Census

The 2010 census continued to miscount the same groups that it's had problems keeping track of in the past, but overall was essentially accurate, officials said Tuesday. According to an assessment of its count, the Census Bureau said it had overcounted the total U.S. population by 0.01% or about 36,000 people, an improvement from the 2000 census, which had an overcount of 0.5%. But the census had the same problems it usually has in dealing with minorities, renters and young males.

The United States has reached a historic tipping point, with children born to Latino, Asian, African American and mixed-race parents now constituting a majority of all births, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The long-expected demographic shift is considered a milestone for the nation, though one that California passed three decades ago when births to racial and ethnic minorities surpassed those to white parents. The new report shows that minorities accounted for about 2 million, or 50.4%, of U.S. births in the 12 months ending July 1 of last year.

The United States has reached a historic tipping point -- with Latino, Asian, mixed race and African American births constituting a majority of births for the first time, theU.S. Census Bureau  reported Thursday. Minorities made up about 2 million, or 50.4%, of the births in the 12-month period ending July 2011, enough to create the milestone. The latest figure was up from 49.5% in the 2010 census. The racial and ethnic shift was an expected, but still important, turning point for the nation, whose economic and political elites remain essentially white and primarily male.

The U.S. foreign-born population has risen to its highest level since 1920, with 13% of all those living in the nation in 2010 having been born elsewhere, a new report from the Census Bureau shows. Forty million of those residing in the U.S. in 2010 were born in other countries, up from 31 million, or 11% of the total, a decade earlier. The foreign-born share of the population dropped between 1920 and 1970, hitting a low of 4.7% in 1970, before rising again for several decades. But that growth has slowed in recent years as immigration has dropped, census officials said Thursday.

High foreclosure rates and a strong rental market pushed the homeownership rate in the U.S. to a 15-year low, even as projections for the housing market grew brighter. The 65.4% rate in the first quarter is down from the 66% rate in the fourth quarter and 66.4% in the first quarter of last year, according to the Census Bureau. Before the housing bubble burst, homeownership reached a high of 69.2% in 2004. The current rate is low compared with the last decade partly because earlier homeownership rates were inflated by people who hadn't made down payments and were really "renters with an option to buy," said Richard K. Green, director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate.

Using space technology to sniff out a telltale trail of penguin poop strewn about the edges of Antarctica, scientists have completed the first-ever census of an animal population taken with satellite imagery. The collaboration of British and American researchers was able to identify 44 emperor penguin colonies, including seven that were previously unknown. They counted 595,000 birds - twice as many as they expected to see. "Now that we have this baseline information, we can start asking new questions" about the Antarctic ecosystem, said Michelle LaRue, a doctoral student in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and coauthor of a paper about the discovery, published Friday in the journal PLoS One. As depicted in the 2005 film "March of the Penguins," emperor penguin pairs battle temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit to nest at their breeding sites each year.

Americans responded in overwhelming numbers Monday to the online release of detailed information from the 1940 census — the first time such a trove of historic census records has been available on the Internet. Minutes after its launch, the 1940 census portal on the National Archives and Record Administration website was all but impenetrable. Officials apologized and promised the website would be accessible as soon as possible. "In the first three hours, we had 22.5 million hits," said Susan Cooper, spokeswoman for the National Archives.

For those who are fascinated by time capsules and family trees, a new  treasure trove opened up online for the first time Monday when the National Archives released the 1940 census. After 72 years hidden by a legal cloak of confidentiality, 3.8 million digital images of what Census enumerators found in 1940 became available to anyone with a computer. The National Archives, a federal government agency, partnered with Archives.com, a family history website owned and operated by Inflection, a Silicon Valley company, to create to the 1940 census website . Previous data dumps were on microfilm.

The nation's Asian population grew faster than any other racial or ethnic group over the last decade, surging almost 46% between 2000 and 2010, says a new Census Bureau report. The number of Americans who identify as Asian, either alone or in combination with another race, rose to more than 17 million during the decade, the report showed. That was more than four times the rate of growth for the U.S. population as a whole, which increased about 10% over that period. By comparison, the Latino population rose 43%. Other groups grew much more slowly.