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.

Does human mortality after age 110 continue to rise, level off, or start to decline? This book describes a concerted, international research effort undertaken with the goal of establishing a database that allows the best possible description of the mortality trajectory beyond the age of 110. The International Database on Longevity (IDL) is the result of this ongoing effort. The IDL contains exhaustive information on validated cases of supercentenarians (people 110 years and older) and allows unbiased estimates of mortality after age 110. The main finding is remarkable: human mortality after age 110 is flat at a probability of death of 50% per year. The sixteen chapters of this book discuss age validation of exceptional longevity, data on supercentenarians in a series of countries, structure and contents of the IDL, and statistical analysis of human mortality after age 110. Several chapters include short accounts of specific supercentenarians that add life to demographic research. Content Level Research

How should life expectancy be calculated? More generally, how should life - bles be estimated? Since John Graunt's pioneering contribution, read before theRoyalSocietyofLondonat6p. m. onthe27thofFebruary1661, demog- phers have developed better and better methods. Some concerns were raised, including concerns about how to deal with heterogeneous populations p- lished in an article inDemography in 1979 that I wrote with Kenneth Manton and Eric Stallard. Yet, a few years ago nearly all demographers believed that as long as the underlying population and death counts were accurate, then lifetables could be reliably estimated. John Bongaarts and Gri? Feeney launched a revolutionary assault on this dogma. Two key contributions by them are reprinted in Part I of this mo- graph. Some very good demographers agreed, as least in part, with B- gaarts' and Feeney's radical argument that when death rates are changing, then tempo e?ects distort conventional calculations of life expectancy. Other very good demographers disagreed. So John Bongaarts and I brought some leading demographers together in a research meeting, co-sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Population Co- cil and held in New York City on November 18 and 19, 2004. Many of the papers discussed at the workshop, generally after considerable revision, were published in Demographic Research in 2005 and 2006. Nine of these articles, in some cases somewhat revised, are published in this monograph: they are the ?rst seven chapters in Part II and the two chapters in Part III.

Why longevity? For a number of years, the Fondation IPSEN has been devoting considerable effort to the various aspects of ageing, not only to age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's, but also to the Centenarians, the paragon of positive ageing. The logical continuation of this approach is to address the question of longevity in global terms. Behind the extreme values, what span is accessible to all of us and likely to directly concern most of our contemporaries? The individual and col lective increase in the duration of life is one of the most striking phenomena of our time. It could be one of the most significant events in the "bio-social" history of humanity. The increase in life expectancy at old age, which started a few de cades ago only, is going on. The most well-advised observer had not foreseen or even dared hope for this increase which will drastically affect our everyday life, our habits and our behavior. In the fragment of human history we are living in, it is our responsibility to deal with this major transformation for the species. Such a transformation needs an effort from all to adapt to the new conditions. This transformation has to be managed rather than simply experienced, anticip ated rather than followed, in order to avoid any attempt to pervert this major step forward. All that was present during the first symposium of the new series on longevity of the Colloques Medecine et Recherche convened by the Fondation IPSEN."

Does human mortality after age 110 continue to rise, level off, or start to decline? This book describes a concerted, international research effort undertaken with the goal of establishing a database that allows the best possible description of the mortality trajectory beyond the age of 110. The International Database on Longevity (IDL) is the result of this ongoing effort. The IDL contains exhaustive information on validated cases of supercentenarians (people 110 years and older) and allows unbiased estimates of mortality after age 110. The main finding is remarkable: human mortality after age 110 is flat at a probability of death of 50% per year. The sixteen chapters of this book discuss age validation of exceptional longevity, data on supercentenarians in a series of countries, structure and contents of the IDL, and statistical analysis of human mortality after age 110. Several chapters include short accounts of specific supercentenarians that add life to demographic research.

How should life expectancy be calculated? More generally, how should life - bles be estimated? Since John Graunt's pioneering contribution, read before theRoyalSocietyofLondonat6p. m. onthe27thofFebruary1661, demog- phers have developed better and better methods. Some concerns were raised, including concerns about how to deal with heterogeneous populations p- lished in an article inDemography in 1979 that I wrote with Kenneth Manton and Eric Stallard. Yet, a few years ago nearly all demographers believed that as long as the underlying population and death counts were accurate, then lifetables could be reliably estimated. John Bongaarts and Gri? Feeney launched a revolutionary assault on this dogma. Two key contributions by them are reprinted in Part I of this mo- graph. Some very good demographers agreed, as least in part, with B- gaarts' and Feeney's radical argument that when death rates are changing, then tempo e?ects distort conventional calculations of life expectancy. Other very good demographers disagreed. So John Bongaarts and I brought some leading demographers together in a research meeting, co-sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Population Co- cil and held in New York City on November 18 and 19, 2004. Many of the papers discussed at the workshop, generally after considerable revision, were published in Demographic Research in 2005 and 2006. Nine of these articles, in some cases somewhat revised, are published in this monograph: they are the ?rst seven chapters in Part II and the two chapters in Part III.

An authoritative overview of the concepts and applications of biological demography This 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 Armee. Provides the first synthesis of demography and biology Covers baseline demographic models and concepts such as Lexis diagrams, mortality, fecundity, and population theory Features in-depth discussions of biodemographic applications like harvesting theory and mark-recapture Draws from data sets on species ranging from fruit flies and plants to elephants and humans Uses a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to demography, bringing together a diverse range of concepts, models, and applications Includes informative "biodemographic shorts," appendixes on data visualization and management, and more than 150 illustrations of models and equations

Paleodemography is the field of enquiry that attempts to identify demographic parameters from past populations (usually skeletal samples) derived from archaeological contexts, and then to make interpretations regarding the health and well-being of those populations. However, paleodemographic theory relies on several assumptions that cannot easily be validated by the researcher, and if incorrect, can lead to large errors or biases. In this book, physical anthropologists, mathematical demographers and statisticians tackle these methodological issues for reconstructing demographic structure for skeletal samples. Topics discussed include how skeletal morphology is linked to chronological age, assessment of age from the skeleton, demographic models of mortality and their interpretation, and biostatistical approaches to age structure estimation from archaeological samples. This work will be of immense importance to anyone interested in paleodemography, including biological and physical anthropologists, demographers, geographers, evolutionary biologists and statisticians.

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.

The storied realms of exceptional longevity are scrutinised in this volume. The vast majority of reputed centenarians in the past, and most countries even today, lived less than 100 years. On the other hand, the number of genuine long-livers is exploding and a substantial proportion of current new-borns in developed countries may survive to celebrate their 100th birthday. Extremely few of our grandparents endured a century but centenarians may be commonplace among our grandchildren. This volume explains and documents these assertions, with research that melds judicious scepticism and painstaking scholarship with intellectual excitement about the advancing frontier of survival.