OK, maybe I can be forgiven for the clickbait title. Allow me to explain.
Tomorrow (Saturday January 11th 2025) @Ed_Zotti is speaking at the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library. The title of his talk is “Chicago’s Demographic Shifts Since COVID”. It begins at 10:30am.
I live nearby and I find the topic interesting, so I plan to go. Is anyone else interested in going? Should we surreptitiously identify ourselves to each other? To Cecil?
Awesome! Tell Ed I said “Hello!” and ask him if he’s got that fifty bucks he owes me. You can collect it for me if you want–I’ll get it from you later.
Tripler
. . . and don’t take no guff. He knows what I’m talking about.
Considering this crew, I think the secret sign would be carrying a copy of one of the StraightDope books to read while you were waiting for the conference to begin.
I can imagine a see of graying folks with hardcover books in their hand, all winking at each other, and repeating various in-jokes or phrases from the board.
Fantastic! Urban human geography…that was my academic training, in Chicago, thirty-five years ago (religiously read the Dope in the Weekly Reader). Hope it went well for you and for Ed.
I was actually hoping to not reply, but I have specifically been called out.
Please let me preface my comments to follow by saying that it is possible (though unlikely) that Ed Zotti may read this post, and Ed Zotti neither asked for nor needs my feedback (you can see that I did not use the ampersand symbol here). So I shall be brief.
I am glad that I went to the talk, and it was well attended. The talk was intended for a general, non-expert audience, and it was not an academic talk. It did not make use of analytic or inferential (as opposed to descriptive) statistical methods or forecasts. It was broad and general, and it was not what I expected. Having said that, I am glad that people care and think about topics like this, and I applaud all efforts to bring data about topics like this to a general audience. I am glad that many people attended the talk; it shows that people care about topics like this. I am glad that Ed Zotti gave this talk on this topic.
Thanks for your impressions. I asked because you said you’d give those, but I only glanced briefly at the thread so if elsewhere reasons arose for your not replying, I apologize for missing that.
Ah, to clarify: I said earlier I was going to reply. After attending the talk, I planned to not reply, because the talk was not what I was hoping for (not that my opinion matters one iota). Hence the first sentence in my previous post.
Your impressions after the talk as compared to your expectations before the talk are of interest to those of us reading this thread. As for whether your opinion “matters”… how is that relevant?