By: Dawn Wotapka
Via: The Wall Street Journal

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.—The housing boom largely bypassed this midsize city in the Appalachian foothills, which many big developers found too small and too remote to warrant many major investments.

But missing out on the national joy ride turned out to be a double blessing for residents: Not only did the local economy dodge the foreclosure hangover that continues to dog other areas, but local and state officials instead spent the time devoting resources to lure big employers that have helped give the former manufacturing city a second act.

European Pressphoto Agency
In Chattanooga, Tenn., employees work at VW assembly plant, which got a boost from land and tax benefits.

Tax incentives and land grants totalling about $630 million were used to help attract $2 billion of investment from dozens of companies—Volkswagen AG, Amazon Fulfillment and Alstom SA—which helped to create more than 7,500 jobs and turned this once struggling town into one of the nation’s strongest local economies. The number of people employed in the region has grown in the past few years to 240,000, putting the unemployment rate at 7.6% in February, below the national rate of 8.3% that month, according to the Labor Department.

Residents “who have lived here for a long time once again have hope,” says Mayor Ron Littlefield, whose city has a population of about 170,000. “We aren’t losing our young people. We are attracting other people’s young people.”

Rising demand has boosted average home prices here by 2.3% since February 2011, at a time when prices have continued to fall in many metropolitan areas. And Chattanooga properties in some stage of foreclosure tumbled 27% from the prior year during the first quarter, compared with a 16% decline nationwide, according to RealtyTrac.

Average rents, meanwhile, grew 3.9% from the prior year in the first quarter, making it the nation’s third-largest gainer, behind San Francisco and San Jose, according to Reis Inc.

The city also is working to grow its tech scene. Since late 2010, EPB, the city-owned nonprofit power provider, has offered one gigabit-per-second Internet speeds, up to 200 times faster than the national average—to both businesses and residents. This summer, public and private partners will pay for dozens of entrepreneurial businessmen and students to come to town for several weeks to develop applications and businesses that could benefit from the high-bandwith. Locals hope the city will benefit from new business ideas.”Here is an old industrial city that now has the tools of the next generation,” Mr. Littlefield says.

Brian McCord for The Wall Street Journal
John Sweet, says sales have jumped at Niedlov’s Breadworks, his downtown bakery.

But using tax breaks, free land and other incentives to attract companies remains unpopular in many quarters. Some critics call the practice “corporate welfare” and some small-business groups argue that incentives are unfair because they often draw big out-of-town businesses rather than sustain smaller local companies.

Peter Fisher, research director at the Iowa Policy Project, says governments usually overstate the benefits of incentives, which he says are usually a bad use of taxpayer funds. The packages “end up costing a lot of money that should be going to the fundamentals of long-term economic growth, primarily education and infrastructure,” he says. Instead, “we end up focusing on these short-term, spade-turning opportunities.”

Proponents counter that incentives have become a necessary tool in economic development. “Cities need to be working with businesses, providing incentives in some fashion,” says William F. Fox, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who has advised the state on economic development.

It seems clear the incentives have played a role in the decades-long effort to revive Chattanooga’s economy. Like many old factory towns, the city struggled to recreate its identity after its manufacturing base began disappearing in the late 1960s, leaving behind mostly pollution and despair. In 1969, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite called Chattanooga America’s dirtiest city. “We were dying,” Mr. Littlefield recalls.

Mr. Cronkite’s remark spurred residents to action. In 1973, a group of local executives redeveloped the train station as a tourist site and hotel, calling it the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel and complex. In the 1980s, the city began to revitalize its riverfront; by the mid-1990s, the downtown boasted new museums, a theater and an aquarium.

Next, city leaders turned to wooing businesses. In the past decade, dozens of companies have received various breaks to relocate or expand in Chattanooga. The largest package so far has gone to VW, with incentives valued at $500 million in 2008 from the city, county and state that included a 30-year property-tax deferral, 1,340 acres of city and county-owned land and infrastructure, and training grants, according to the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. The $1 billion auto plant, VW’s only one in the U.S., employs more than 2,500 workers and the German company recently announced it would hire 1,000 more this year.

Amazon, which built a facility the size of 17 football fields where customer orders are filled, was awarded a multimillion-dollar package in 2011 that includes 75 acres of former Army land adjacent to the VW site and no property tax for a decade, according to the local Chamber.

Alstom, whose new local factory makes turbines for coal, nuclear, gas and hydroelectric power plants, received a similar property-tax abatement in 2008 and help in training workers through a local college. It also received a $63 million clean-energy manufacturing tax credit from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The job growth is helping everything from retail to real estate. Last year, sales climbed 10% from the previous year at Julie Darling Donuts. Sales jumped more than 25% last year at Niedlov’s Breadworks, a bakery downtown, says owner John Sweet. And Chattanooga-based CBL & Associates Properties Inc., a publicly held mall operator, says sales at its flagship Hamilton Place mall have climbed in the “high single digits” from a year ago, while customer traffic has been up by double-digits.

Several new retailers, including cosmetics retailer Bare Escentuals and tea purveyor Teavana, have come to the market. “We have a number of inquires [from prospective tenants] that we’re trying to figure out how to satisfy,” says Chief Executive Stephen Lebovitz. “Our biggest challenge is we don’t have space.”

By: Aaron Corvin
Via: The Columbian

Washington State University Vancouver career counselor Christine Lundeen works with student Annise Nassib on Wednesday at the Student Services Center.

A slow economic recovery is under way in the U.S., as employers enlarge their payrolls and the unemployment rate inches down.

For young job seekers, however, the numbers tell a different story.

While the federal unemployment rate is 8.2 percent, unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds is 13.2 percent. In Washington state, the unemployment rate is 8.2 percent. By contrast, the jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds was 21 percent in 2011. That’s up from 11.8 percent in 2007.

While there are no equivalent unemployment data for counties, it’s likely that Clark County’s job market mirrors the statewide figures, according to Scott Bailey, regional economist for the Washington State Employment Security Department.

What is known about Clark County is that the number of jobs held by high school-age workers plummeted by 40 percent from the first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2011, Bailey said. For those ages 19 to 21, the number of jobs in Clark County dipped by 11 percent in the same period.

The situation for young job seekers in Oregon is similar. The unemployment rate was 19 percent for 16- to 24-year-olds in 2011. That’s more than double the overall jobless rate, and it’s up from about 11 percent in 2007.

The numbers underscore the tough spot that an entire generation of young workers find themselves in: They face an economy marked by lower pay and fewer job prospects, experts say, and rising pressure to attend college to have a shot in an economy that increasingly favors the highly skilled.

More seekers than jobs

The long-term weak economy has favored employers with a wealth of qualified candidates, and has caused the most pain for the newest entrants to the workforce.

Employers usually lower wages when there’s an oversupply of job applicants. What’s more, they’re able to be choosy, hiring the most experienced job candidates while eschewing younger ones, according to Dave Wallace, senior economist for the state Employment Security Department.

“That’s where (younger workers) really lose out,” Wallace said.

And older workers are staying in their jobs longer and putting off retirement, according to Guy Tauer, a regional economist for the Oregon Employment Department.

College grads in demand

Before the recession, younger workers filled a lot of Clark County’s production and construction jobs, Bailey said. Those low-skilled, entry-level positions were the first to be vaporized by the nation’s economic spiral.

In fact, some experts say a fundamental shift in the economy is well under way, where the U.S. labor market is increasingly open to only those who possess a college education.

In 2011, Jon Roberts, principal of Austin, Texas-based TIP Strategies, who oversaw development of a new economic development plan for Clark County, publicly urged regional leaders to boost Washington State University Vancouver’s role in creating economic growth.

He cited data showing that the jobless burden in the U.S. is shared unevenly. People who lack a high school diploma are experiencing a jobless rate of 13.7 percent, while 7.4 percent of those with college degrees are unemployed.

“Any region that isn’t committed to higher education and higher education training is likely to suffer significantly high unemployment,” Roberts told a gathering of more than 300 people at The Heathman Lodge in Vancouver.

David Autor, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Bloomberg.com that the U.S. workplace is polarizing between the education haves and have-nots.

And more jobs — even if they’re blue-collar jobs such as auto repair — will require some kind of college or post-secondary training, Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The only thing more expensive than going to college is not going. Kids are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”

Employers say they will hire 10.2 percent more new college graduates in 2011-12 than they did in 2010-11, according to a survey released in March by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

That’s a slight increase over employers’ initial projection — 9.5 percent — “and marks the second consecutive year in which employers have adjusted their hiring expectations upward,” the survey said.

That’s “encouraging data” for new or soon-to-be college graduates, including those at WSUV, said Christine Lundeen, the branch campus’ career counselor.

Lundeen said she began her job about 3 years ago, when the economy was in a tailspin. Since then, she said she has noticed an increase in the number of employers showing interest in WSUV students.

“It’s definitely been encouraging,” she said. “Every year, I have more and more employers contacting me to post jobs and internships.”

No guarantees

However, as the national survey shows, a college degree hardly guarantees landing a job. Competition is high: About 32 new college graduates are expected to apply for every job posting during the 2011-12 recruiting year, according to the survey. That’s up from 21.1 applicants for every job posting during the 2010-11 recruiting year.

And that’s all the more reason for college students to get aggressive about reaching potential employers rather than just passively searching online, Lundeen said.

In fact, she said, campus leaders are encouraging students to get some experience, via internships and other programs, in the fields they’re pursuing while they’re still in college.

College departments are teaming with community organizations and business leaders to bring real world issues into classrooms, Lundeen said.

Students are taking the initiative, too, she said. One WSUV student group focused on accounting, business and finance recently secured a visit to campus by two potential employers: the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bonneville Power Administration.

In an economy that still has weak spots, Lundeen said she’s noticed students becoming increasingly aware that a college degree, while an important key to unlocking the labor market, isn’t necessarily a sure lock on a job.

“There’s definitely been an increase in the use of services,” she said of the career and networking advice her office provides. “The word’s getting out; it’s a tough market, and you need to be developing the best résumé, thinking about job-searching strategies and networking.”

Lundeen added, “The campus as a whole is really pushing to get students experienced in their field before they leave.”

By:Nathan Yau
Via: FlowingData

An update to an interactive by Hannah Fairfield and Graham Roberts of The New York Times in 2010, making use of Mike Bostock’s Wealth & Health of Nations D3 port.

On average, women are still paid less than men for working comparable jobs. Is it getting better? Below shows how salaries between the genders have changed over the past nine years.


*Only occupations with data for all years and with at least 50,000 respondents for each sex are shown.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Via: Trace Media

Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualization of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa. For more information contact Gavin Baily or Mark Graham.

Before opening the map please note that some searches require a large download. For articles written in English try filtering the search by location e.g. Africa, Northern America, United Kingdom. Use the Stop button to cancel a search in progress.
We recommend using the latest version of Chrome, FireFox, Opera, IE or Safari. There’s Flash support for IE 7 and IE 8, but IE 9 or above is preferable.



The images below show the global distribution of articles written in each language.
















To further explore the geography of the data, each Wikipedia article is associated with various attributes, such as word count, number of authors, and number of images etc. You can investigate these using the ‘map’ dropdown. Here are a few examples for Europe, Asia and the US.




How it was built

The project was developed using the excellent Open Layers. To display the large number of articles we wrote a subclass of the Open Layers Canvas renderer, and optimised for point plotting. As a fallback for browsers that don’t support canvas we included the FlashCanvas shim. http://flashcanvas.net/.

The Google basemap was produced using the Styled Map Wizard:
http://v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html

To glue everything together we used jQuery. A big thankyou [sic] to the authors of the following libraries and plugins.
Eric Hynds’ UI MultiSelect Widget:
http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/jquery-ui-multiselect-widget/

Mike Chambers’ Quadtree for mouse-picking articles:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/03/21/javascript-quadtree-implementation/

Ben Alman’s BBQ library for storing URL hash values:
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

Via: Hint.fm

Map as seen on April 10, 2012 5:00 pm EDT, top speed: 26.2 mph, average: 8.9 mph

Click image to be taken to a live interactive map.

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.

This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US.

Read more about wind and about wind power.

By: Nidhi Subbaraman
Via: Fast Company


Professional racing is an extreme sport. Drivers battle super-hot temperatures and G-forces for hours. To survive a race, let alone win one, a driver needs to be in top physical health.

A startup called MC10 based in Cambridge, Mass., is making wearable electronics that could change the way drivers train and stay on track during races. In the future, they hope to help all kinds of athletes up their game.

Through the thin plastic sensors worn on the arm like a transluscent [sic] patch, a driver’s team can monitor the driver continously [sic] during a race, keeping tabs on their level of energy and hydration, fixing both car and driver at break points in the race. “Think about it as a pit stop for the driver,” Ben Schlatka, MC10′s cofounder [sic] and VP of business development, says. The sensors will be designed to be specific to their use, but can detect temperature, electrical signals to pick up heart, brain, and muscle activity, measure hydration levels, and even detect motion.

MC10′s sensors are made of the same materials that regular electronics are–a combination of semiconducting silicon and metal electrodes. The difference here is that these sensors have been engineered to be bendable, stretchable, light, and extremely sensitive. This makes wearing them a dramatically different experience than wearing conventional electrodes and monitors that are rigid and tough.

“[They're] truly a soft, thin, almost skin-like device that integrates seamless with the athlete,” says Schlatka. They are also built for roughness. “G-forces, temperatures–our technology will survive all of these things,” he tells Fast Company. Though only about an inch long each way, the sensors can pick up hydration levels, heart rate, even motion cues.

This past weekend, MC10′s sensors took their first spin in a NASCAR race, pasted to the arm of 22-year-old driver Paulie Harraka during the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race on the Martinsville Speedway track in Ridgeway, Virginia. Early on in the race, plans veered slightly off course when the car’s cooling system failed. “I was hotter than I normally am and the adhesive of the MC10 patch worked just great,” Harraka tells Fast Company.


“You’re on the edge all the time,” Harraka continues. “The temperature in these vehicles get up to 140 degrees. The race lasts for hours.”

MC10 was spun out of materials scientist John Roger’s lab at the University of Illinois, where Rogers and his team have been designing bendable, stretchable electronics that can be unobtrusively connected to the body. Members of the lab have designed sensors on flexible catheters to aid heart surgeries, eyeball cameras that augment vision, and channeled their expertise in skinny, flexible electronics into stick-on skin sensors for monitoring daily health signs.

The company has collaborations for sophisticated medical tools underway, with partners like Massachusetts General Hospital. There they’re testing out sensors attached to catheters that pick up vital signs of a patient during heart surgery. While those hi-tech medical tools make their slow journey through the FDA’s regulatory process, MC10 is targeting an early adopter athlete market in parallel, racing ahead with this first collaboration with Wauter Motorsports, Harraka’s team. Military applications are in the pipeline through project collaborations MC10 has in place with the U.S. government and Department of Defense.

“Athletes are an early market segment for us because they appreciate tech that allows for performance optimization,” Schlatka says. “There’s no regulation, it’s faster to the market.” In fact, speed fiend Harraka only met the MC10 team for the first time this March, at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. Less than a month later, he was revving up his engine with a custom-designed sensor stuck on his forearm. To Harraka, the deal made instant sense. “At NASCAR we’re such a technology and numbers-driven sport,” Harraka says, “it’s totally natural they’d want to be using and testing cutting edge-tech.”

The race on Sunday was a demonstration that the sensors (currently inactive) were durable and would stay on during real race conditions, without distracting the driver. In the coming months, MC10 and Harraka’s team will be testing multiple sensors to pick up health readings during practice runs and other races.

[Images: Ronda Greer]