Finalement, on a encore un avenir :
"À mesure que l’IA automatise les tâches routinières de la connaissance, elle valorise [les métacompétences que les] sciences humaines cultivent [: ] apprendre à apprendre, à exercer un jugement critique, à mobiliser des savoirs dans des situations inédites."
Interesting, as always, and again, what a powerful picture published in that issue!
Toi au moins, tu as des cheveux ! 😜
As it was high time to honor France’s achievements, Agnieszka Fihel and Heini Väisänen sat down with France to talk with her about her career and about bringing #cause-of-death analysis into #demography.
Please read the full interview here
👉 www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol...
Do not forget our first #LunchSeminar of the week today! ⏬
Dear Editor; I appreciate the value of Nature Cities and the manuscript looks interesting but I regret to decline this review request in protest against publishing platforms applying €10850 (!!!) Open Access fees while expecting editorial work and reviews for free (i.e. mostly paid by public money). I only review articles published in journals applying Open Access fees below 1000 US$ which is the maximum editing cost before commercial operating costs, taxes, and (huge) profits. I wish other reviewers would do the same so I will not suggest other potential reviewers. Nothing personal. Best regards; Prof. Philippe Bocquier
📣 Heads-up everyone interested in databases and scholarly migration! 📣
We have great news "loading..."! (see photo)
www.scholarlymigration.org
Tune in and watch this space. More soon ...
@theiletom.bsky.social @akbaritabar.bsky.social @ezagheni.bsky.social @mpidr.bsky.social
#BiblioDemography
😲
It’s a common misconception that life expectancy has increased only because fewer children die.
Historical mortality records show that adults today also live much longer than adults in the past.
REMINDER: submit your proposal for the 2026 #QueteletSeminar before 01/05!
More information on the call: www.uclouvain.be/fr/instituts...
Multi-panel dumbbell chart comparing how the share of net personal wealth changed from about 1985 to the latest available year for seven countries across three groups: Top 1%, Middle 40%, and Bottom 50%. Countries listed down the left are China, India, United States, France, Germany, Brazil, and United Kingdom; each panel has a horizontal percent axis from 0% to 40%, with light blue dots for “~1985” and dark blue dots for the latest year connected by gray lines, showing the top 1% generally gaining share while the middle 40% and bottom 50% often lose or stay low. Visible text includes: “Only the richest keep accumulating wealth”; “Share of net personal wealth — ~1985 -> latest available year”; “Top 1%”; “Middle 40%”; “Bottom 50%”; “Data: World Inequality Database (WID.world) via {wid}”; and “#30DayChartChallenge 2026 · Day 9 · Wealth · Ilya Kashnitsky @ikashnitsky.phd”.
DAY 9 -- wealth 👑 #30DayChartChallenge
Here I'm exploring how the share of wealth owned by three groups of wealth distribution evolved since 1985 in 7 major economies. tl;dr: richest get filthy rich 🤑
🔗 #rstats code: github.com/ikashnitsky/...
🧙♂️ pplx chat: www.perplexity.ai/search/day-9...
C'est le constat édifiant mené sur 13 000 scientifiques danois. En retraçant leurs carrières sur plus de 20 ans, cette nouvelle étude révèle qu'un tiers des femmes devenues mères quittent la recherche. Un effet absent chez les hommes et qui pourrait expliquer le phénomène du "tuyau percé".
May I suggest replying with something like:
Reminder: we have a #lunchseminar today at 1pm!
Earth and Moon from DSCOVR NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured this unique view of the Moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. This view shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth. Ian Regan processed this version of the image to account for the Moon's motion. NASA / NOAA / Ian Regan
I hadn't seen this before. This is pretty remarkable.
Earth and Moon in one NASA photo.
ht @astrokatie.com
Meanwhile, my pitiful attempt to get out of the earth attraction... 🪂
The drop from 2021 to 2022 is worrying. No change in method?
🤔🐟😜
Today I tested a custom GPT that predicts whether your prompt will make ChatGPT hallucinate.👌 Ideal for students (and reviewers). 🫶
It runs on a cutting-edge Bayesian Poisson multiverse bootstrap engine calibrated on parallel datasets and quantum-regularised priors and self-validating likelihood.😵💫🤯
Join our next #LunchSeminar!
Emmanuel Pont (INED) will present on the carbon footprint of procreation.
How much does having a child really impact the #climate? His talk revisits this widely debated topic.
📆 7/04 at 1pm
🖥️Join online: us02web.zoom.us/j/87199604242
One more day to submit your proposal for the 2026 Demog-Crazy Award! ⏬
If you see this, post a concert photo you took.
This, from demographer Francesco Billari, is very good:
“The real choice for political leaders is not whether to accept demographic change. It is whether to continue to fight it symbolically or to start governing it strategically”
www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026...
"In other words, the perceived worth of higher education has waned just as women have begun to outnumber men within it. Is it really a coincidence?"
Amazing picture illustrating climate change in Madagascar.
Line chart showing how many years it took the global population to double from around 1500 through a projected 2100. The trend falls steeply from very long doubling times in early centuries to much shorter intervals in the 20th century, then rises slightly with a shaded area on the right indicating a UN projection. Annotated points: it took 1,024 years to double from 250 million in year 471 to 500 million in 1495; 310 years to double from 0.5 billion to 1 billion in 1805; 121 years to double from 1 to 2 billion in 1926; 72 years to double from 1.5 to 3 billion in 1960; 36 years to double from 2.5 to 5 billion in 1986; 48 years to double from 4 to 8 billion in 2022; projection of 74 years to double from 5 to 10 billion in 2060 under the UN medium-fertility variant. Data source: HYDE (2023); Gapminder (2022, 2023); UN WPP (2024). Licensed under CC-BY by the authors Max Roser and Veronika Samborska. OurWorldInData.org
You can learn more about how we combine multiple sources to build our long-run population dataset, spanning from 10,000 BCE to 2100.
→ ourworldindata.org/population-s...
"There’s little sense of strategic purpose concerning social media as a form of digital infrastructure upon which research collaboration depends, which leaves the sector precariously outsourcing it to unpredictable private corporations."
🌟🌍 À découvrir ! Dans le magazine N-IUSSP @iussp.bsky.social, notre professeure @sophiachae.bsky.social et Victor Agadjanian résument les résultats de leur plus récent article @readdemography.bsky.social sur la polygynie et la fécondité en Afrique subsaharienne
🔎 www.niussp.org/fertility-an...
Well, the US was promised back the good old days. The Liberal Democracy Index now shows the US is back to the 1960s. All the impressive gains from the 60s and 70s wiped out. A sad phase in history. Likely more decline in the pipeline.
In the 1980s, youth literacy was higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than South Asia, but that has changed Line chart comparing the share of the population aged 15 to 24 years who can read and write a simple sentence in 1985 and 2023 for Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In 1985 Sub-Saharan Africa was at 63% and South Asia at 53%. By 2023 South Asia rose to 93% while Sub-Saharan Africa reached 79%, so the regional lead reversed as South Asia improved faster. Annotations note that in 1985 only around half of young people in South Asia had basic literacy skills, and by 2023 almost all young people in South Asia do, while literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa also improved but at a slower pace. Data source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025).
In the 1980s, youth literacy was higher in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia; it’s now the opposite—
Forty years ago, young people had higher literacy rates in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia. You can see on the chart that the region had a 10-percentage-point lead in 1985.