A review of name-based ethnicity classification methods and their potential in population studies

Several approaches have been proposed to classify populations into ethnic groups using people's names, as an alternative to ethnicity self-identification information when this is not available. These methodologies have been developed, primarily in the public health and population genetics literature in different countries, in isolation from and with little participation from demographers or social scientists. The objective of this paper is to bring together these isolated efforts and provide a coherent comparison, a common methodology and terminology in order to foster new research and applications in this promising and multidisciplinary field. A systematic review has been conducted of the most representative studies that develop new name-based ethnicity classifications, extracting methodological commonalities, achievements and shortcomings; 13 studies met the inclusion criteria and all followed a very similar methodology to create a name reference list with which to classify populations into a few most common ethnic groups. The different classifications' sensitivity varies between 0.67 and 0.95, their specificity between 0.80 and 1, their positive predicted value between 0.70 and 0.96, and their negative predicted value between 0.96 and 1. Name-based ethnicity classification systems have a great potential to overcome data scarcity issues in a wide variety of key topics in population studies, as is proved by the 13 papers analysed. Their current limitations are mainly due to a restricted number of names and a partial spatio-temporal coverage of the reference population data-sets used to produce name reference lists. Improved classifications with extensive population coverage and higher classification accuracy levels will be achieved by using population registers with wider spatio-temporal coverage. Furthermore, there is a requirement for such new classifications to include all of the potential ethnic groups present in a society, and not just one or a few of them. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Structural vulnerability to narcotics-driven firearm violence: An ethnographic and epidemiological study of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican inner-city.

BackgroundThe United States is experiencing a continuing crisis of gun violence, and economically marginalized and racially segregated inner-city areas are among the most affected. To decrease this violence, public health interventions must engage with the complex social factors and structural drivers-especially with regard to the clandestine sale of narcotics-that have turned the neighborhood streets of specific vulnerable subgroups into concrete killing fields. Here we present a mixed-methods ethnographic and epidemiological assessment of narcotics-driven firearm violence in Philadelphia's impoverished, majority Puerto Rican neighborhoods.MethodsUsing an exploratory sequential study design, we formulated hypotheses about ethnic/racial vulnerability to violence, based on half a dozen years of intensive participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork. We subsequently tested them statistically, by combining geo-referenced incidents of narcotics- and firearm-related crime from the Philadelphia police department with census information representing race and poverty levels. We explored the racialized relationships between poverty, narcotics, and violence, melding ethnography, graphing, and Poisson regression.FindingsEven controlling for poverty levels, impoverished majority-Puerto Rican areas in Philadelphia are exposed to significantly higher levels of gun violence than majority-white or black neighborhoods. Our mixed methods data suggest that this reflects the unique social position of these neighborhoods as a racial meeting ground in deeply segregated Philadelphia, which has converted them into a retail endpoint for the sale of astronomical levels of narcotics.ImplicationsWe document racial/ethnic and economic disparities in exposure to firearm violence and contextualize them ethnographically in the lived experience of community members. The exceptionally concentrated and high-volume retail narcotics trade, and the violence it generates in Philadelphia's poor Puerto Rican neighborhoods, reflect unique structural vulnerability and cultural factors. For most young people in these areas, the narcotics economy is the most readily accessible form of employment and social mobility. The performance of violence is an implicit part of survival in these lucrative, illegal narcotics markets, as well as in the overcrowded jails and prisons through which entry-level sellers cycle chronically. To address the structural drivers of violence, an inner-city Marshall Plan is needed that should include well-funded formal employment programs, gun control, re-training police officers to curb the routinization of brutality, reform of criminal justice to prioritize rehabilitation over punishment, and decriminalization of narcotics possession and low-level sales

Probabilistic Inference of Twitter Users' Age based on What They Follow

Twitter provides an open and rich source of data for studying human behaviour at scale and is widely used in social and network sciences. However, a major criticism of Twitter data is that demographic information is largely absent. Enhancing Twitter data with user ages would advance our ability to study social network structures, information flows and the spread of contagions. Approaches toward age detection of Twitter users typically focus on specific properties of tweets, e.g., linguistic features, which are language dependent. In this paper, we devise a language-independent methodology for determining the age of Twitter users from data that is native to the Twitter ecosystem. The key idea is to use a Bayesian framework to generalise ground-truth age information from a few Twitter users to the entire network based on what/whom they follow. Our approach scales to inferring the age of 700 million Twitter accounts with high accuracy.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Trends and concerns in digital cartography

CISRG discussion paper ;

Data DNA: The Next Generation of Statistical Metadata

Describes the components of a complete statistical metadata system and suggests ways to create and structure metadata for better access and understanding of data sets by diverse users

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Unlocking Latino Civic Potential 2016 and Beyond

In August 2015, the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Program and the Aspen Institute Citizenship and American Identity Program convened a diverse group of distinguished scholars, organizers, and other experts and leaders to discuss the challenges and causes of low Latino civic participation and to develop recommendations for unlocking Latino civic potential in the United States.This is a vital topic, as the U.S. Latino population is growing rapidly, is overwhelmingly young, and thus will see growing power and influence in American society and politics, if Latinos are able to more fully realize their civic potential. Increasing Latino civic and political participation rates today will pay dividends for generations to come; likewise, missing the opportunity to do so will have consequences to the health of our democracy for generations to come.This report identifies four priority areas and tactics for unleashing the civic potential of Latinos in the United States. Focusing on immigrant integration and naturalization, voter engagement, civic education, and leadership development; the report offers a comprehensive vision for how to engage the nation's fastest growing demographic, beyond election cycles, to participate more fully in our democracy