monkey's uncle

Priceless. Steve Pinker wrote a spectacular review of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, in the New York Times today. I regularly read and enjoy Gladwell’s essays in the New Yorker, but I find his style sometimes problematic, verging on anti-intellectual, and I’m thrilled to see a scientist of Pinker’s stature [...]

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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 [...]

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There is an extremely cool paper in this week’s Nature by Scheffer and colleagues. I’m too busy right now to write much about it, but I wanted to mention it, even if only briefly.  The thing that I find so remarkable about this paper is that it’s really not the sort of thing that I [...]

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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 [...]

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An anthropologist colleague who did a post-doc in a population center has been trying to get a group of people at his university together to think about population issues.  This is something I’m all for and am happy to help in whatever little way I can to facilitate especially anthropologists developing their expertise in demography. [...]

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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 [...]

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With election day past us now, I have a moment to reflect upon how uncanny were Nate Silver and crew’s predictions of the election.  I became quite a FiveThirtyEight.com junky as the election approached and I think that the stunning success that they demonstrated in predicting all sorts of elections yesterday holds lessons for the [...]

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The figure that appeared on MediaCurves.com (the link to which I found here) following the second presidential debate last night was a truly outstanding example of communicating complex information using simple, effective graphical presentation.

The figure shows the responses of 1004 respondents to the question of who won the debate.  The graphic summarizes quite a bit of information [...]

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This is a relative oldie but a goodie that just re-appeared in my inbox.  Professor Hans Rosling from the Karolinska Institute debunks a number myths about the distribution of wealth and health in the world.  It is an amazing demonstration of the power of interactive graphics to communicate complex information.
 

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The first produce to positively match the Salmonella serotype Saintpaul was announced today.  A jalapeño chile, grown in México and processed at an unnamed plant in McAllen, Texas, tested positive for the strain of Salmonella that has sickened at least 1237 people since April.  This is the first time that the bug has actually shown up on a [...]

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