Interesting Links for 27-09-2012

[andrewducker]

• Today we celebrate Petrov Day - the man who decided not to destroy the world (No, really)
  (tags: russia nuclearweapons epicwin )
• 10 most overused opening sentences in personal statements for university applications
  (tags: university )
• London's surnames overlaid on a map. (Useful for finding all the Cohens)
  (tags: viaJack names visualization

Comments

[philmophlegm]

Is it politically incorrect to look at that very clever surnames map of London and think "Gosh, aren't there are lot of furriners living in London*..."?

* Or, as I understand the locals** pronounce it "Landun Taaaan"
** Not that the locals seem to actually live there any more, if the map is anything to go by.

[naath]

Well, yes. Considering how many people with non-WASP names are British citizens.

[inamac]

Also, assuming the map follows custom, those names are all men - I'd be interested in a map of women and pre-marital names.

[naath]

Do most cultures follow that custom or is it just a white-British thing?

[inamac]

It's a cultural British thing. If the data is taken from the census returns (as I suspect it is) then the names will be 'head of household' - with a male slant (in this household the two females alternate the 'head' role on forms - which might skew the results even further).

I wish the map named the boroughs. The demographic for Tower Hamlets is interesting (all 'English' on the Isle of Dogs).

[naath]

The data is from the electoral roll, not the census.

Even if it was from the census everyone puts their full name on it; don't the nice census people bother to compile information about people who aren't "head of household"? That would really suck...

[andrewducker]

Some of those foreigners have been there over a century (e.g. The Cohens). Some arrived in the late 40s, when we* deliberately imported people from all over the commonwealth.

Some of the, only arrived last week, of course. But I doubt many of the most popular names belong to them. Give it another couple of generations...

*And "we" only just includes my family, some of them having arrived in the 1920s, some in 1940, having left Paris just in time.

[philmophlegm]

Well we're all immigrants somewhere along the line...

[andrewducker]

Yup!

Which is why I found the map fascinating, because you can see the different groupings, and how little some of the areas mix.

[philmophlegm]

I'd be fascinated to see a similar map done for Cornwall. There's a very distinct break in southeast Cornwall between Cornish placenames and Anglo-Saxon placenames. We're on the Cornish side of the river, but the English side of the placename boundary (in Chilsworthy, near Callington - both good English names). It would be interesting to see if there is a similar distinction with surnames.

[nancylebov]

"when we* deliberately imported people from all over the commonwealth"

That's intriguing. Why was it done? About how many people were brought in?

[andrewducker]

Lots!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African-Caribbean_people#The_.22Windrush_generation.22

(Basically, the UK didn't have enough people after WWII, so we imported some from all over the commonwealth.)

[nancylebov]

Poking around a little, I've found that there were 125,000 immigrants from the Caribbean, but I'm wondering about how many from the rest of the empire.

Also, this echoes a little with an sfnal notion-- what happens if (as I expect what with low birth rates and an aging population), there's a shortage of young people?

[apostle_of_eris]

Just look around. Most of the "First World" is below replacement. China has put the brakes on population growth so successfully that India may soon be the most populous country in the world, but when four grandparents have only one grandchild between them to spoil, other things happen.
And our economies and labor practices aren't aligned with the age distributions we're moving into . . .

[nancylebov]

I was thinking about countries competing to get young people.

We're only seeing the beginning of the shortage. What might happen?