One of the very specific items in the U.S. Constitution from its beginning is the requirement to enumerate the population every ten years. The decennial census is a big undertaking, made even more challenging this year by the Coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately they had already planned to get most of the information by online questionnaires (which I already filled out), so they can more easily limit human contact and virus transmission. An interesting side effect of the constitution’s simple wording -- that makes no mention of citizenship or national origin in the count -- is that we must reach out to residents in their own language. They have determined that there are twelve languages with at least 60,000 households that do not speak English well enough to complete the survey; so they translate all the questionnaires into those twelve languages. Further, there are 59 languages with at least 2000 households (that do not speak English well enough to understand the pr...
Thoughts on education, technology, and culture, during an international career.