monkey's uncle

Well, it certainly has been a while since I’ve written anything here. Life has gotten busy with new projects, new responsibilities, etc. Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on campus sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Young Environmental Scholars Conference. I was asked to stand-in for a faculty member who had to [...]

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Biological and Human Dimensions of Primate Retroviral Transmission One of the great enduring mysteries in disease ecology is the timing of the AIDS pandemic. AIDS emerged as a clinical entity in the late 1970s, but HIV-1, the retrovirus that causes pandemic AIDS, entered the human population from wild primates many decades earlier, probably near the [...]

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Since my last update, we have added another faculty member to the workshop on Migration and Adaptation. Loren Landau, the Director of the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) (formerly Forced Migration Studies Programme, FMSP) at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa will be joining us to discuss conceptual issues in understanding African migration [...]

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Information on our NICHD-funded April formal demography workshop on migration and adaptation is now posted on the website Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR, pronounced ”scooper”).  SCPR is itself hosted by Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), which is also the umbrella organization for the Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), a [...]

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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 [...]

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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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