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KeithPickering
Tourist


Reged: 03/14/07
Posts: 31
Loc: Minnesota, USA
World Population Center
      #865562 - 04/15/07 12:57 PM

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Every year the US Census Bureau publishes the location of the US population center, which is currently near St. Louis, Missouri, and moving slowly southwest. I thought it would be interesting to do the same for the population of the whole world.

I got the populations of all the world's countries from Wikipedia, and estimated (very roughly!) the positions of each country's population center using Google Earth. Then I computed the great circle distance from each country to a trial population center and weighted by that country's population. To find the world population center, I adjusted the trial center until the sum of weighted distances was minimized.

I had guessed beforehand that the world population center would end up somewhere in central Asia. Boy was I wrong!

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Keith Pickering

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