Category Archives: Census Bureau

13Aug / 2021

More detailed data release from Census 2020

After a lot of angst over the past few years around undercount, representation, and anonymization, the Census Bureau released detailed data from the 2020 decennial census:

The U.S. Census Bureau today released additional 2020 Census results showing an increase in the population of U.S. metro areas compared to a decade ago. In addition, these once-a-decade results showed the nation’s diversity in how people identify their race and ethnicity.

“We are excited to reach this milestone of delivering the first detailed statistics from the 2020 Census,” said acting Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin. “We appreciate the public’s patience as Census Bureau staff worked diligently to process these data and ensure it meets our quality standards.”

These statistics, which come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, provide the first look at populations for small areas and include information on Hispanic origin, race, age 18 and over, housing occupancy and group quarters. They represent where people were living as of April 1, 2020, and are available for the nation, states and communities down to the block level.

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Posted by in Census Bureau, Data Sources, demographics

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29May / 2020

Impact on Households in the United States

The Census Bureau has been running the Household Pulse Survey since April 23, 2020 to get some gauge for how the pandemic is changing things at home. Here's how things look so far. Read More

Posted by in Census Bureau, coronavirus, Data Underload, Pulse, states

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11May / 2017

Census Bureau budget cuts

The unexpected resignation of Census director John H. Thompson was likely related to the administration providing only half the requested budget for 2017. Mona Chalabi for The Guardian on why this matters:

Budget cuts at the Census Bureau mean counting fewer things. Fair enough right? Except that the subjects that are being targeted for cuts seem conspicuous. So far, the Trump administration has deleted questions on sexual orientation from the 2020 Census and at least two other government surveys. Meanwhile, two Republican-sponsored bills introduced in January say that government money can’t be used to collect data on “racial disparities”.

Worrisome.

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Posted by in Census Bureau, news

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11May / 2017

Census director resigns

The U.S. Census director John H. Thompson resigned and will leave June 30. Seems not good. And a horrible time for government data in general.

The news, which surprised census experts, follows an April congressional budget allocation for the census that critics say is woefully inadequate. And it comes less than a week after a prickly hearing at which Thompson told lawmakers that cost estimates for a new electronic data collection system had ballooned by nearly 50 percent.

Isn’t this supposed to be the age of big data or something? I thought data was the new oil. Measure things to improve them. Etc. Census data — not just the decennial stuff — is core in so much policy-making to make sure people are properly represented. The direction government data seems to be headed confuses and frustrates to no end, and to think that just a few years ago I’d think happy thoughts with the prospect of where it was going.

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Posted by in Census Bureau, news

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25May / 2016

Bot automatically generates maps from American Community Survey data

Census bot

The American Community Survey is an ongoing survey run by the United States Census Bureau that collects data about who we are. The map maker bot by Neil Freeman is a Twitter bot that automatically generates county-level maps based on this ACS data. It’s been running for the past month, making one map per hour, so there are already lots of demographic breakdowns to browse.

Pretty awesome. The implementation gets extra plus points for making the maps straight out of a government pamphlet.

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Posted by in bot, Census Bureau, maps, twitter

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20Jan / 2016

US Census Bureau open source

It took forever and it's way overdue, but the United States Census Bureau has committed to an open source policy, which seems pretty sweet.

  • Foster a community around Census data and tools by encouraging and responding to real-time feedback on how our data products are used by researchers, non-profit, and for profit organizations.
  • Increase our organizational capacity to do more open source by delivering more Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to the community. FOSS is software that does not charge users a purchase or licensing fee for modifying or redistributing the source code, in our projects and contribute back to the open source community.
  • Identify opportunities to publish existing code under an open source license that may benefit the public.
    Identify opportunities to create new open source projects, and develop those projects in the open alongside community participation.
  • Adopt industry best practices for managing the lifecycle of our open source projects including standard release management and continuous integration approaches.
  • Encourage “Issues” and accept “Pull Requests” (PRs) from the community.
  • Ensure that new Code Releases and Community Contributions meet the specified guidelines, detailed in the sections below.
    Where feasible to do so, we will automate and also open source any testing procedures and encourage contributors to execute their own tests.

Of course it all comes down to execution. The organization is not especially speedy, but it's worth keeping an eye on this. See the current open source projects here.

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Posted by in Census Bureau, government, open-source, software

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