In a comment to the previous posting, I attempted to guess at certain aspects of the demographics of the people with whom we spent a week in Omaha NE. Below are the demographics for Kansas and Nebraska (only two counties in Iowa are represented in the population, so I'm choosing not to include Iowa.)
The table presents the demographics for those in the photo (75% of all those who attended the meetings) as I guessed them - with a comparison to the appropriate numbers from the census table.
Ethnicity/Race |
Attendance (%) |
Kansas (%) * |
Nebraska (%) * |
(Non-Hispanic) White |
75.5 |
78.2 |
82.1 |
Black/African-American |
8 |
5.9 |
4.5 |
Asian |
2-4 |
2.4 |
1.8 |
(Hispanic) White |
10 |
10.5 |
9.2 |
American Indian/Alaska Native |
4 |
1 |
1 |
Male |
37 |
49.6 |
49.6 |
Female |
63 |
50.4 |
50.4 |
* IndexMundi, which in turn gathered the data from United States Census Bureau.
How dare you identify people by gender. Were these attendees counted by what you assumed was their gender or what they identified themselves as? :-)
Posted by: Ingineer66 | August 17, 2015 at 07:39 PM
Ingineer--Very funny! From my previous comment, "...people whom I would guess to identify themselves as...." I've worked (via computer and/or phone) with most of the people in the photo, and I've worked shoulder-to-shoulder with about 1/4 or 1/3 of them; so I have some knowledge of how they present themselves.
; )
Posted by: Cop Car | August 17, 2015 at 09:51 PM
But the people you were helping (by installing smoke detectors) in the 67214 ZIP code
have a very different distribution. It's a poor area, cheap housing, many black/AAs, high unemployment, low education level; people living (in rentals?) for whom smoke detectors have a low priority.
Posted by: Ole Phat Stu | August 18, 2015 at 12:07 AM
Sorry, Stu, but I am not understanding the point you are trying to make. Are you saying that we should assure that only a team of Asians call on homes inhabited by Asians, that only a team of Black/African Americans should call on homes inhabited by that ethnic group, and that only economically challenged people should call on such households?
In the neighborhood in which "my" team worked, most houses were vacant as far as we could determine. Of the remainder, by my judgment, about 50% were Black/African American, about 5% Asian, and the rest (Non-Hispanic) White. I was surprised by the number of households into which we were invited that already had functioning (our team checked them!) smoke alarms. A few could even tell us what their evacuation plan was for each room in their home and how they had trained their children to react to fires. I did not note a lack of priority for smoke detector/alarm installations.
Did I miss your point?
; )
Posted by: Cop Car | August 18, 2015 at 07:24 AM
I am not making a point, merely holding up a mirror called "efficient use of resources".
I suspect that had you done a Pareto analysis of causes of death in 67214, fire might not be at the top of the list (using the numbers you gave). You could probably save more lives by e.g. distributing clean needles? I don't know.
And yes, visitors of the same ethnic/religion group are more likely to be asked in than others.
Therefore assign volunteers accordingly.
Here we currently have a flood of asylum seekers, most of whom cannot speak German.
The local government authorities mostly can only speak German. So my minor contribution is to
act as an interpreter, using French or English as an intermediate tongue. That's inefficient, but the local authorities do not (yet?) have their information leaflets in the asylum-seekers native tongues. I've suggested they prioritise that.
Posted by: Ole Phat Stu | August 18, 2015 at 10:54 AM