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...

Surprise Shaking?

Most Americans know fully well that the west coast, especially California, is subject to frequent and often severe earthquakes.   Many would not be overly surprised if the ‘big one’ eventually caused Los Angeles or San Francisco to fall into the Pacific Ocean.  Those...

Two of my all time favorite books

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.   We’ve all heard that quote.   The classic book on the fine art of lying with numbers, now over sixty years old and still available on Amazon….How To Lie With Statistics.   If you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything....