Mortality and Health
Demography 230
University of California, Berkeley
Prof. John Wilmoth, Fall 2004
Welcome to the web page for Demography 230,
Mortality and Health, a graduate-level course being offered at the University of California, Berkeley, during
the Fall semester of 2004. The
instructor is Prof. John Wilmoth. This class will meet only once per week, on Mondays
from 9 am until noon, from August 30 until December 6 (excepting Labor Day,
September 6), in the main seminar room (Rm. 100) of the Department of Demography.
This course will examine patterns of
mortality and health in human populations, giving special emphasis to methods
for analyzing and understanding those patterns. In order to limit the scope of the course, we will emphasize causes of variation in health and
mortality, rather than consequences of
such patterns for other aspects of society.
For example, we will examine the effects of smoking on health and
mortality, but we will not consider the resulting financial costs of
smoking-related illness and death.
A general overview of the course, including preliminary
information about schedules, readings, requirements, etc., is contained in
the course syllabus.
HOMEWORKS
All homework assignments will become
available online as soon as they are distributed in class. Solutions will be also be posted online once
a problem set has been graded. These
solutions may sometimes include computer code written in R (this free software
for statistical computing and graphics is highly recommended by the instructor
and easily obtained online via the R
Project).
|
#1 |
|
|
|
|
|
#2 |
||||
|
#3 |
|
|
|
|
|
#4 |
|
|||
|
#5 |
|
|||
|
#6 |
|
|
||
|
#7 |
|
|
|
|
|
#8 |
|
|
|
|
|
#9 |
|
|
|
|
|
#10 |
|
|
|
|
|
#11 |
||||
|
#12 |
|
|
|
|
A course archive
of R code contains some general functions for constructing life tables,
decomposing life expectancy at birth, etc., for use in doing the problem sets
for this course and/or similar work in other contexts.
RESEARCH EXERCISE
Rather than writing a complete research paper,
students are asked to develop some exercise in research methods that would be
interesting and useful for them. For
example, using the same data and addressing the same substantive issues, a
student might explore different methods of data analysis and presentation. This would perhaps be the most common
approach, but students are invited to propose other designs for a research
exercise.
CONTACT
INFORMATION
|
Name |
Prof. John R. Wilmoth |
|
Office Hours |
Fridays, 10 – 11:30 am |
|
Telephone |
+1 (510) 642-9688 |
|
Fax |
+1 (775) 213-2239 |
|
Email |