Today’s release of data from the 2016 Census allows us to identify some of Australians’ more common characteristics, how they vary across states and territories, and how they are changing over time.
How can we possibly know how many millions of people are living in the U.S. illegally? Demographers have actually refined a simple formula that’s worked pretty well since the 1970s.
Dallas Rogers speaks with Alanna Kamp on how racism and sexism has excluded lives and experiences of Chinese-Australian women from our historical record.
The evidence the Census servers suffered a DDoS attack is weak. A simpler explanation is that they buckled under load of Australians filling out their Census forms as asked.
Despite assuring Australians its systems were load tested and secure, the Census site went offline at a crucial time. Could the ABS have avoided such an embarrasing failure?
Census data have a real impact on the lives of Australians, from determining political representation through the distribution of electorates, to the allocation of government funding.
Reliable data about the homeless population is vital when developing policy, allocating funding and developing services for vulnerable people. But first the census needs to find them.
By linking censuses through time or by combining other information with the census, many more important policy questions can be answered than if we used one dataset alone.
Analyzing big data sets holds the promise of big insights. But the axiom “garbage in, garbage out” is particularly apt, since conclusions can be only as good as the raw data itself.
Before Australia proceeds with plans to devote fewer resources to a less frequent national census, we should consider the Canadian experience of what losing such rich data means.
If reports are to be believed, both the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the federal government are strongly considering moving from a five-year to a ten-year census cycle. This move has been…
There are now more mobile phones in use than there are people in the world to use them – some 7.2 billion phones. Mobile phones are becoming integral parts of our lives, penetrating into areas of the developing…