monkey's uncle

Perhaps it’s just me being a bit groggy from jet-lag, but I just read one of the most bizarre things I think I have ever seen in the New York Times.  There is a generally very interesting article by Sarah Kershaw on so-called “cougars,” older women who have sexual relationships with younger men. It was [...]

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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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I’m no longer on vacation which means that I have much less time to devote to blogging.  I just wanted to follow up on the last couple posts though before I jump back into the fray. I received some very stimulating comments from Edward Hugh and Aslak Berg, who are economists and contributers to the [...]

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In my last post, I wrote about a new paper by Myrskylä and colleagues in this past week’s issue of Nature.  Craig Hadley sent me a link to a criticism of this paper, and really more the science reporting of it in the Economist, written by Edward Hugh on the blog A Fist Full of [...]

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In a terrific paper in the latest issue of Nature, Myrskylä and colleagues (including my sometime collaborator Hans-Peter Kohler) demonstrate that total fertility rate (TFR) — which we typically think of as declining with economic development — actually increases at very high levels of development.  One of the fundamental challenges of social science remains explaining [...]

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So, either Bill O’Reilly is either on to something profound or he simply doesn’t understand averages.  Methinks it’s the latter. It’s actually a pretty common problem — people not understanding life expectancy — it’s just that O’Reilly boffs it in such spectacular form! Mathematical expectation is a fancy term for taking an average. You know, [...]

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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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I received a note from Rich Lawler this morning, who passed along a note he received from Hal Caswell, who passed along a note he, in turn, received from someone at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (where my friend Josh Goldstein is Director).  In this note, I was reminded that today is the 348th birthday [...]

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Well, it’s happened again.  My work has been written up in Science but I am not mentioned.  I’m actually not that concerned this time — we’re going to submit the paper for publication soon. I’ve been telling myself (and other people) that this thing we’ve ben working on (all the while being very cryptic about what [...]

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I finally received the pdf version of my recently published paper with a 2006 publication date.  My grad student, Brodie Ferguson, and I used demographic data from the Colombia censuses of 1973, 1985, 1993, and 2002 to calculate the magnitude of the marriage squeeze felt by women in Colombia.  The protracted civil conflict in Colombia [...]

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