Adrian Raftery’s course in Paris

UW Professor and U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Adrian Raftery has received the 2020 FSMP research chair and as a result will be visiting Paris this Fall 2021. He will be located at the MAP5 laboratory at the University of Paris. In particular, he will give a 20-hour Master course on statistical semography. This will be given over four successive Tuesdays, with 5 hours of lectures per week. The course is open to all. Attendance is free of charge but registration is mandatory. (To register, please fill the attached form. Lectures will be given in the salle du conseil, on the 7ft floor of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés campus, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris.)

Demography aims to estimate and forecast population, fertility, mortality and migration. This is important for government policy-making, private sector planning, and research in the health and social sciences, and also critical for climate science and global health. It has traditionally been done using deterministic mathematical methods, but these ignore uncertainty and measurement error.  In the past decade, modern statistical methods were developed for this by our group at the University of Washington, and these were recently adopted by the  United Nations for their official population forecasts for all countries.  Statistical demography is expanding rapidly,  and this course will teach theory and practice of  methods and models of the field, with a focus on current and potential future research.

The topics will be:

1. Review of basic mathematical demographic methods.

2. Modeling age-specific rates, including model schedules and Lee-Carter method.

3. Statistical modeling and projection of fertility, mortality, migration and population.

4. Reconstructing population and vital rates from imperfect data.

it’s complicated…

Yesterday saw a first round of the regional and departmental elections in France, with a terribly low participation (around 30% of the voters, except in Corsica where 56% of the voters voted)…. [The map here is about the departmental elections, with departments being delineated in white and the subdivisions corresponding to the cantons. Corse/Corsica is “missing” because it is now a single entity. Same thing about Paris.] The only nice surprise about this outcome is that abstention particularly impacted the lepenist votes, which almost uniformly went down compared with the previous regional elections. And hence that the ill chances that a region gets a nazional majority are lowered. Although it is difficult to analyse why: polls were predicting a brown sludge tsunami, the gilets jaune movement (or morass) is not yet over and mostly aligned with the populist themes of the RN, and (some) people  seem unhappy with about any decision taken by any level of authority during the Covid-19 crisis. It will be interesting to watch the second round final results, next week, but I doubt we will see a voting surge happening, esp. since the frontist danger is now downplayed.

another Latin rectangle

Écoles laïques [150 years ago]

Tour de Paris [of pools]

As I am prevented from running since the beginning of this year, due to a ligament injury caused by an excess of kilometers run since the beginning of the (first) lockdown, I have started swimming most days I can find a free window of time. And an open swimming pool! While Paris and most of the suburban cities near me have a decent offer of (cheap) public pools, it is often a challenge to find one open at a manageable time. Meaning for me mostly in the early morning. The lockdown has obviously reduced opening hours and introduced restricted access, requiring a medical certificate for indoor pools, and I have thus being recently visiting a rather extensive array of pools to fit such constraints, since both nearby pools, at home and at work, are rarely available. Last week, I biked to the most exotic so far, namely a pool made from a barge standing on the Seine River. It is alas not yet outdoor, but not yet crowded either (if small and rather hot). By comparison, the nearer and wider pool at Porte d’Orléans is surprisingly crowded at 7am (but pleasantly colder) and the historical pool on Butte aux Cailles also gets quickly crowded and is missing its outdoor pool (but is close to a fantastic bakery!). Even careful scheduling does not always work as I sometimes find an unexpected closed door, as two weeks ago when Butte aux Cailles had emptied overnight or a few days ago when Joséphine Baker had a disfunctioning pediluvium enough to bar entry. (The outdoor 50m pool in Villejuif I used to go to has just reopened to the general public and is not yet overcrowded, despite milder temperatures.)