Thoughts on ageing

Some Thoughts on the Economics of Ageing, Geriatrics and End-of-Life

The purpose of this note is to explore some recent significant trends concerning the ageing of the global population and to discuss some of the economic implications therein; and to proffer some ideas on where fruitful research might be conducted by the health economist given these trends. Populations in many countries are ageing. Many countries are experiencing a shift in the distribution of t...

Thoughts on Social Design

Thoughts on the Bulletin.

Because daguerreotype photographs are usually reversed laterally from actuality, images of W.T.G. Morton falsely suggest that he sometimes changed the side of the part in his hair. Because of daguerreotype image reversal, a statue of Apollo in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital appears to have been moved for the 50th anniversary of Ether Day. Ether anesthesia was announced in ...

Thoughts on scale

I begin with a metaphor to characterize the challenges that authors and readers face when confronting issues of scale. Consider the ways that map makers use insets—devices that allow for a focus on particular areas, while situating those areas within the larger whole. The use of insets allows for characterizations at two orders of grain size. Now imagine a map of the world containing four inset...

Thoughts on clustering

Clustering is a somewhat confusing topic theoretically. In large part this is because there are many different kinds of clustering problems. In addition, the true goals in clustering are often difficult to measure, making the task seem not well-defined and under-specified. In this note we discuss one approach from [6] to theoretically formulating a certain broad class of clustering problems, an...