number of jobs in the US using 2010 data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics study (LEHD). The map divides job types into various categories including manufacturing and trade, professional services, healthcare, education and government, and retail, hospitality and other services. Each dot in the graph represents a job recorded through state unemployment insurance and federal jobs.

Each job type is color coded to show where certain jobs are clustered in various parts of the United States. The geographical job map covers approximately 96% of jobs in the United States. The graphic was created by a Harvard PhD student named Robert Manduca and was inspired by a racial dot map that showed ethnic diversity across the United States. Since jobs can be more concentrated than populations of people the map is useful for determining where the highest concentration of jobs is in cities across the country.

MAP OF JOBS ACROSS THE US. EACH DOT REPRESENTS ONE JOB. COLORS: RED = MANUFACTURING AND TRADE, BLUE = PROFESSIONAL SERVICES, GREEN = HEALTHCARE, EDUCATION, AND GOVERNMENT, YELLOW = RETAIL, HOSPITALITY, AND OTHER SERVICES.

The map can be used to chart demographic information from census data to show where higher-income individuals live in relation to where their jobs are. This can be laid over a map of the more extensive parts of a city as well. For example, in New York City the map shows a high concentration of individuals who have high incomes living in expensive parts of town, like Manhattan. Lower paid jobs exist in areas like Brooklyn which is home to a lot of industry; Queens, meanwhile, is a diverse location as far as residents and jobs go.

MAP OF JOBS IN THE NEW YORK CITY AREA. EACH DOT REPRESENTS ONE JOB. COLORS: RED = MANUFACTURING AND TRADE, BLUE = PROFESSIONAL SERVICES, GREEN = HEALTHCARE, EDUCATION, AND GOVERNMENT, YELLOW = RETAIL, HOSPITALITY, AND OTHER SERVICES.

Areas in Northern California have a high concentration of electronic and technology related jobs while manufacturing and industrial labor employment opportunities are decreasing more and more each year. Employment is highly concentrated is downtown city centers but, as the job map reveals, most jobs still exist outside of major cities. Certain suburban areas also reveal high concentrations of employment which is normal. Industrial centers, shopping malls and business parks can employ many people in a variety of sectors.

The map has some gaps as places like Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands aren’t covered. Additionally, Massachusetts data is also missing because that state hasn’t integrated its data into LEHD’s system. The data isn’t entirely inclusive; for instance, the four categories of job types exclude jobs that don’t fit those labels. Additionally, some federal jobs aren’t included because of security reasons and thus data in governmental centers like Washington, D.C. appear quite empty on the map. Overall, the map includes about 96% of civilian wage and salary jobs, per the estimate provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The importance of job map can be used to chart the rise and fall of employment in the United States. Understanding where jobs are, where they’ve been and where they are moving to is as important as brushing up a resume or writing a new cover letter. How we can quantify the jobs that exist in the United States today can potentially help us understand recessions, job movement, and where opportunities are for a variety of job sectors.

References

Where Are the Jobs? Employment in America, 2010

Mapping Every Single Job in the U.S. (2015, July 14). The Atlantic’s City Lab.

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Google tracks hellish wildfire season in the American West

Google has created the 2012 US Wildfire Crisis Map to dynamically track the four dozen wildfires blazing across the United States, mostly in the West.

The map, built on its Crisis Response platform, is tracking about 50 fires, including the 100,000-acre Clay complex in Utah and the dangerous Waldo Canyon fire that is threatening the city of Colorado Springs. The map tracks the fires themselves, including their extent, information on suppression efforts, evacuation status, and the locations of shelters.

Google has pulled together data on fire perimeters from the US Geological Survey and InciWeb, shelter information from the Red Cross, satellite info from DigitalGlobe, and fire weather information from NOAA's Storm Prediction Center. Local-level data has been drawn from the State of Colorado Division of Emergency Management, Utah Division of Emergency Management, and other sources. This information has been plotted in layers across Google Maps and Google Earth.

The interface allows users to "turn on and off the layers of information" using a checkbox in the right-side panel. A "Share" button up top allows you to capture the URL or the embed code. A KML (keyhole markup language) file of the Waldo fire allows you to view that most dangerous of fires in great detail in Google Earth.

On the LatLong Blog, Pete Giencke of Google's Crisis Response Team encourages users to provide the team with data requests, to enrich the mapping possibilities during the fire season.
Turning data into usable information in a crisis

Giencke, a GIS data engineer, told Ars that the main crux of his efforts is working with partners to ensure that their (often GIS-specific) data is more usable and discoverable by those in a crisis situation.

"Our partners produce great datasets, sometimes in a way a lay audience has limited access to–in a crisis situation we can’t expect them to be downloading third-party programs or learning new data formats. So our charge on the tools side is to make the visualization of the data intuitive for a non-GIS user, make the interface easy to use, and enable the ready sharing of the data, e.g. with friends and family, via their social network of choice."

To do that, Crisis Response uses a number of tools that are designed to render huge amounts of data quickly and graphically. They use open source and publicly available tools as much as possible, including an App Engine backend to host the data, JavaScript, and CSS. They use Google JS Test to test.

The front end is created using Closure, an open-sourced Google tool that provides a framework for JavaScript and handles compilation, leaving a very small JS footprint, scriptwise.

For the crisis map application, they again use open source and publicly available tools, including a Google App Engine back-end to host the application, and JavaScript (Closure, Google Maps API V3) and CSS on the front-end. For mobile use, the Closure tools, like the compiler, help reduce the footprint of the application and improve cross-browser/device compatibility.

"GIS nerds like me get really excited about the kinds of data out there we can use," he said. But that data is not often user-friendly, so for the wildfire map, and other crisis projects, the data is treated via OGC open standard, enabling complex data sets to be read efficiently.

"Some of the data sets we get can be one to two gigabytes," he explained. "But by using, say, Mercator map tiles, we can produce 256-by-256 pixel renderings (i.e. tiles) of the data, and overlay those tiles atop the map where appropriate. By slicing up the data, users can efficiently, quickly zoom in and move around, where otherwise you'd quickly bog down."

Crisis data is the least abstract data imaginable. It is data that saves lives and homes and communities. So making sure it is quickly and clearly accessible is paramount. Evacuation routes out of a fire situation or a flood or hurricane can be hundreds of megabytes. But the Crisis Group uses Fusion tables and can get them to render out at 200 megabytes on a mobile phone.

"We’re targeting people affected by a disaster, often these folks have only their smartphones and tablets as a vehicle to finding relevant crisis-related information," said Giencke, so it's helpful to do "anything we can do to scale our ability to serve data to them more efficiently."
A brief history of crisis tech

Humans have been mapping crises since there have been maps and crises. But modern crisis mapping really came into its own with the development in Kenya of the Ushahidi crowdsourced platform. Originally created by Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh (now Google's policy manager for Africa), Juliana Rotich, David Kobia, and others, it was first employed during the election violence in Kenya in 2008. It has since been used in dozens of places, from the Haiti earthquake to the tsunami in Japan.

Google's Crisis Response group, however, reaches beyond mapping. Its first undertaking was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf, where the company created overlays of storm information.

In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, Google built Person Finder, to allow 'individuals to post and search for the status of relatives or friends affected by a disaster." Searchers could update information on missing persons to the Finder. During the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, they provided aMODIS satellite viewer of the spill's spread using images from NASA.

Regarding the 2012 US Wildfire Crisis Map, however, not everyone is a fan. Although maps such as Google's are more accessible, wildfire professionals see them as problematic, not so much for what they do or do not include in terms of data, but in their implied message.

"The new corporate maps tend not to be interested in helping educate the public about fire’s natural role in the ecosystem," Prof. Mike Medler told Ars. Medler is the chair of the Environmental Studies program at Western Washington University's Huxley College of the Environment and an expert in mapping wildfires. "Instead we see an explosion of 'disaster maps' and 'crisis maps,' often mapping dozens of fires that are no more a 'disaster' or a 'crisis' than a flood occurring on a wild river in the back country, or a particularly cold winter killing elk in a wilderness area."
Features

The Crisis Response platform allows Google to respond to a crisis by, among other things:
Creating a resource page with emergency information and tools.
Launching Google Person Finder to connect people with friends and loved ones.
Hosting a Crisis Map with authoritative and crowd-sourced geographic information.

It provides crisis responders with the following tools:

• Google public alerts
• Person Finder
• Custom maps
• Google Earth
• Google Fusion Tablets
• Shareable documents and spreadsheets
• Google websites

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