monkey's uncle

My last post, which I had to cut short, discussed the recent paper by Scheffer et al. (2009) on the early warning signs of impending catastrophe. This paper encapsulates a number of things that I think are very important and relate to some current research (and teaching interests). Scheffer and colleagues show the consequences on [...]

[Read more →]

On 29-31 October, we will be holding our next installment of the Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography and Biodemography, the result of an ongoing grant from NICHD to Shripad Tuljapurkar and myself.  This time around, we will venture onto the bleeding edge of biodemography.  Specific topics that we will cover include:

The use of genomic information [...]

[Read more →]

Craig Hadley drew my attention to this terrific piece by Paul Roberts on the complexities of truly sustainable agriculture.  Food for though, as it were…

[Read more →]

A major challenge in science writing is how to effectively communicate real, scientific uncertainty.  Sometimes we just don’t know have enough information to make accurate predictions.  This is particularly problematic in the case of rare events in which the potential range of outcomes is highly variable. Two topics that are close to my heart come [...]

[Read more →]

Every time I go by the Stanford Shopping Center — which is a truly absurd place, I should add — I am reminded of an event that seems like an apt metaphor for the economic melt-down, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand. I am, of course, talking about the replacement of [...]

[Read more →]

A nice piece by Nicholas Dawidoff in the New York Times Magazine this week details the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson’s skepticism about the dangers of global warming. It seems that Mr. Dyson is concerned about the quality of the science that underlies the current scientific consensus about its perils.
One gathers from reading the Dawidoff piece [...]

[Read more →]

Results from a recent Gallup poll are rather depressing. Based on telephone interviews with a sample of 1,012 Americans, more Americans think that the reporting on global warming is exaggerated than think its seriousness is under-estimated (41% vs. 28%).  This looks like a real change since it wasn’t that long ago (2006) that the numbers [...]

[Read more →]

I recently received some comments on my post describing our PNAS paper from the end of 2008 in which we demonstrated that aboriginal burning increases grassland biodiversity.  The comments were very angry — and a little incoherent.  Clearly, emotions were (and are) running high in Aus following the the tragic bushfires in Victoria that have [...]

[Read more →]

From an FDA press release: “K-Fat Inc., Brooklyn, NY is recalling “Golden Dragon Fish brand Frozen Cooked Mackerel Fish” because the product was found to be uneviscerated prior to processing.” Mmmmm…Uneviscerated fish… Mmmmm… Clostridium botulinum…

[Read more →]

I was asked how I plotted the recruitment curve from my last post. It's pretty easy to do in R.
PLAIN TEXT
R:

Dn <- expression(r * (1 - N/K) * N)

r <- 0.004

K <- 10^10

N <- seq(0,10^10,by=10^7)

png(file="recruitment.png") ## sends output to .png file

plot(N,eval(Dn),type="l", xlab="Human Population", ylab="Recruitment")

dev.off()

Now we can generalize to the generalized logistic model [...]

[Read more →]