Bio

Jiaying Xu joined Wolfram Research in 2018. She is passionate about creating ideas for educational innovation and turning them into products. She is also a language enthusiast, with a special interest in maintaining and revitalizing threatened and endangered languages. She takes refuge in drawing, composing and photography during her free time. She is currently working in the field of education, undertaking projects aimed at the China-US education sector. She believes that the principal role of education is to create contexts where students can develop their creative thinking and new ways of understanding the world around them. She blogs about her personal experience navigating human-nature relationships and Chinese-US cultural differences that are indispensable in creating these contexts for students from China and the US.

Computational Essay: Diffusion-Limited Symphony

Project: The Past and Future of Occupations in the U.S.

Project Overview

1. Greater job instability Comparisons between jobs lost and jobs gained over the years reveal a rich mosaic of potential shifts in occupations in the years ahead, with important implications for workforce skills. Declining occupations tend to be physically and contextually predictable, including carpenter, athlete, baggageman, blacksmith, bookbinder, farmer, office machine operator, and motion picture picture projectionist, and physicist. Conversely, rising occupations include actor, artist, architect, author, baker, barber, bartender, bus driver, cook, decorator, designer, dentist and nutritionist. With rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence, this result might imply that automation will have a lesser effect on jobs involving creating art, applying expertise, managing people, and social interactions. 2. Reduced Gender Gap Women’s labour force participation and economic power demonstrate an unambiguously positive trend in a somewhat turbulent landscape of technological and socioeconomic change. In the long run, the expansion of opportunities for women has the potential to transform the economies and societies of the U.S.. The continuing ascent of women in the workplace is also contributing to increasing diverse and dynamic workplace cultures. Women are, on average, now participate more fully in professional and technical occupations than about 200 years ago, and the average prestigiousness of their positions are nearly the same as that of men. Nevertheless, industries like technology, energy, and infrastructure exemplify a particularly low overall female workforce participation. Conversely, industries that have a comparatively high proportion of women include household labor, Milliner, nurse, professor of physics, creditor, optometrist and Radio operator. 3. Older Labor Force According to the data, workers over 40 show greater job engagement than younger workers over time. Factors for favoring older workers might be that their experience and skill subsets are increasingly valued, and that they exhibit greater professionalism with increased productivity. 4. Nebulous Job Correlations The strong correlations between Inmate and Economist, Apprentice Electrician and Professor of Statistics, Decorator and Nutritionist, and so on might have powerful implications for the underlying sociopolitical factors and market needs that have shaped and reshaped the job market. Yet, the high frequency of the occurrence of ‘Professor – Statistics’ might suggest the embedded errors in the data collection itself.