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Thursday, March 17, 2011

Atlanta 2010 Census Population Seems to Have Been Undercounted



Above, is a scatterplot I made comparing the July 2009 Census Bureau estimated populations of cities with at least 100,000 people (according to the Jul 2009 estimates).

You can look at the spreadsheet I used/created for this here


Missing are the cities with over 1,000,000 people (because they make the rest of the scatterplot too small) as well as those cities with between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people from states the Census Bureau still has to release ( Maine, Massachusetts,Michigan,New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina and West Virginia).

Notice how the data fits very well(even though the populations in July 2009 were slightly different from those in April 2010), with one glaring exception-the city of Atlanta, where, as it so happens, I now reside.

The July 2009 Estimate put Atlanta's population at 540,922. Today's Census 2010 release of Georgia put the April 1, 2010 population of Atlanta at 420,003, just barely up from the April 1, 2000 Census population of 416,474.

Putting aside that it just seems like there MUST have more than a 3,500 person gain based on residential development in Atlanta in the last 10 years, the chances of a city (in this case Atlanta) being more than 6 standard deviations away from the mean (no other city was more than 2.67 standard deviations away from the mean) is 1 in 500 million (assuming the error here is normally distributed, which it looks to be).

That is to say, it seems MUCH more likely that there's either a typo or a serious undercount of Atlanta's population (I tend to think they undercounted in a lot of places and not just Atlanta personally ...)

This is a very serious issue; the difference in population here is enough to account for about 1/6th of a seat in Congress, 2/3 of a seat in the Georgia Senate, and 2.25 seats in the Georgia House of Representatives, not to mention millions in population-based federal block grants.

I would strongly urge Mayor Kasim Reed to sue the Census Bureau over an undercount of Atlanta.


Anyway, all of that being said, there is the possibility that they somehow majorly majorly overlooked the "black flight" phenomenon, as the official 2010 Census numbers show a 17% increase in the white population of Atlanta but a 12% decrease in the black population (a whopping 65% increase in the Asian population, which is probably due largely to expansion of Georgia Tech). More on black flight later.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What was Huckabee Taught about the British in Arkansas Schools?

OK, so the obvious part of the stupidity in Mike Huckabee's recent statement is that President Obama grew up in Kenya. I don't even think that's a widely held view among the Birthers.

But consider the context of where Huckabee said it.

"I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough," Huckabee said of the president in an interview with New York radio station WOR. "And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American."

Huckabee, the former presidential candidate and current Fox News host who has said he is thinking about mounting another campaign, added, "his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."

I guess he's got a point. I mean, look at the kind of terrible things Kenyan revolutionaries said about then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

  • He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
  • He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

or about the British in general

  • Thousands are already ruined by British barbarity; (thousands more will probably suffer the same fate.)

Wait, those weren't Kenyan revolutionaries; that's in the Declaration of Independence (referring to King George) and in Common Sense (Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet).

Most Americans ARE taught that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted our ancestors (if we had ancestors in the country at the time). Perhaps Arkansas schools were too busy teaching the "War of Northern Aggression" and the terrible persecution of the South to have any time to teach about the British.

Hey, maybe that racist environment he grew up in is what's causing Mr. Huckabee to try to paint a black president as foreign/less-than-American. Huckabee certainly needs to answer some questions on the subject.