Researchers at Virginia Tech have created a synthetic US population based on Census data, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus.

The model runs on a supercomputer and assigns demographic characteristics to fake individuals based on real data, as reported in IEEE Spectrum. The model could be used to study any number of social science problems, and researchers are currently using it to study flu transmission.

For more, included selected publications, see the EpiSims project web page.

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has released Measuring Up 2008: The National Report Card on Higher Education. The report presents indicators on higher education nationally and for all 50 states. The data used to create the indicators can also be downloaded in Excel format.

The Population Reference Bureau and the Migration Policy Institute brought together four experts to talk about immigration data sources on Oct. 16. Webcasts and a report are available on the PRB web site.

The US is the only industrialized country in which children are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school, according to a new report from the Education Trust.

Citation: Habash, A. (2008). Counting on Graduation: An Agenda for State Leadership.  Washington, DC: The Education Trust.

The number of working poor families in the US increased between 2002 and 2006, according to a new report from the Working Poor Families Project. The report, Still Working Hard, Still Falling Short, includes state-level data and maps.

A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center says that the inflow of illegal immigration to the US has slowed, dropping below the rate of legal immigration. While the report does not try to identify reasons for the decline, some researchers, including William Frey of the Brookings Institution, point to the country’s economic downturn (Associated Press).

Citation: Passel, J. & Cohn, D. (2008). Trends in Unauthorized Immigration: Undocumented Inflow Now Trails Legal Inflow. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center.

Reversing a trend from the 1990s, poverty has become more concentrated from 2000 to 2005, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution (Christian Science Monitor).

For their study, authors Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube used Census data and Earned Income Tax Credit data from the IRS. They found that the number of poor people living in high poverty communities increased for the majority of metropolitan areas studied.

Citation: Kneebone, E. & Berube, A. (2008). Reversal of Fortune: A New Look at Concentrated Poverty in the 2000s. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

The Pew Hispanic Center has released a new fact sheet, Hispanic Women in the United States, 2007, containing statistics from the Current Population Survey and American Community Survey.

The population of the US will rise to 438 million in 2050, and the majority of the increase will be due to immigrants and their descendants, according to new projections developed by the Pew Research Center. The projections are published in a report, U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050.

The Department of Homeland Security has released a report estimating the legal permanent resident (”green card” holders) population in the US (PDF).