Occupational Pay Comparisons Among Metropolitan Areas 2007

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Occupational Outlook Quarterly

Summer 2008

In this issue:
+ Working in politics (PDF; 881 KB)
+ The class of 1993: Earnings and occupations by college major, 1 and 10 years after graduation (PDF; 2.1 MB)
+ Healthcare jobs you might not know about (PDF; 664 KB)
+ Brief items of interest to counselors and students
+ You’re a what? Home stager (PDF; 216 KB)
+ Job openings by industry (PDF; 280 KB)

Is Cuil Cool?

A new search engine, Cuil - pronounced "cool" - started today. You can read all about its claims of being "better than Google" here and here, among many other places. Apparently, it was having start-up jityters, as one person indicated that one couldn't access it at all fotr a time.

But I got through and tried New York State Small Business Development Center; it actually suggested the whole name after I had typed New York State Sm

My result:
We didn’t find any results for "New York State Small Business Development Center"
Some reasons might be...

a typo. Please check your spelling.
your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

It’s the first item on Google. Meh.

And as a matter of vanity, I cuiled my blogs and they showed on the 7th page, while they're on the first page on Google.

As this writer noted: Cuil Not So Cool.

US a better bargain for foreigners

Cost of living shifts on global scale.

Naturalizations in the United States

From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

State Export Data

Annual estimates of U.S. exports by State and commodity group based on each State’s share of U.S. agricultural production.

2010 Census Cost

2010 Census: Census Bureau Should Take Action to Improve the Credibility and Accuracy of Its Cost Estimate for the Decennial Census. GAO-08-554, June 16.

Highlights.

UN Recruitment Exam

2009 UNITED NATIONS NATIONAL COMPETITIVE RECRUITMENT EXAMINATION
For U.S. citizens seeking junior professional posts.

EXAMINATION CRITERIA (all must be met)
1. Be no more than 32 years old as of December 31, 2009 (UN requirement).
2. Have at least an undergraduate degree (advanced degree is an advantage but is not required) in one of the following occupational fields or related areas:
· Administration
· Economics
· Finance
· Information Technology
· Public Information
· Social Affairs
· Statistics
3. Be fluent in English and/or French, the two working languages of the
Secretariat. Knowledge of additional official languages of the UN (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Spanish) is a definite advantage.

NOTE: The exam may be limited to the 40 most qualified Americans per occupational group.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: October 31, 2008

Detailed information and application forms may be obtained at target=_new>www.un.org/Depts/OHRM/examin/ncrepage.htm
Examination will be held on February 24, 2009, in New York City and San Francisco.
Travel expenses to and from exam site will NOT be paid by the UN or U.S. Government.

Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths

Provisional Data for 2007.

ZIP Code to MSA

There's bad news and then there's good news.

The bad news is that the US Department of Labor link noted here no longer works. I discovered this when I was contacted by a Ph.D. student named Alan who came across the post.

I called the DOL to ask what was up. The person there, clearly reading a script, referred me to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That person, confused by why DOL referred me there, passed me on to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census guy told me about this great program called the State Data Centers. Specifically he mentioned one in Missouri that has a cool database:

1. Click on the link on the right of above page to GEOCORR 2K.
2. Pick a state or states. (The Census guy I called tried NY.)
3. Select one or more SOURCE codes. (He picked the MSA). Select one or more TARGET codes. (He picked 5-digit ZIP, which are actually ZCTAs).
4. You need to pick a weighed variable. (He picked as 2000 Pop census). He picked CSV, and Codes and Names in both category.
5. Then run it. Then download it.

(I haven't tested it, but Alan probably wanted to flip what I got by putting ZIP on SOURCE and MSA as TARGET, which may be more like his goal.)

Still, since GEO IN GEO doesn't work on the American FactFinder for this purpose - for good reason - I really liked this solution. Not so incidentally, one can use this tool for other calculations as well, down to the block level.

Census Nixed Married Gay Couples

While the Canadian census will count same-sex married couples, the Census Bureau in the US contends that the federal so-called Defense of Marriage Act -- which defines marriage as solely between a man and a woman for all purposes related to federal regulations -- prohibits it from recognizing same-sex marriages, such as the ones now legal in Massachusetts and California. "For the 2010 survey, the bureau intends to maintain the policy established in 2000, whereby it will edit the responses of married same-sex couples. Same-sex spouses will be reported as "unmarried partners" in all census tabulations. Read the Census position.

New Birth, Death, and Employment Firm Size Data

Advocacy funded, U.S. Census Bureau Statistics of U.S. Businesses dynamic data has been updated to 2005. The data contains firm/establishment births, deaths, and related employment creation and destruction data by firm size, industry, and geographic location.

From 2004 to 2005, firm births numbered 644,122 and deaths numbered 565,745. Firms with fewer than 500 employees accounted for 78.9 percent of the net employment growth during this period. See the dynamic data sections of http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/data.html for details.

Should you need further information, please feel free to contact Brian Headd at (202) 205-6533 or advocacy@sba.gov.

TradeVibes Company Search

From the J.J. Hill library.

Looking for detailed information on private companies, such as funding source, number of employees, names of key decision makers, and competitor listings? Good luck. This type of information is generally locked in the realm of expensive databases.

But TradeVibes isn't expensive. In fact, it's free. And it brings together just this type of detailed information on thousands of private companies throughout the consumer Web, technology, and advertising industries. There's that fairly strict industry focus, but if you're looking for data on a Web-savvy company, you'll likely find it here.

The site is built on a wiki platform, so anyone can contribute, but that makes it all the better as a good starting place for tech company research.

Baseball

From BNET: "From its origins amid scandal to its status as a legal monopoly to its modern-day experiments in online media, here's how the business of Major League Baseball has evolved." Also check out The Revenue Model: Why Baseball Is Booming and MLB’s Labor and R&D Formula, also linked off the post above.

Word clouds

I've read about word clouds, a/k/a tag clouds, how they reflect which words are being emphasized in a website/blog or newspaper or any written document. From Tag Crowd here's the one done on July 15, 2008 of the NYS Data Center website:

access affiliates age areas available bureau business census center change community contact cpi data demographic development economic empire employed ethnicity federal file history index individual information issues local metro ny organized page planning population product program rather records residents resources site state statistical subject symbols view web year-to-year years york

created at TagCrowd.com

And here's the cloud for this blog:

account affairs affiliates age agencies article available billion births blog bureau business census center com comments crime data department distinct fusion gas green growth hispanic immigration indian internet labels links litigation local network nys past pm population post prices program provide public reversal roger site skip state web years york

created at TagCrowd.com

Other sites that can generate clouds are Wordle and the Tag Cloud Generator.

Census Switch Worries Some

Yet another article. Subtitle: "Return to Paper Forms Leaves Little Time for Adjustment".

How to turn Census data into business knowledge

That's the provocative title of this article from the J.J. Hill library blog. It links to an Ad Age article about The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer.

Crime in the United States

From BUSLIB-L:

The FBI tracks crime in its annual publication, Crime in the United States. Numbers for 2007 are preliminary, but 2006 is final.

There is a site called CrimeReports.com, which allows police departments to voluntarily load their crime stats (you can then run analytics for each department on daily, weekly or monthly intervals). For a list of participating agencies, go here. No NYS agencies are represented.

Census re-examines using Internet for 2010 count

This is "a reversal from its earlier assertion that it did not have the time to develop an application and could not adequately protect information from cyberattacks." Internet is merely an option being considered, not a sure thing. Read the whole article here.

World Population Approaches 7 Billion

The population is expected to go from 6 billion in 1999 to 7 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More detail data is available at The International Data Base.

Indian Affairs Web site reconnected

After years of litigation requiring its Internet links to be disconnected, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is back on the World Wide Web. I had written about a workaeround to the closure here.

Births, Not Immigration, Fueling Hispanic Growth

Births, not immigration, now account for most of the growth in the nation's Hispanic population, a distinct reversal of trends of the past 30 years.
Births, not immigration, now account for most of the growth in the nation's Hispanic population, a distinct reversal of trends of the past 30 years...

This natural increase -- more births than deaths -- is accelerating among Hispanics in the USA because they are younger than the U.S. population as a whole. Their median age is 27.4, compared with 37.9 overall, 40.8 for whites, 35.4 for Asians and 31.1 for blacks...

Copyright Office opens Web portal for online registrations

"The U.S. Copyright Office is opening a new online portal intended to help the office move from a paper-based environment to electronic processing.

The office, a part of the Library of Congress, handles about 550,000 copyright claims annually. Beginning July 1, anyone will be able to use the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) portal to submit basic claims and copyright applications electronically, make online payments and upload works being registered. Those submitting hard copies of the registered material can generate and print shipping labels."

.com Is So Faux Pas

From the Branding Indentity Guru:
Web regulators Thursday voted to allow the creation of thousands of new domain names, from .paris to .Pepsi, in one of the biggest shake-ups in Internet history, a French web official said.

The overhaul is expected to radically change the way users navigate the Internet and has major implications for businesses and consumers worldwide.

Under the new system, the web’s 1.3 billion users would be able from 2009 to buy an unlimited number of generic addresses based on common words, brands or company names, cities or proper names.

The popular online trading site eBay is one of the many companies that wants to have its own domain name.

Read the entire story here.

Now, I'm wondering about someone buying pepsisucks.pepsi and what Pepsi might be able to do about it.