Sister Cities?

Over the years, we have become accustomed to seeing signs indicating that a city is twinned with a list of cities around the globe. The above signs are in San Francisco, pointing to the cities around the world which are “twinned”. None are in Canada. Since these are...

Race and the Census

The recent publication of the redistricting release of the 2020 census has resulted in some discussion about some of its more surprising results. The white population declined from 223.5 to 204.7 million between 2010 and 2020, by all accounts an unprecedented change....

Splitting Hairs?

In the world of demographics, seemingly small differences in national statistics can have dramatic effects, especially when those differences have different spatial expressions. The average age of the population in the United States is about 38.5 years old. In Canada,...

Hugging the Southern Border

Fun fact — Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, is at the same latitude as Sacramento, California. The vast majority of the Canadian population lives within a couple of hundred miles of the American border. At first glance, this seems like a...
Random Rounding and Segmentation

Random Rounding and Segmentation

The Canadian census has for some decades used a random rounding technique to minimize privacy concerns on its data. Essentially, the method works by rounding each number to the nearest five using a probability table. A value of 1 would have an 80% probability of being...