James W Vaupel

The goal of this book is simple: We would like to show how mortality dynamics can be visualized in the so-called Lexis diagram. To appeal to as many potentialreaders as possible, we do not require any specialist knowledge. This approachmay be disappointing: Demographers may have liked more information aboutthe mathematical underpinnings of population dynamics on the Lexis surface asdemonstrated, for instance, by Arthur and Vaupel in 1984. Statisticians would haveprobably preferred more information about the underlying smoothing methods thatwere used. Epidemiologists likewise might miss discussions about the etiology ofdiseases. Sociologists would have probably expected that our results were moreembedded into theoretical frameworks... This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

The goal of this book is simple: We would like to show how mortality dynamics can be visualized in the so-called Lexis diagram. To appeal to as many potentialreaders as possible, we do not require any specialist knowledge. This approachmay be disappointing: Demographers may have liked more information aboutthe mathematical underpinnings of population dynamics on the Lexis surface asdemonstrated, for instance, by Arthur and Vaupel in 1984. Statisticians would haveprobably preferred more information about the underlying smoothing methods thatwere used. Epidemiologists likewise might miss discussions about the etiology ofdiseases. Sociologists would have probably expected that our results were moreembedded into theoretical frameworks... This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

An authoritative overview of the concepts and applications of biological demographyThis book provides a comprehensive introduction to biodemography, an exciting interdisciplinary field that unites the natural science of biology with the social science of human demography. Biodemography is an essential resource for demographers, epidemiologists, gerontologists, and health professionals as well as ecologists, population biologists, entomologists, and conservation biologists. This accessible and innovative book is also ideal for the classroom.James Carey and Deborah Roach cover everything from baseline demographic concepts to biodemographic applications, and present models and equations in discrete rather than continuous form to enhance mathematical accessibility. They use a wealth of real-world examples that draw from data sets on both human and nonhuman species and offer an interdisciplinary approach to demography like no other, with topics ranging from kinship theory and family demography to reliability engineering, tort law, and demographic disasters such as the Titanic and the destruction of Napoleon's Grande Armée.Provides the first synthesis of demography and biologyCovers baseline demographic models and concepts such as Lexis diagrams, mortality, fecundity, and population theoryFeatures in-depth discussions of biodemographic applications like harvesting theory and mark-recaptureDraws from data sets on species ranging from fruit flies and plants to elephants and humansUses a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to demography, bringing together a diverse range of concepts, models, and applicationsIncludes informative "biodemographic shorts," appendixes on data visualization and management, and more than 150 illustrations of models and equations

This book visualizes mortality dynamics in the Lexis diagram. While the standard approach of plotting death rates is also covered, the focus in this book is on the depiction of rates of mortality improvement over age and time. This rather novel approach offers a more intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics, enabling readers to better understand whether period- or cohort-effects were instrumental for the development of mortality in a particular country. Besides maps for single countries, the book includes maps on the dynamics of selected causes of death in the United States, such as cardiovascular diseases or lung cancer. The book also features maps for age-specific contributions to the change in life expectancy, for cancer survival and for seasonality in mortality for selected causes of death in the United States. The book is accompanied by instructions on how to use the freely available R Software to produce these types of surface maps. Readers are encouraged to use the presented tools to visualize other demographic data or any event that can be measured by age and calendar time, allowing them to adapt the methods to their respective research interests. The intended audience is anyone who is interested in visualizing data by age and calendar time; no specialist knowledge is required.This book is open access under a CC BY license.

This book visualizes mortality dynamics in the Lexis diagram. While the standard approach of plotting death rates is also covered, the focus in this book is on the depiction of rates of mortality improvement over age and time. This rather novel approach offers a more intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics, enabling readers to better understand whether period- or cohort-effects were instrumental for the development of mortality in a particular country. Besides maps for single countries, the book includes maps on the dynamics of selected causes of death in the United States, such as cardiovascular diseases or lung cancer. The book also features maps for age-specific contributions to the change in life expectancy, for cancer survival and for seasonality in mortality for selected causes of death in the United States. The book is accompanied by instructions on how to use the freely available R Software to produce these types of surface maps. Readers are encouraged to use the presented tools to visualize other demographic data or any event that can be measured by age and calendar time, allowing them to adapt the methods to their respective research interests. The intended audience is anyone who is interested in visualizing data by age and calendar time; no specialist knowledge is required.This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Book & Disk. This volume is an array of demographic data which can often be pictured in an intelligible and graphically striking way by a shaded contour map. The data might pertain to population levels or to rates of fertility, marriage, divorce, migration, morbidity, or mortality. Most often the data are structured by age and time (eg: age-specific death rates over time). Shaded contour maps permit visualisation of such demographic surfaces and offer a panoramic view impossible to obtain from the usual graphs of levels or rates at selected ages over time or a selected times over age. Contour maps are particularly effective in highlighting patterns in the interaction of age, period, and cohort effects. This monograph presents a bouquet of shaded contour maps to suggest the broad potential of their use in population studies. The value of such maps lies in their substantive import. Graphic designs, E R Tufte concluded, should give "visual access to the subtle and difficult, that is, the revelation of the complex". Demographic surfaces can be particularly complex.A mortality surface, for example, might be defined over a century of age and a century of time, comprising 10,000 date points that may vary over four orders of magnitude. Shaded contour maps are an arresting, efficient, and clear means of giving demographers visual access to such data. William Playfair, the pioneer of graphic methods for presenting statistical data, argued that with a good visual display "as much information may be obtained in five minutes as would require whole days to imprint on the memory, in a lasting manner, by a table of figures". The 100 shaded contour maps in this monograph summarise more than a half million data points in a memorable, revealing manner.