No matter how many jobs are promised, Barak Obama’s administration will be nearly impossible to beat when it comes to employment growth. The following code uses the blcrapeR package, which is available on CRAN. Politicians talk a lot about jobs and unemployment, even though the actual power they have ...

Someone contacted me recently about the map projections used in my blscrapeR package. After a bit of web searching, I couldn’t find a really good list of map projections for the continental U.S. that could be used in R. This list is as much for my own reference ...

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the main standard for tracking the inflation of the U.S. dollar. The various CPI measures are published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For this walk-through, we will be using the blcsrapeR package to download our data from the BLS and perform ...

The most difficult thing about working with BLS data is gaining a clear understanding on what data are available and what they represent. Some of the more popular data sets can be found on the BLS Databases, Tables & Calculations website. The selected examples below do not include all series or ...

The blscrapeR package makes it easy to produce choropleth maps of various employment and unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.) Install blscrapeR from CRAN: install.packages("blscrapeR") It’s easy enough to pull a metric for a certain county. The code below pulls the unemployment rates for ...

Anyone who’s spent any time around data knows primary keys are your friend. Enter the FIPS code. FIPS is the Federal Information Processing Standard and appears in most data sets published by the US government. Name Matching The map below is an example as the “wrong way” to do ...

The long-awaited new Ubuntu LTS Xenial Xerus was released last week. I wrote a tutorial on installing R and R-Studio on the old 14.04 LTS, so I figured I’d update that document. Not much has changed for the new 16.04 version but there are new repositories. Install R-Base You can find ...