Related topics: population

The paradox of big data spoils vaccination surveys

When Delphi-Facebook and the U.S. Census Bureau provided near-real time estimates of COVID-19 vaccine uptake last spring, their weekly surveys drew on responses from as many as 250,000 people.

Inferring urban travel patterns from cellphone data

In making decisions about infrastructure development and resource allocation, city planners rely on models of how people move through their cities, on foot, in cars, and on public transportation. Those models are largely ...

Google introduces its Public Data Explorer

(PhysOrg.com) -- Google's latest release is an application that allows users to create their own interactive, animated graphs and charts using public data such as census data or government statistics on unemployment or mortality ...

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Census

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include agriculture, business, and traffic censuses. In the latter cases the elements of the 'population' are farms, businesses, and so forth, rather than people. The United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined periodicity", and recommends that population censuses be taken at least every 10 years. The term itself comes from Latin: during the Roman Republic the census was a list that kept track of all adult males fit for military service.

The census can be contrasted with sampling in which information is obtained only from a subset of a population, sometimes as an Intercensal estimate. Census data is commonly used for research, business marketing, and planning, as well as a baseline for sampling surveys. In some countries, census data are used to apportion electoral representation (sometimes controversially – e.g., Utah v. Evans).

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