census

It was billed as a huge Web event, and the release of the 1940 census lived up to the advance billing. "Extraordinary demand" overwhelmed the service to the point where many services were taken offline for updates.

On Monday, the Census Bureau released the 1940 census for the first time since those records were compiled 72 years ago. The trove includes some 3.8 million images scanned from more than 4,000 rolls of microfilm.

The release was eagerly awaited by scholars hoping to glean more details about what the United States looked like in the waning days … Read more

This is a guest commentary. See below for Adam Marcus' biography.

Seventy-two years ago, the federal government made a promise to the American public: "No one has access to your census record except you."

So said a radio ad intended to promote participation in the 1940 census by assuaging privacy concerns. President Franklin Roosevelt even proclaimed, "No person can be harmed in any way by furnishing the information required. There need be no fear that any disclosure will be made regarding any individual or his affairs."

Yet today, the government is posting online all 3.8 million … Read more

Today's show begins with a history lesson on the fate of the Microsoft Courier tablet and its possible reincarnation with a modified version of the Windows 8 operating system.… Read more

Results of the census, we are told, can influence the allocation of federal funds for education programs, law enforcement, and highways--and apparently tell us how many crazy robots are running loose.

Well, at least the Carnegie Mellon Robot Census 2010 can tell us the last one. So far, it has tallied 547 robots on the CMU campus, including Tank LaFleur the "roboceptionist," Boss, winner of the 2008 DARPA Grand Challenge, and Opto-Isolator, the artbot that watches you with its big roving eye.

It all started when Heather Knight, a first-year Ph.D. student at CMU's Robotics Institute, … Read more

CNET reporter Declan McCullagh talks about privacy concerns arising around U.S. Census-taking time, and why those fears might be heightened in 2010. That, and other headlines of the day, including the riskiest U.S. cities for cybercrime. See where your city ranks.

Today's stories:

Norton ranks riskiest cities for cybercrime

Amazon unveils Kindle app for iPad

Cheaper electric car rides on battery manufacturing

Group formed to sell consumers on smart grid

Census time heightens privacy concerns

SanDisk ships 32GB memory card for phones

Wiesenthal study details online hate, terror groups

DemoSpring: Where start-ups sprout

When a census worker visited Oliver Sarle's home in Warwick, R.I., the crusty farmer refused to answer a series of questions, including how much revenue his crops had generated the previous year and how many gallons of milk his cows had produced.

Sarle was charged with a misdemeanor: not answering questions posed by an official representative of the census. A Rhode Island judge sided with the government, ruling that the "information required by the statute to be collected must be assumed to be important and necessary for the public service."

The year was 1890, but the … Read more

YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen's VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world's third most popular place to view video online.

According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked … Read more

The Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.

To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it's clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the "S").

It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I've seen, apparently doesn't even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.

So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.

The data on Ubuntu's amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.… Read more

So much for a "high-tech" census in 2010.

Department of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez plans to tell Congress on Thursday that the next constitutionally mandated count of the U.S. population will be taking place, once again, via old-fashioned pencil and paper, according to a report by National Journal's NextGov blog.

Census officials had been hoping to introduce handheld computers into the process of collecting and transmitting data, but numerous glitches along the way have stymied those plans.

That means, in part because of "recent increases in gas prices, postage, and printing" and the need … Read more