I’m off to help the people of Plato, Missouri, a small village in South Central Missouri, celebrate their being named the 2010 Center of Population.

The center of the population as defined by the 2010 Census is that point in the US that if we imagined a flat surface representing all the geography (including Alaska and Hawaii), with all residents weighing exactly the same, we would have a perfect balance on the surface.

This decade the center of population moved from Edgar Springs, MO, to Plato, southwest by about 20 miles or so.

I’ll meet with students at the school and help the local officials unveil the marker placed by the US Geodetic Survey designating the center of population.

See how the center of population has moved over the decades.

One of the issues I think about a lot these days is maximizing the credibility of statistical information that we provide to the United States.

That statistical information is a key feedback loop for the American public. Our estimates describe almost every aspect of our lives – income and educational attainment, retail and wholesale sales, occupational distributions in small communities, foreign trade flows, and changes in job distributions. They allow the citizenry to assess how things are going and to evaluate actions of the government that may affect their well-being. If the Census Bureau statistics are not believed, if they’re not found to be credible, we have failed.

We go through many steps to assure that the statistics we produce are of the highest quality given our resources. Our success at that depends on the professionalism and technical skills of our staff. In short, we believe that to be found credible our statistical information must be sound statistically.

The credibility of our statistics, however, relies on more than just their technical qualities. We have to be transparent in describing our methods. To be credible we must describe both the strengths and weaknesses of our statistics. In a world filled with advertising that only describes the strengths of products and not their weaknesses, this is an unusual activity. However, this is important for us to do. None of the statistics that we deliver are perfect; we know that. So we tell users about their imperfections so that they can take those into account. By being completely honest about our data products, we hope to win the trust of the users and enhance the credibility of our statistics.

A challenge in solely using transparency to enhance the credibility of our data products is that our statistical information is often delivered by a set of intermediaries – print, digital, and video journalists. The time-constrained environment of the 24/7 news world usually doesn’t permit their going beyond reporting only the numbers themselves.

Since many people learn of our estimates from intermediaries, without detailed descriptions of how they were assembled, their reaction to our estimates is affected about whether we are viewed as a trusted source of information. Does our name connote professional, objective, nonpartisan measurement and reporting? Are we viewed as independent of whatever controversies might exist about the phenomena we’re reporting? Do we “tell it like it is?”

Informing such judgments is long term work. As current stewards of the reputation of the Census Bureau, we need to do everything we can to preserve the trust of the American public so that to them our estimates can be believed and used effectively.

One of the key attributes of statistical information from the Census Bureau is that it should serve the widest audience possible, that it is relevant to their needs. The challenge in today’s United States is that there are many diverse needs of the public, local officials, business leaders, and federal government officials. We try to produce many different statistics to serve those needs.

Relevancy is an issue also in the methods we use to seek answers to our statistical survey questions. For years, the tools we most often used were a visit by one of our field interviewers to a home that was selected at random into our surveys or the mailing of a paper questionnaire.

Increasingly, our survey sample members ask us whether they might complete the questionnaire by Internet. Their lifestyle makes it complicated for them to host a visit of one of our interviewers. They prefer to complete the survey by themselves, at any hour they choose to do so. They are accustomed to ongoing connections with friends, family, and business associates via the Internet. It’s completely natural for them to want to use the same medium to interact with the Census Bureau.

Hence, the Census Bureau is increasing its use of the Internet as a tool to collect data. At present we are moving to give respondents the option to use the Internet in 50 surveys that we conduct. We hope to make that about 60 surveys in the near future. Many of these are surveys of businesses that ask just a few questions of the respondent. It’s quite efficient for respondents to respond online. Indeed, some are responding on mobile devices like iPads, Android devices, and others. We are now conducting a test of the Internet for the American Community Survey.

The research from around the world suggests that the length of the questionnaire is a factor in whether people prefer to use the Internet. The Internet is more attractive for short surveys than for long surveys. Some topics lend themselves to self-response versus others. There is also a consistent finding that some persons don’t prefer the Internet; hence, moving all surveys totally to Internet collection doesn’t work, at least now.

For these reasons, we offer multiple modes of data collection in some surveys, trying to fit the needs and desires of the diverse groups we need to measure. Our job, as we see it, is to make the participation in our surveys and censuses as convenient as possible. When that occurs we can provide the country with high quality statistical information about how it’s doing.

Today the Census Bureau delivered the final state-level files from the 2010 Census, permitting the redistricting process that will produce 435 geographical areas of representation for the House of Representatives. As with other operations of the 2010 Census, we’re a little ahead of mandated schedule.

Looking back over the past few months, all seems like a whirl of frenetic activity, with thousands of Census Bureau staff working long hours diligently, producing the initial files, carefully checking the quality of every response we obtained, making sure all the answers were consistent, and assembling counts for many different levels of geography. These data processing staff are committed to quality, and they don’t permit the release of counts until all the quality reviews have been passed. Then a whole set of experts in particular substantive areas (e.g., race/ethnicity, housing) examined all the counts, comparing them to other sources of data (e.g., the American Community Survey estimates), looking for anomalies. Many of these experts will now turn to doing their own analyses of the data, but our first duty is to get the counts out to the thousands of users in the states.

The vast majority of these staff do their jobs without fanfare or public visibility. They are public servants, in the sense that what motivates their day-to-day work is that they are contributing to a keystone of our society, based in the constitution, motivated by deep principles of the founding fathers. As statisticians, computer scientists, and demographers, it doesn’t get better than this.

I am proud to be a part of this group; they’re special people, and they deserve the thanks of all of us at this moment of their success.

I just got back from speaking to the American Association of Advertising Agencies conference. Like many industry groups they are filled with conversation about challenges facing their field.

Much of the early session discussion was focused on methods – how to use mobile cellular technology to get messages in the hands of potential customers, how to use social media tools, how to communicate brand image in multiple media, and how to get a look and feel that was complementary across media.

I talked to the group about the age, race, and ethnic diversity in the country. This might be best labeled as “What are the characteristics of the potential consumers?” The findings are very powerful from the combined information from the 2010 Census and the American Community Survey.

We are approaching a new high point in the prevalence of US residents who were born outside the country. The size of the foreign-born population has never been greater since the 1920s; the percentage of the population has grown significantly since the low point in 1960s. This means a higher portion of consumers view products and services partially from the lens of their home country’s culture.

The race and ethnicity identities within the population are correspondingly becoming more diverse. Minority groups are growing faster than the White Non-Hispanic population, both because of higher fertility rates and immigration. This means the minority populations are especially dominant in younger consumer groups. Advertisers of products of services need to understand the tastes, preferences, and purchasing power of these groups. Those advertisers of products and services aimed at youth will really have to understand the interplay of language, culture, race, and ethnicity.

In this regard, a very interesting subpopulation is that choosing multiple races to describe themselves in Census 2010. While this is still a “single-digit” group in percentages, it’s one that grew at 30-60 percent rates across different states from 2000 to 2010. Some of these folks in some sense live in two cultures. This gives them translational abilities across two sub-cultures. They may provide insights into how their two groups may perceive the value of products and services in different ways.

In short, in addition to adapting to new media, advertisers also have challenges with a very dynamic population using the media.