Most work on the human fertility transition has focused on declines in mean fertility. However, understanding changes in the variance of reproductive outcomes can be equally important for evolutionary questions about the heritability of fertility, individual determinants of fertility and changing patterns of reproductive skew. Here, we document how variance in completed fertility among women (4...

We consider inference about the causal effect of a treatment or exposure in the presence of interference, i.e., when one individual's treatment affects the outcome of another individual. In the observational setting where the treatment assignment mechanism is not known, inverse probability-weighted estimators have been proposed when individuals can be partitioned into groups such that there is ...

Nutritional environments, particularly those experienced during early life, are hypothesized to affect longevity. A recent cross-taxa meta-analysis found that, depending upon circumstance, average longevity may be increased or decreased by early-life dietary restriction. Unstudied are the effects of diet during development on among-individual variance in longevity. Here, we address this issue u...

Given a sequence of fractional frequency deviates, we investigate the relationship between the sample variance of these deviates and the total variance (Totvar) estimator of the Allan variance. We demonstrate that we can recover exactly twice the sample variance by renormalizing the Totvar estimator and then summing it over dyadic averaging times 1, 2, 4, . . . , 2 along with one additional ter...

From a suitable integral representation of the Laplace transform of a positive semi–definite quadratic form of independent real random variables with not necessarily identical densities a univariate integral representation is derived for the cumulative distribution function of the sample variance of i.i.d. random variables with a gamma density, supplementing former formulas of the author. Furth...

Variable flows of food, water, or other ecosystem services complicate planning. Management strategies that decrease variability and increase predictability may therefore be preferred. However, actions to decrease variance over short timescales (2-4 y), when applied continuously, may lead to long-term ecosystem changes with adverse consequences. We investigated the effects of managing short-term...

Since the cosmic peculiar velocity field depends on small wave-number modes strongly, we cannot probe its universal properties unless we observe a sufficiently large region. We calculate the expected deviation (sample variance) of the peculiar velocity dispersion from its universal value in the case observed volume is finite. Using linear theory we show that the sample variance remains as large...