Human Populations – Dec 8

How long will the people in a particular population live? How do we know if a cancer treatment works, or whether parents pass their socioeconomic status to their children? How often do formerly incarcerated people return to prison, and how long (on average) will current marriages last? All these questions seem straightforward. However, answering each of them can go awry in a similar way. A single mathematical relationship, length-biased sampling, allows analysis of a diverse set of phenomena, and it presents new, easy-to-understand insights into human populations.

Our speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and at the Minnesota Population Center.