LinkedIn is an unmitigated hellhole, but last week the world’s biggest business social networking site redeemed itself somewhat and gave us all a gift in the form of voice messages. The feature is rolling out to users right now, and lets you send audio clips up to 60 seconds long. If you have it, you’ll see a little microphone icon when you compose a message on the LinkedIn app. For reference, this is what it looks like. Voice messages are also ripe for trolling, as I soon found out. There’s an unmistakable beauty in using audio as a medium of…
Every ten years, governments around the world conduct their national census: a count of the resident population. This is no easy task. The 2011 Chinese census, for instance, was a vast operation relying on six million enumerators taking census questionnaires from door to door. Knowledge of a population’s composition is crucial for government planning, for example in terms of investing resources in elderly care. In some countries, it is the basis for dividing parliamentary seats over electoral districts. Historically, census counts have been relevant to the development of modern nation states because they link populations to a territory. They have…