A couple of weeks ago the United States Census Bureau released results from the 2008 American Community Survey. The survey results suggest that Boston had a majority-white population in 2008. Ad the tables below illustrate Boston’s population remains about half white, half non-white, as the case has been for several years.

White means white alone not Hispanic. Latino means Hispanic of any race. Black means black alone, not Hispanic, and Asian means Asian alone, not Hispanic. The “Pop. est.” row in the first table is the official estimate of the size of the city’s population, while the row Boston is the size of the population as indicated by the ACS.

As you may recall there has substantial controversy surrounding the estimates of the size of the city’s population over the last few years.The city argues that the federal United States Census Bureau has consistently underestimated the population, and the Bureau has repeatedly revised the its estimates upwards. Next year’s population count will hopefully settle the matter, at least for 2-3 years.

The city’s argument is basically that the Bureau has grossly underestimated the number of college students and housing project residents.

The New England Patriots offensive linemen in 2009 and the different combinations of starters the team uses:

New England Patriots starting offensive linemen by game in 2009

Offensive linemen on New England Patriots 53-man roster (position, jersey number, height, weight, number of starts in 2009):

Matt Light (T, #72, 6′4″, 305, 11)
Logan Mankins (G, #70, 6′4″, 310, 16)
Dan Koppen (C, #67, 6′2″, 296, 16)
Nick Kaczur (T, #77, 6′4″, 315, 14)
Stephen Neal (G, #61, 6′4″, 305, 12)
Dan Connolly (G, #63, 6′4″,313, 5)
Rich Ohrnberger (G, #62, 6′2″, 291, 0)
Sebastian Vollmer (T, #76, 6′8″, 315, 7)

Practice squad:
Patrick Brown (T, #68, 6′8″, 312) was added to the practice squad on September 7.

Roster changes:

Ryan Wendell (C,#62, 6′2″,275,0) was released on September 22.

Gone from last year’s line up are back up centers/guards Russ Hochstein and Billy Yates, and tackles Wesley Britt and Ryan O’Callaghan. Hochstein was traded to Denver Broncos for a fifth-round draft pick during pre-season while Yates, Britt, and O’Callaghan were cut as the team released players to reach the 53-man roster limit.

I took a stroll down Newbury Street in Back Bay in Boston the day before Independence Day. It was a beautiful day and Newbury Street was the bustling happening street one would expect it be, but there were also rather sad signs of the recession stumbling through. Blow are pictures of a few storefronts between Clarendon and Exeter:

104.1 WBCN - the self-proclaimed Rock of Boston - will soon be moved from terrestrial glory to the Internet graveyard, as originally reported by Adam Reilly on his media blog at ThePhoenix.com. The station’s owner CBS is moving Mix (WBMX) from its current signal 98.5 to WBCN’s. 98.5 will in turn be taken over by a brand new sports radio station called The Sports Hub (WBZ-FM) and that station starts out with quite enviable programming: The New England Patriots (from WBCN) and the Boston Bruins (from WBZ-AM).

As a bit of a metal head and on-and-off WBCN listener (a few years ago I participated in a series of focus groups sponsored by WBCN and a couple of other Boston stations) I am quite disappointed with the shake up. While WBCN’s music programming is just barely good enough it’s still better than WAAF’s and especially WFNX’s. But it’s easy to understand why CBS is pulling the plug on the storied rock station. The station’s roster of advertisers lacks in both quality and quantity and it’s not difficult to imagine a marketing director making the case for the shake up (”Look at the sports demos! Look at their purchasing habits! Look at their income!”)

Incidentally, yesterday morning morning-hosts Toucher and Rich found it “eerie” that their show being named Best something or other by The Improper Bostonian was met with “silence” by the station. No self-congratulatory emails were sent out, neither internally or externally.

But not as eerie as they may have feared because Toucher and Rich are moving to the Sports Hub where they will anchor the morning show. I really enjoy T&R on WBCN but while they do talk sports every so often I’m not sure they’ll be able to carry the conversation the morning after a close game against the New York Jets. We’ll see.

Certainly the Sports Hub has some of the ingredients necessary to go up against the regional sports-talk behemoth that is WEEI but perhaps less than one might think. Yes, The Hub has Patriots and Bruins games, but WEEI has Patriots Monday and Patriots Friday, and the former includes exclusive interviews with New England’s quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick. That’s hard to top.

There is a vocal contingent of sports fans who express severe dissatisfaction with WEEI’s style, but it remains to be seen how big that contingent is and how many of its members will find The Hub more appealing.

Finally, a memo to old-time ‘BCN fans: Yes, I’m sure the station was better 25 years ago. Everything was better 25 years ago, as people from Harare to Hällefors can attest. That was true in 1984, too.

I ran a small handful of keyword searches that are near and dear to me in Microsoft’s new search engine Bing today and found that the gossip section in the Boston Herald, the Inside Track Gals, used one of my pictures on May 11 to illustrate some item related to the the Boston Celtics Dancers.

Google’s image search is pretty good at suppressing image swipers but the current incarnation of Bing seems to put a premium on recentness (Yahoo!’s image search is a butt load of Flickr images). Because of that, I imagine, the Herald’s sticky fingers bubbled to the top row on the Bing image search results.

The Inside Track used a re-sized version of the second photo of my suite of pictures of the Boston Celtics Dancers that I took during a game against the Atlanta Hawks almost two years ago. The caption has it that it is a “file” photo. I rather doubt that such a low-res image would end up in a photo catalog so I assume that “file” means “pilfered from some site on the Internet”. Here’s a re-sized and cropped screenshot of the Inside Track’s completely unauthorized usage of the photo:

Here’s the original photo:

A couple of months ago I quoted a local politician in Sweden recounting how government revenue projections are repeatedly revised downwards because of the terrible toll the recession in the United States is taking on the global economy’s export-driven participants. The local newspaper in my native city reports this weekend on another town that’s facing rapidly growing budget deficits because of collapsing revenue:

In the beginning of the year politicians in Gnesta [the G is not silent] thought it would suffice with a couple of million [SEK] in spending reductions. But the deficit has deepened along with the recession.

- In April we said four million and one can save that by asking all the departments to keep their belts tight. But then came another cold-shower [projecting even lower revenue] and now we have be specific and tell each department how much they need to cut back, says town alderman Henric Soderlund.

And he fears it will get even worse.

- New projections will be announced at the end of June and they aren’t likely to be any more fun, he says.

The department that gets hit the hardest in Gnesta is Human Services according to the newspaper article, which is fairly normal since that’s one of the real big-ticket items in municipalities in Sweden.

(My translation and editing)

A picture of a Target Assets Protections tricycle personnel carrier at the Target store in Watertown. I don’t know whether it’s a souped up pimped Segway or some kind of electric vehicle. I have to say it’s more stylish than the plain vanilla segways that mall cops ride. Target wins - again.

some nitwit who copied passages because the idea of writing was more appealing than the writing itself.

Udolpho.com on Ben Domenech, 3/26/2006

New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd (461) has gotten herself into a pinch by lifting a paragraph written by blogger Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo fame and using it in one of her columns without attribution. That’s plagiarism (4,990).

In the dark world of Search Engine Optimization and affiliate marketing (the two of which I shall refer to collectively as online marketing) we don’t worry about plagiarism as much as so-called duplicate content. In our world we answer to a power much higher than editors, we answer to Google, and Google does not take kindly to duplicate content. Consequently, when I manage or supervise writers - or content writers as we are prone to call them in online marketing - I implore them to check phrases and sentences they write to make sure they aren’t identical or closely similar to existing copy on the web, especially when it comes to sentences that contain the keywords we try to push.

(Even on this monumentally unprofessional blog I put the vast majority of quoted text in blockquote tags and the remainder in quotes to inform both readers and search engine bots that the enclosed text is in fact a quote and could very well be found elsewhere, especially on pages I link to from that web page. Occasionally I also wrap the attribution in a cite tag to really drive home where I’m getting the material from, whether the the source is online or not.)

In other words, Dowd not only failed to live up to the standards I expect of part-time minimum wage writers, she merrily violated those standards by knowingly, willfully lifting copy.

But Dowd is far from a part-time minimum wage writer (0) looking to build her portfolio. She is a big deal, at the top of the journalistic totem pole, a brand name more than a writer. What she writes about and how she writes is a good deal more important than what she actually writes. If you are a fan and frequent reader of Dowd and the mind-candy she regularly outputs in her column do you really care if she occasionally adds some candy that isn’t strictly speaking hers? As a fan of Dowd (0), how harshly do you want her to be punished for bringing you witticisms even wittier than what she can produce? If you, like me, aren’t a fan of hers and never read her stuff and pretty much don’t even give her existence much thought unless she happens to augment some content of hers with a few lines written by a better and harder-working writer, well, how much does it really bother you that she isn’t as good as perhaps some would want to have you believe?

We are, after all, talking about one insipid paragraph in a long stream insipid name-brand content that’s been output by Dowd over the course of many years. I compare Dowd’s error to the kind of transgressions radio talk show hosts occasionally commit. Radio yakkers typically yak for several hours each day and it doesn’t strike me as particularly outrageous, or even noteworthy, that they cross the line from time to time. I suggested yesterday that journalists who plagiarize should have to send half their paycheck to the writer they victimize. The kind of plagiarists I had in mind for the half-a-pay-check punishment are columnists.

My lax standards for op-ed columnists don’t extend to reporters. If, say, Boston Globe’s reporter Maria Cramer stole a paragraph or two from a blogger to spice up an article she would seriously undermine the credibility of her work. Likewise, if you write novels, essays or science papers of one kind or another you pretty much burn yourself when you plagiarize.

Perhaps I have a misplaced lack of respect and appreciation for the Dowds of the world.

(Number of exact matches on Google for the preceding phrase)

Peacuddy’s Cafe & Bakery in Melrose - a rather pleasant town north of Boston - is a terrific little place to have a cup of coffee and something to eat (Peacuddy’s serves Rao’s so you know the coffee is good). They have great cookies, too.