ICSC 2024

By mid-morning on the Tuesday of the annual pilgrimage to ICSC Vegas, my body harshly reminds me that humans were not designed to walk for hours on concrete floors. And by mid-afternoon, driving south on I-15 towards the California state line as if the local sheriff...

The Evolution of the Site Report

1985 was a milestone year for me. I wrote my first site reporting system for the new Intel 386 based computers which sported a massive 640k of memory and a 10mb hard drive. The design requirements were twofold: first, that we could execute a radius report within 30...

Transitioning to the 2020 Census

Starting a few years before the 2020 census, the bureau began discussing methodologies for improving ‘disclosure avoidance’. To be honest, we were highly skeptical of how this would play out, especially since the published methodology discussions were obtuse, reading...

Rethinking Poverty and Income Inequality

In recent years, we have been consistently told that income inequality is on the rise and that the war on poverty declared in the 1960’s has been a failure. The Economist magazine stated bluntly that “it is a truth universally acknowledged that inequality in the rich...

Geospatial Deep Diving with Census Blocks

For many years, the standard detail geography which AGS has provided to users has been the census block group. Only those who read through our methodology statements knew that you could order your In-n-Out double-double ‘animal style’, since it certainly wasn’t posted...