Learning R

I've decided to learn R to work with some data and visualizations I have come across. I just found a really neat website that brings you through learning the code and the way to apply it to data. Check out DataCamp if you are interested in learning with me.

Public vs Private - Who Owns the Jobs?

I saw a Wall Street Journal article today called A History of Government Employment, and I thought the data it presented was very interesting. The piece goes on to say,

The current percentage (16%) is subject to change again. Following cutbacks during the recession, the government has started hiring for more positions again...But just because the number of government jobs is rising again doesn’t mean their share of total jobs will go up. In fact, the overall percentage may continue to decline. Looking at the percentage change in jobs since January, total jobs are rising at a faster rate than local and state government jobs. The number of federal jobs has gone declined from January.

I thought this was interesting. The graph they presented along with saying this looked like this:

Based on this graph, it seems as though we are continuing our dip from the high levels we had mid 70's, meaning less of a share of public jobs. However, as WSJ provided their data, I quickly made a chart similar to theirs.

You can see from this graph that the large majority of jobs is still in the private sector, as it has been since the 40's. Even in a stacked graph not in percentages, you can see that the relative amount of government jobs changes very little.

Well, that's my piece for today. Make sure to check out the WSJ article this data came from and let me know if you think recent changes are a big deal in 

The Changing Ways Students Pay for College

Fewer loans and more out of pocket costs than previous years reports Sallie May. This infographic, found from NPR's Marketplace, shows that the majority of college spending comes from parents and scholarships. For more information, check out the Marketplace article. One of their findings surprised me,

Only 38 percent of respondents said they had a plan to pay for all college costs before enrolling in college.

To me, it would seem like more students would have plans for how to pay for college, even if it does involve public or private loans.

From Lip Reading to Plant reading - Passive Recovery of Sound from Video

So, I came across this video today (courtesy of FlowingData) and was astounded. In this YouTube video from MIT, researches use a High Speed Camera to recover sound using video.

From the project's website:

When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones.We recover sounds from highspeed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound.

Even if you don't have a High Speed Camera, an adaption of their program can be used with traditional cameras. By utilizing the Rolling Shutter many video cameras use, they obtained a high enough frequency to playback sound.

If this interests you, check out the video below.