Santa Discovers Analytics

A few months ago, we got an interesting request. The folks at the North Pole were looking for data to keep Santa safe and improve his gift efficiency at Christmas. Personally, I have long admired Santa, both for his generosity, but also for his total disregard of...

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....
Directional Colloquialisms

Directional Colloquialisms

The convention in cartography is that unless otherwise specified, up on the map is always north. It wasn’t always this way. Different cultures used different, and often highly inconsistent, conventions which had cultural or religious meaning. What sealed the “north is...

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,...

Privacy and the Census

Every representative democracy has a fundamental need to undertake a regular enumeration of its citizens to ensure that equal representation can be maintained as best as possible. But once you have gone to considerable trouble to count the people, it is quite...