The Population Problem: A Third World Reaction

Dr. Mascarenhas is Consultant in Community Health and Family Planning at the Family Welfare Center in Bangalore, India. Until April, 1975, she was Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at St. John\u27s Medical College in Bangalore and was actively involved in the first Village Health Cooperative program sponsored by the College. She is the author of a recently published book entitled Population Education for Quality of Life. The following article is the text of a paper presented at the XI General Assembly of the International Federation of Catholic Universities

7. Malthus and the Problem of Population

One of the central beliefs of classical economic theory was that there is an inexorable tendency for population to press against the available natural resources, especially those providing the food supply. This doctrine, though not originating with him, was eloquently expressed by Thomas Robert Malthas (1766-1834) in an essay which first appeared in 1798. Malthus, a high-ranking graduate of Cambridge University, was a clergyman in the Church of England before he became a professor of history and political economy at the East India College, Haileybury, in 1805. This college had just been established by the British East India Company to train men for its service in Asia. Malthus, one of the first persons ever to hold a professorship in economics, continued in this post for the remainder of his life. [excerpt

On the Inverse Problem for a Size-Structured Population Model

We consider a size-structured model for cell division and address the question of determining the division (birth) rate from the measured stable size distribution of the population. We formulate such question as an inverse problem for an integro-differential equation posed on the half line. We develop firstly a regular dependency theory for the solution in terms of the coefficients and, secondly, a novel regularization technique for tackling this inverse problem which takes into account the specific nature of the equation. Our results rely also on generalized relative entropy estimates and related Poincar\'e inequalities

Error analysis for stellar population synthesis as an inverse problem

Stellar population synthesis can be approached as an inverse problem. The physical information is extracted from the observations through an inverse model. The process requires the transformation of the observational errors into model errors. A description is given for the error analysis to obtain objectively the errors in the model. Finding a solution for overdetermined and under-determined case was the purpose of two preceding papers. This new one completes the problem of stellar populations synthesis by means of a data base, by providing practical formul\ae defining the set of acceptable solutions. All solutions within this set are compatible, at a given confidence level, with the observations.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, 1 table. M.N.R.A.S.(2000) in pres