census-taking

Nearly half of today’s identified colonies were discovered in the last 15 years by Fretwell, who pioneered the science of penguin census-taking by satellite.

“After 200 years of census-taking and 30 census directors, I was the 31st director and the first woman, so that heightened my visibility a little,” she said in a 1993 oral history for the bureau.

Strictly speaking, census-taking might have operated apart from these factors, but counting the populace has never been a simple math problem.

The 2020 census streamlined that process by moving most of the form-filling from cumbersome paper surveys to the internet, and equipping census workers with iPhones and census-taking apps instead of clipboards and paper forms.

“We propose that ‘human error’ during census-taking field operations should have a remedy, if such errors are detected and substantiated,” said Todd Graham, principal demographer for the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities, in public comments on the program.