Flattening the Economy

A black swan event. We have all heard of it, but who could have imagined that the black swan would be a virus running amok, having graciously been given free airline tickets to a globally connected economy. Obviously, nobody saw this coming. On the plus side, we have...

Picking the Pickles off Your Burger

Many years ago, a major advertising battle between McDonalds and Burger King was started when Burger King promoted the slogan “Have it your way” in the jingle that included the line “special orders don’t upset us”. If that jingle is now playing in your head in an...

Welcome to Profile, by AGS.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Profile, a weekly newsletter that we hope you will find interesting, educational, and on occasion amusing as we explore the richness of applied geography expressed through maps, data, analytic techniques, apps, and case studies....

Household Data: A Heretical View

At the heart of geodemographic analysis lies the once revolutionary but now mundane site report – a simple aggregation of geographic data within a predefined geometric or arbitrary shape – a radius, a drive time, or perhaps a ZIP code polygon.  Simple, but it serves...

The Illusion of Precision

Sometimes the increasingly prevalent marketing hype and oversell in this business simply annoys me to the point of arousing the normally dormant academic in me. When the first computerized and geo-referenced censuses were released in the United States, Canada, and...