This paper examines the effects of lifetime learning on the diversity and fitness of a population. Our experiments measure the phenotypic diversity of populations evolving by purely genetic means (population learning) and of others employing both population learning and lifetime learning. The results obtained show, as in previous work, that the addition of lifetime learning results in higher le...

The development of stochastic demography has largely been based on age structured populations, although other types of demographic structure, especially permanent and dynamic heterogeneity, are likely common in natural populations. The combination of stochasticity and demographic structure is a challenge for analyses of population dynamics and extinction risk, because the population structure w...

The estimation of population parameters from genetic data can help reveal past migration patterns or past population sizes. The transformation from raw genetic data to population parameters needs a model, which should reflect the true relationships between subpopulations. Often the models are overly simplified and do not allow, for example, for differences in population sizes and differences in...

With the growing threat of pandemic influenza, efforts to improve national surveillance to better predict and prevent this disease from affecting the most vulnerable populations are being undertaken. This paper examines the utility of Medicare data to obtain age-specific influenza hospitalization rates for historical analyses. We present a novel approach to describing and analyzing age-specific...

It is conventional wisdom that Russia’s Muslim population is increasing dramatically relative to Russia’s Slavic population, and that along a variety of demographic indicators its Muslim national groups are thriving in comparison to the demographic crisis being experienced by their Slavic compatriots. Reported ethnicity data from the 2002 Russian census, released in early 2005, permit a more ri...

We develop extensions of the Polya posterior that can be used to estimate population quantiles in stratified populations. In the simple case with no auxiliary information, estimates based on this extension to the Polya posterior perform similarly to the standard frequentist estimates. The Polya posterior can be extended to incorporate a variety of prior knowledge about an auxiliary characterist...

Population–environment debates in Australia are at an impasse. While the ability of this continent to sustain more migrants has attracted persistent scrutiny, nuanced explorations of diverse migrant cultures and their engagements with Australian landscapes have scarcely begun. Yet as we face the challenges of a climate changing world we would undoubtedly benefit from the most varied knowledges ...

We consider a spiked population model, proposed by Johnstone, whose population eigenvalues are all unit except for a few fixed eigenvalues. The question is to determine how the sample eigenvalues depend on the non-unit population ones when both sample size and population size become large. This paper completely determines the almost sure limits for a general class of samples.

We propose a method for partially discretizing a model of an agedependent population dynamics with an additional structure whose growth rate is age-dependent. We give theoretical conditions under which a second order accuracy arises. A priori estimates are obtained. The main result indicates that the sum of these errors converges and is of second order accuracy.