Summary Death registration statistics, even when incomplete, can provide valuable information about mortality. In particular, the age structure of deaths can be used to estimate the completeness of registration, provided that this completeness does not vary substantially with age. Two methods of estimating the completeness of death registration from the distribution of deaths by age are des...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Reference limits are widely used in anthropometry, the behavioral sciences, medicine, and clinical chemistry. They describe the distribution of a quantitative variable in a healthy population, and are often a smooth function of age or another determinant. Thus, instead of estimating reference limits separately for several age groups, it is more economical and parsimonio...

This chapter examines the relationship between the age structure of the workforce and aggregate productivity. It is well known from the labor literature that there is a robust relationship between years of experience and income. If workers are paid their marginal product then this suggests a relationship between worker productivity and age. In the aggregate, therefore, we should expect changes ...

Residual demography is a recent concept that has proved to be a useful tool to gain insights about the age distributions of wild populations, especially insects. We develop an operator equation that permits the derivation of functionals of the age distribution in wild populations, such as mean age, within the framework of residual demography. Our method combines information from an observed cap...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part I. Macroevolutionary Models 1 Chapter 1. Diversity, endemism, and age distributions in macroevolutionary sources and sinks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Chapter 2. Origination, extinction and dispersal: integrative models for understandi...

Identifying and dating historical biological events is a fundamental goal of evolutionary biology, and recent analytical advances permit the modeling of factors known to affect both the accuracy and the precision of molecular date estimates. As the use of multilocus data sets becomes increasingly routine, it becomes more important to evaluate the potentially confounding effects of rate heteroge...

In this paper, we use a finite-state continuous-time Markov chain with one absorbing state to model an individual's lifetime. Under this model, the time of death follows a phase-type distribution, and the transient states of the Markov chain are known as phases. We then attempt to provide an answer to the simple question "What is the conditional age distribution of the individual, given its cur...

Determining what fraction of texts and manuscripts have survived from Antiquity and the Middle Ages has been highly problematic. Analyzing the transmission of texts as the "paleodemography" of their manuscripts yields definite and surprisingly high estimates. Parchment copies of the foremost medieval textbooks on arithmetical and calendrical calculation closely fit age distributions expected fo...

Groundwater age distributions are used to estimate the parameters of Fickian, and non-Fickian, effective models of solute transport. Based on the similarities between the transport and age equations, we develop a deconvolution based approach that describes transport between two monitoring wells. We show that the proposed method gives exact estimates of the travel time distribution between two w...

Whole-genome duplications (WGDs), thought to facilitate evolutionary innovations and adaptations, have been uncovered in many phylogenetic lineages. WGDs are frequently inferred from duplicate age distributions, where they manifest themselves as peaks against a small-scale duplication background. However, the interpretation of duplicate age distributions is complicated by the use of K(S), the n...