Business
商业
Social media and job titles
社交网站与职位
A pixelated portrait of labour
就业市场"高清"图
LinkedIn offers a new way to look at employment
LinkedIn让你用全新的角度看待就业
OFFICIAL statistics can tell you how many workers were jobless last month, how many had college degrees and how many worked in construction.
官方统计数据能够告诉你上个月有多少人失业，多少个有大学文凭及多少人从事建筑业。
But they cannot tell you how many know Hadoop, a software for managing data that is much in demand these days.
但这些数据却无法告诉你有多少人会使用Hadoop这个如今需求量甚大的数据管理软件。
LinkedIn, however, says it knows that, and much else gleaned from the profiles of its millions of members.
然而，LinkedIn说它知道这些，还掌握许多从其数百万会员的注册信息收集而来的其它信息。
The social-media website for professionals can tell you that one of the fastest-growing job titles in America is "adjunct professor" (an ill-paid, overworked species of academic). One of the fastest-shrinking is "sales associate" (see chart).
这个专业人士的社交网站能告诉你，美国从业人数增长最快的一种职业是"兼职教授"（即薪水很低、超负荷工作的大学老师），从业人数减少得最快的职业之一是"销售人员"（见图表）。
Researchers already mine the internet for hints about disease outbreaks, the national mood or inflation.
研究人员已经在网络上找寻关于疾病爆发、国民心态及通货膨胀的线索。
LinkedIn thinks its data can do the same for the job market.
LinkedIn认为其数据能在就业市场上派上同样的用场。
It has more than 150m members worldwide, 60m of them in America.
LinkedIn在全球拥有一亿五千万会员，其中六千万来自美国。
That should be enough to draw accurate inferences about the entire American labour force.
凭此应足以精确推断整个美国劳动力市场的情形。
At the request of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, it calculated which industries and job titles were experiencing the biggest gains and losses.
应白宫经济顾问委员会的要求，LinkedIn对哪些行业及职业的从业人数最多或最少进行了统计。
Scott Nicholson, a "data scientist" for the firm, says LinkedIn can potentially track such changes in real time, rather than the weeks or months government surveys take.
该公司的一位"数据科学家" 斯科特?尼科尔森说，LinkedIn甚至可以实时追踪这些数据的变化，而不像政府调查那样要费时数周或数月。
It can also follow occupations and industries, such as e-learning, that don't have their own category in government tallies.
LinkedIn也可以追踪如在线学习这种政府记录中没有单列出来的职业与行业的数据。
It can trace shifts between regions, sectors and occupations.
它还能追踪不同地区、行业、职业之间的变化。
Are people quitting law firms to become law professors, moving from Arizona to North Dakota, or what?
人们是否辞去了律师事物所的工作去当法律教授了？是否从亚利桑那州搬到了北达科它州？还是其他状况？
The firm hopes to be able to track the nation's evolving skills base.
该公司希望能够对美国人不断发展的技能水平进行追踪。
Members routinely pick up new skills and add them to their profile.
其会员平日会学习新的技能并将其添加至个人信息中。
LinkedIn can see how often job-changers mention a particular skill, such as Hadoop.
LinkedIn能够知道跳槽者提及某项技能（如操作Hadoop）的频率。
Jeff Weiner, the firm's boss, imagines that eventually every job opening and its requisite skills will be digitally searchable by every potential candidate, reducing the friction that lets millions of vacancies co-exist with high unemployment.
公司老板杰夫?韦纳的设想是最终每位潜在的求职者都能在网上搜索到空缺的职位及其所需的技能，使社会能更加人尽其才，而不至于出现有数百万个空缺职位的同时却又失业率高企的局面。
Such granularity could revolutionise economic research, says Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT.
麻省理工学院的埃里克?布吕诺尔夫松说，这种" 分辨率"会为经济调查带来革命性的变化。
But for consistency and longevity, you can't beat the government.
但若论调查的连贯性和持久性，无人能胜过政府。
As Mr Brynjolfsson notes, "Web companies don't tend to have the same lifespan as the US Census Bureau."
正如埃里克?布吕诺尔夫松所说，"网络公司的寿命往往不可能和美国统计局一样长。"