Identifiable Age, Period, and Cohort Effects: An Exploratory Approach Applied to Italian Female Mortality

A group of eleven Ph.D. candidates from seven countries--Robin Cowan, Andrew Foster, Nedka Gateva, William Hodges, Arno Kitts, Eva Lelievre, Fernando Rajulton, Lucky Tedrow, Marc Tremblay, John Wilmoth, and Zeng Yi--worked together at IIASA from June 17 through September 6, 1985, in a seminar on population heterogeneity. The seminar was led by the two of us with the help of Nathan Keyfitz, leader of the Population Program, and Bradley Gambill, Dianne Goodwin, and Alan Bernstein, researchers in the Population Program, as well as the occasional participation of guest scholars at IIASA, including Michael Stoto, Sergei Scherbov, Joel Cohen, Frans Willekens, Vladimir Crechuha, and Geert Ridder. Susanne Stock, our secretary, and Margaret Traber managed the seminar superbly. Each of the eleven students in the seminar succeeded in writing a report on the research they had done. With only one exception, the students evaluated the seminar as "very productive"; the exception thought it was "productive". The two of us agree: the quality of the research produced exceeded our expectations and made the summer a thoroughly enjoyable experience. We were particularly pleased by the interest and sparkle displayed in our daily, hour-long colloquium, and by the spirit of cooperation all the participants, both students and more senior researchers, displayed in generously sharing ideas and otherwise helping each other. One of the best of the research reports produced and probably the most original is the report by John Wilmoth that appears in this working paper. Building on some of the work on the mathematics of population surfaces, on the use of shaded contour maps for displaying population surfaces, and on Italian mortality that had been started at IIASA by the two of us and W. Brian Arthur, Bradley A. Gambill, and Graziella Caselli, Wilmoth developed an approach for analyzing age, period, and cohort effects that shows considerable promise for further development and application. This report thus exemplifies the productive role IIASA can play in bringing together diligent, creative scholars from different countries and disciplines

A Simple Model for the Statistical Analysis of Large Arrays of Mortality Data: Rectangular vs. Diagonal Structure

A simple descriptive model is proposed for the analysis of large, non-additive mortality arrays. Similar in form to additive-plus-multiplicative models discussed by other authors, the model goes one step further by introducing a diagonal term. An exemplary application of the model to French male post-War mortality data demonstrates three important characteristics of the data being analyzed: 1) the structure of the data matrix is largely additive; 2) some rectangular non-additivity exists, implying that mortality has declined with varying speed at different ages or, equivalently, that the shape of the age-curve of mortality has changed over time; and 3) residual non-additive diagonal structure exists, indicating that some "peculiar" cohorts have had mortality experiences which deviate by as much as 2 or 3% from levels which would be expected considering only the age and period of death

The Reproductive Revolution

Este texto fue publicado en 2009 por The Sociological Review. Rogamos que, a efectos de divulgación, docencia y cita bibliográfica se acuda a la publicación impresa (u online de la propia revista) y la cita sea esta: MacInnes, J., Pérez Díaz, J. (2009), "The reproductive revolution" The Sociological Review 57 (2): 262-284. Su versión html puede encontrarse en esta dirección:http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122368561/HTMLSTART Quienes estén interesados en ampliar la información sobre nuestra Teoría de la Revolución Reproductiva pueden visitar la página web siguiente: http://www.ieg.csic.es/jperez/pags/RRweb/RRweb.htm También encontrarán en este mismo repositorio otra publicación con unaexposición en castellano de las mismas ideas y publicada en la REIS bajo el título “La tercera revolución de la modernidad: la reproductiva”.We suggest that a third revolution alongside the better known economic and political ones has been vital to the rise of modernity: the reproductive revolution, comprising a historically unrepeatable shift in the efficiency of human reproduction which for the first time brought demographic security.As well as highlighting the contribution of demographic change to the rise of modernity and addressing the limitations of orthodox theories of the demographic transition, the concept of the reproductive revolution offers a better way to integrate sociology and demography. The former has tended to pay insufficient heed to sexual reproduction, individual mortality and the generational replacement of population, while the latter has undervalued its own distinctive theoretical contribution, portraying demographic change as the effect of causes lying elsewhere. We outline a theory of the reproductive revolution, review some relevant supporting empirical evidence and briefly discuss its implications both for demographic transition theory itself, and for a range of key social changes that we suggest it made possible: the decline of patriarchy and feminisation of the public sphere, the deregulation and privatisation of sexuality, family change, the rise of identity, ‘low’ fertility and ‘population ageing’.Peer reviewe

The structure of the upper atmosphere of Mars: In situ accelerometer measurements from Mars Global Surveyor

The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) z-axis accelerometer has obtained over 200 vertical structures of thermospheric density, temperature, and pressure, ranging from 110 to 170 kilometers, compared to only three previous such vertical structures. In November 1997, a regional dust storm in the Southern Hemisphere triggered an unexpectedly large thermospheric response at mid- northern latitudes, increasing the altitude of thermospheric pressure surfaces there by as much as 8 kilometers and indicating a strong global thermospheric response to a regional dust storm. Throughout the MGS mission, thermospheric density bulges have been detected on opposite sides of the planet near 90°E and 90°W, in the vicinity of maximum terrain heights. This wave 2 pattern may be caused by topographically-forced planetary waves propagating up from the lower atmosphere