Time was, even the Three Stooges didn't fear the Census. But now, turbulent political and economic times roiling the nation are expected to diminish initial participation by households in next year's Census. To counteract this, the Census will spend an unprecedented $326 million in marketing, including a Super Bowl ad, and will appear in a Spanish-language telenovela. [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet on Oct 20, 2009 - 67 comments

Cancer survivor, teacher, single father, and part-time U.S. Census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead September 12, hanging from a tree with the word "FED" written on his chest.
posted by zoomorphic on Sep 23, 2009 - 314 comments

ACORN already drew fire last year during the election, accused of voter fraud, although ACORN points out there was no real fraud going on [pdf]. Now, they are facing controversy over a recent video showing ACORN officials offering advice to amateur actors posing as a pimp and prostitute on what to say when seeking a mortgage for a brothel. A second video captured an ACORN worker claiming to have murdered her husband (she later said she was simply messing with the filmmakers). As a result of these recent controversies, the Senate voted 83-7 to prohibiting the use of funds to fund ACORN. [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious on Sep 16, 2009 - 159 comments

Michele Bachman waxes fuzzy on the census with Glenn Beck. Michele Bachmann is continuing her anti-Census campaign and getting brighter by the minute - like that last intense glow before the bulb burns completely out.
posted by PuppyCat on Jun 26, 2009 - 89 comments

Hundreds of New Reef Creatures Found in Australia. Hundreds of new marine creatures have been discovered in three Australian reefs by CReefs, a census of coral reefs which is part of the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year initiative to assess global ocean diversity.
posted by homunculus on Sep 19, 2008 - 12 comments

White Americans No Longer A Majority By 2042. The nation will be more racially and ethnically diverse, as well as much older, by midcentury, according to projections released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become the majority in 2042, with the nation projected to be 54 percent minority in 2050. By 2023, minorities will comprise more than half of all children.
posted by plexi on Aug 14, 2008 - 91 comments

TheDataWeb - a network of online data libraries on topics including census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data
posted by Gyan on Dec 26, 2007 - 10 comments

Census sensitivity. The Economist takes a look at the politics of enumeration.
posted by goo on Dec 23, 2007 - 14 comments

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Oct 18, 2007 - 47 comments

US Census Bureau Facts & Figures: Holiday Edition says that more than 20 billion letters, packages and cards will be delivered this holiday season and 12 million packages a day through to Christmas Eve. Also check out the Special Edition for comparison data from 1915, 1967 and 2006, the African-American History Month Facts & Features and more data going back to 2000.
posted by fenriq on Dec 15, 2006 - 4 comments

CensusScope. US Census 2000 data displayed through maps, rankings, and charts. [more inside] Warning: some pages render funny, but usable, under Firefox 1.5.0.4.
posted by Slithy_Tove on Aug 18, 2006 - 7 comments

When Library and Archives Canada placed online images of the 1901, 1906 and 1911 census, Automated Genealogy provided opportunity for volunteers to transcribe names into a database. Now the two early documents (1901, 1906) and most of the 1911 are fully indexed and searchable with links to the original image pages. Further projects are underway to link names between the documents and to other online sources, such as The Halifax Explosion Book of Remembrance and the British Home Children.
posted by TimTypeZed on Aug 15, 2006 - 8 comments

Boston's population woes may have been partially solved.
posted by RTQP on Jul 6, 2006 - 29 comments

The Supreme Court rules that state legislatures may redistrict at any time, while not harming minorities. The ruling is heavily influenced by Vieth v. Jubelirer, a Scalia opinion based on the premise that there is no objective way to draw a district (How the Census Bureau is trying to help make one). This ends a saga including amid-decade redistricting and subsequent rebellion in the Texas Statehouse.
posted by Captaintripps on Jun 28, 2006 - 43 comments

Who's Your Grandaddy? Ancestry.com "has compiled an online database of information on 500 million people, culled from every U.S. census record from 1790 to 1930" that "includes screen shots of the handwritten forms filled out by census-takers." Usually you have to pay to access the records, but they're providing three days of free access.
posted by kirkaracha on Jun 22, 2006 - 80 comments

No More Black and White. An article in the Washington Post about a census report released today shows that 45 percent of children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, with Hispanics the largest group. Interestingly enough, as Andrew Sullivan notes, among the under-5 population only 4% are black, a trend he's seen in the time he's lived in Washington D.C. ("It's only gotten whiter and browner.") This has happened/is happening perhaps most dramatically in New Orleans (previously).
posted by fugitivefromchaingang on May 10, 2006 - 40 comments

Seen anyone on Google Earth lately?
posted by divabat on Feb 17, 2006 - 33 comments

Google Maps and Census Data. Navigate to a place via Google Maps. Click and you get Census demographic data such as population, median income and housing.
posted by caddis on Sep 14, 2005 - 18 comments

Arsenic Lullaby is probably one of the most dementedly funny comic books. It features zombie fetuses, census worker hitmen, and the tooth fairy moonlighting as death. Luckily the internets feature Samples!
posted by drezdn on Oct 11, 2004 - 9 comments

Bush's latest accomplishment may not be one that he's willing to brag about. The Census Bureau is reporting that an additional 1.3 million Americans are now living in poverty. They also offer a number of pretty graphs (all in pdf).
posted by bshort on Aug 26, 2004 - 113 comments

Consider the scorecard. During Clinton's two terms, the median income for American families increased by a solid 15% after inflation, according to Census Bureau figures. But it rose even faster for African Americans (33%) and Hispanics (24%) than it did for whites (14%). The growth was so widely shared that from 1993 through 1999, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their incomes increase faster than those in the top 5%. By comparison, under President Reagan in the 1980s, those in the top 5% increased their income more than five times faster than the bottom 20%. Likewise, the poverty rate under Clinton fell 25%, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. It fell even faster for particularly vulnerable groups like blacks, Hispanics and children. Again the contrast with Reagan is striking. During Reagan's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by just 77,000. During Clinton's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty plummeted by 8.1 million. The number of children in poverty fell by 50,000 under Reagan. Under Clinton the number was 4.1 million. That's a ratio of 80 to 1. Clinton's Biggest Gains Not on Conservative Critics' Radar
posted by y2karl on Jun 29, 2004 - 44 comments

Modern Language Association Language Map of the USA.
posted by stbalbach on Jun 23, 2004 - 12 comments

Ancestry Maps from the 1990 census: Which states have the highest percentage of people of Danish ancestry? Greek? Hispanic? Who (perhaps) doesn't realize that we almost all came here from somewhere else? Using the data provided on 1990 Census question 13, which asked respondents to identify the ancestry groups with which they identified most closely, the State of Minnesota provides us with these nifty Ancestry maps. More info here on 'the ancestry question' from the US Census Bureau. link via ::crabwalk.com::
posted by anastasiav on Oct 28, 2003 - 38 comments

1901 Back on it's feet again... At last it's the 1901 show!(the date not the time) and the UK Public Record Office 1901 Census is up and testing again after having crashed due to overdemand earlier in theyear. And it works! I've discovered my great grandfather was a wheelwright and that his eldest son was a labourer at the gas works (I saw my first naked girlfriend in a bedroom in the shadow of that very gasworks!) and that I had a great great Uncle Percy!
posted by terrymiles on Nov 15, 2002 - 4 comments

The 1880 census went online yesterday. I found my Great Grandfather John S Roberds. Born in 1847(100 years before me) he was farming in Missouri when his household was documented. My Grandfather Oscar was 6 in 1880. From my Great Grandfathers household I only know what happened to Oscar. He died crossing Woodward ave. going to work at Ford Motor Co.
posted by JohnR on Oct 24, 2002 - 24 comments

Cooking the Books The Office of National Statistics feels that the UK population is a little too small - so they're inventing one million people to fill the gap. Why did they do a census if they were going to make it all up?
posted by tabbycat on Sep 23, 2002 - 9 comments

The 1901 UK Census in online including the records of Tolkien, Florence Nightingale and Charlie Chaplin No Jedis in 1901 though. Non-PC descriptions include "imbecile", "lunatic" or plain "feeble-minded".
posted by brettski on Jan 2, 2002 - 4 comments

It really is amazing what kinds of cool, free, raw data you can get from the web (that other folks would charge you good money for), here are a few I've come across.

Weather, from the good folks at the NOAA/NWS
Geographic locations of zipcodes amongst other things from those pesky buggers at the US Census Office
Want reverse phone lookup data ? NANPA has the skinny.

So what other cool data feeds have people found out there ?
posted by zeoslap on Oct 18, 2001 - 19 comments

"My name is John Johnson, I come from Wisconsin..." Find out the historical distribution of your last name throughout the U.S. (This will not, alas, be useful for Mr. Johnson, or the Smiths, Joneses, Williamses, and Browns of the world.) Brits, we haven't forgotten you! Of course, if you're doing genealogical research, you can turn to specific resources, like the US Census or the massive Familysearch.
posted by snarkout on Sep 10, 2001 - 15 comments

Alone. Ahhh. Sigh. 27 Million Singles Do Whatever They Want. All by Themselves.

The problem with census data is there's never space for a longer answer to the question. (Yes, I live like this but I didn't plan to. See, here's what happened . . . ) This week's newsy trickle across the national spreadsheet reveals, among other things, that more Americans than ever live alone. Twenty-seven million people, give or take. That's a lot of air guitar being played in private. That's a lot of bowls of cereal eaten over the sink around 1 in the morning.....

Do you fit into this scenario? I know I do.

posted by perogi on May 19, 2001 - 33 comments

Claims based on early census data that "non-hispanic whites" are becoming a minority in many regions of the United States are very devisive and inaccurate, this nytimes op-ed by Orlando Patterson claims. "The misleading reports of white proportional decline are likely not only to sustain the racist fears of white supremacist groups but also to affect the views of ordinary white, nonextremist Americans."
posted by palegirl on May 8, 2001 - 13 comments

Jedi could become official religion -- An email is circulating in New Zealand seeking 8,000 people to write "Jedi" as their religion on that country's census form. If they do, it's claimed the government will have to recognize the Star Wars discipline as an actual religion.
posted by shauna on Mar 6, 2001 - 16 comments

US Census not to be adjusted for undercounts. (NY Times, req'd registration)
Many political strategists, Democrats and Republicans alike, say that reliance on unadjusted population figures favors Republicans in the drawing of Congressional districts, since, they say, adjustment through statistical sampling would add to customarily Democratic neighborhoods most of those who have been uncounted.
They visited my home/office four times and never once brought the Long Form. Damnation.
posted by methylsalicylate on Mar 2, 2001 - 13 comments

This Census site is way cooler than the other one
The Census Monitoring Board is really snazzy. It has a lot of interesting reports to Congress on ways to improve the Census. It's way cooler than most .gov sites, especially census2000.gov
posted by rschram on Sep 1, 2000 - 4 comments

This information was supposed to be private, wasn't it?
posted by thirteen on May 29, 2000 - 12 comments

U.S. population stands at 13,462 With the April 1 deadline for returning Census 2000 forms finally passed, the Bureau of the Census announced Monday that the U.S. population stands at 13,462.       "We at the Census Bureau are shocked by the incredible decrease in the population that apparently took place in the 10 years since the last Census in 1990," Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt said. "A 1999 projection estimated the U.S. population at 274 million and set the annual growth rate at .95 percent. Yet from this latest Census count, we find that this projection overestimates the population by a multiple of 20,000."
posted by cmeck33 on Apr 8, 2000 - 1 comment