From rhoskins@home.com Mon Aug 16 03:05:42 1999 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id DAA27248 for ; Mon, 16 Aug 1999 03:05:41 -0700 Received: from mail.rdc1.wa.home.com (imail@ha1.rdc1.wa.home.com [24.0.2.66]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.06) with ESMTP id DAA19956 for ; Mon, 16 Aug 1999 03:05:40 -0700 Received: from c501552a ([24.5.121.123]) by mail.rdc1.wa.home.com (InterMail v4.01.01.00 201-229-111) with SMTP id <19990816100539.HWDS6201.mail.rdc1.wa.home.com@c501552a>; Mon, 16 Aug 1999 03:05:39 -0700 Message-ID: <000e01bee7ce$b82eb2e0$7b790518@olmpi1.wa.home.com> From: "Richard E. Hoskins" To: Cc: References: Subject: WAPHGIS: census data worldwide Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 03:04:24 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 I won't touch whomever's flag is (was) on the Canadian Parliament. The 2 $ is now a beautiful composite coin with a polar bear on one side and you know who on the other. Public health people in the US can only envy such a census. Is there a web site? I found www.statistics.gov.au which looks like the official site for census and other things. In the US, intercensus data - the gov census is every 10 years here - can be bought from commercial vendors who use demographic models based on new housing permits, telephone surveys, birth & death data, other things I guess. I cannot imagine they do not exist, but I am not aware of validation studies on these numbers. Would seem an important issue for public health but seldom discussed. It is particularly difficult to deal with since you have to squeeze the population data vendors pretty hard to reveal just how they get their numbers. Academic journals don't push authors too hard about where they got their population data. Getting the details are a lost cause because commercial population data is used mostly for marketing and site location in a GIS. So vendors keep it a big secret. (and its very very expensive) It is possible to buy this data at the census block level which is just a few households. In the DOH here, we just bought the population part and spent a lot. We are able to dispense it to local health departments but we can't put it up on a web site for giving to anyone else. The rest of the data available (market segmentation data) has food, alcohol, tobacco consumption data, etc - would be very useful, but it costs a fortune. But we have no idea how good it is. Of course, health status assessment depends on having a numerator and a denominator; in the US, getting either is a challenge. I guess in Australia, the nature of your health care system allows better disease and condition enumeration? I teach a GIS and Public Health course at the U of Washington and I have always wanted to upgrade my material on the census with some examination of census activities outside the US. For that matter, it would be nice to talk about how other nations get their numerator too. Thanks for your contribution, Tim. Richard Hoskins ----- Original Message ----- From: Tim CHURCHES To: ; Sent: Sunday, August 15, 1999 8:25 PM Subject: Re: WAPHGIS: only in the USA -Reply .