Center for Demography of Health and Aging

Prior Special Events/Workshops

Summer of 2013

WLS Pilot Grant Workshop

WLS pilot grant workshop will be held on August 1st and 2nd in Room 8417 William H. Sewell Social Science Building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The workshop on August 1st provides an overview of the WLS and attendees can learn how to use the WLS data. The afternoon is hands-on for people who have specific projects and/or questions that they want direct assistance with. The presentations on August 2nd are open to anyone who wants to learn more about the WLS and its current research projects. Topics and speakers for this workshop can be found at this agenda.

Center for Demography and Ecology Demography Summer Workshop

This workshop will be informal and interactive. Topic for this workshop is "health, mortality & inequality". It is held on May 21, 23, 28 and 30 in Social Science Room 8411 at 9:30-11:30am. Speakers are John Mullahy and Marcy Carlson (May 21), Tom DeLeire (May 23), Javier Nieto (May 28) and Alberto Palloni (May 30).

Summer of 2012

WLS Pilot Project Presentations

Research presented by the 2011 Pilot Grant Winners:
Reuben Ng "Increased Longevity from Psychological Well-being"
Lindsay Pitzer "Pathways to Well-being in Adulthood Among Victims of Childhood Abuse"
Sean Clouston "The Implications of Adolescent Cognition to Educational Inequalities in Health Research: Educational Attainment and Childhood Cognition in Health Research."

2012 Winning research proposals:
Lewina Lee "Does Timing Matter? Differential Effects of Childhood Adversities & Stressful Life Events on Cognitive Trajectories in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study"
Yusuke Kuroki "Identifying Diverse Pathways to Psychological Well-being in Later Life Using Genetic and Environmental Factors"

WLS reseach projects:

Alberto Palloni "Looking Backwards to Move Forward: Relations between Early Childhood and the Adult Gradient"
Tetyana Pudrovska "Job Authority and Mortality."

Winter of 2011

Workshop in Spatial Analysis: Motivations and Applications

In recent years spatial analysis has become increasingly important in population research. This two-part workshop covers the population research areas that spatial analysis can apply to and tools suitable for spatial analysis. This workshop is sponsored by the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Applied Population Laboratory. Power Point presentations from this workshop are available at these links:
www.apl.wisc.edu/downloads/SpatialWorkshop_Agenda.doc
www.apl.wisc.edu/downloads/SpatialAnalysisWorkshop_Day1.pdf
www.apl.wisc.edu/downloads/SpatialAnalysisWorkshop_Day2.pdf
Instructors: Professor Katherine Curtis, Bill Buckingham and Dave Long
Date: January 12 and 13
Time: 1 P.M. to 4 P.M.
Location: Room 354 Agriculture Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

R Workshops

R is an open-source statistical package commonly used by statisticians developing new statistical methods. While it is more difficult to learn and use than Stata, SAS or SPSS, some cutting-edge techniques have only been implemented in R.
Monday January 10, 9 A.M.to 5 P.M.
Topic: A Marathon Introduction to R
Instructor: Doug Hemken
This workshop will cover R basics like language fundamentals, data objects, graphics, descriptive statistics and simple linear models.
Tuesday January 11, 9 A.M.to 5 P.M.
Mixed Models in R using lme4
Instructor: Douglas Bates
This second workshop will emphasize linear mixed models and generalized mixed models. Basic familiarity with R and fixed effects modeling in R will be assumed.

Summer of 2010

Biomarkers, Genetics, and Social Science Workshop

The Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE), the Center for Demography of Health and Aging (CDHA) and the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Health and Society Scholars Program are sponsoring a one day workshop on "Biomarkers, Genetics, and Social Science." Jason Fletcher from Yale University and Elliot Friedman from University of Wisconsin-Madison will be the presenters. They will cover the basics concepts and terminology in these two rapidly emerging areas of increasing importance to population studies research. This workshop is open to students, faculty, and affiliated researchers of CDE, CDHA, and RWJ. A reading list is available at this link: GeneticsBiomarkersReadingList.pdf.
To download the Microsoft PowerPoint presentations from this workshop, click on these two links: GeneticsFletcher.ppt and BiomarkersFriedman.pptx.
Location: 8417 Sewell Social Sciences Building
Date: July 7, 2010
Time: 9 A.M. - 4:30 P.M.

Spring of 2010

Introduction to R Programming

CDE's Statistical Core will be offering an Introduction to R Programming workshop. Marc Ratkovic, a graduate student in political science and statistics, will teach the class. R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is available for a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS. SSCC has R installed on both our Winstat servers and Linux servers (including Condor). Visit R's website www.r-project.org for more information. This workshop will be tailored to applications in demographical research, but should be useful to anyone interested in R.
Location: 3218 Sewell Social Sciences Building
Date: 2/26, 3/5, 3/12, 3/19
Time: 1:00 - 2:30 P.M.

Fall of 2009

Demography of Inequality Workshop

The distribution of resources and rewards is closely linked with demographic structures and processes. Fertility, family and household behavior may create and foster inequalities in economic resources, both within and across generations. Similarly inequality in social and economic resources may affect individual and family behavior. Socioeconomic inequality is intrinsically linked with health inequalities, access to schooling, and success in later life. The central interests of our workshops are factors affecting the distribution of income and wealth. Research on educational attainment, employment, and consumption fit in this forum for exchanging ideas. Christine Swartz, Jenna Nobles, Ted Gerber and Jane Cooley presented their projects on Demography of Inequality this semester.
Location: Room 7324 William H. Sewell Social Science Building at UW-Madison
Date: 2/15, 3/22, 4/5, 4/19 and 5/3
Time: noon - 1:15 P.M.
Organizers: Karl Scholz and Maria Cancian

Spring of 2009

Mapping Your Spatially Referenced Data with ArcGIS

This hands-on training provides a brief introduction to ArcGIS software. The focus of this course is on teaching beginner users how to bring tabular data into a GIS environment and begin mapping it for descriptive and or analytic purposes. The instructor will also offer an overview of more advanced ArcGIS functions related to data production, manipulation, and integration.
Location: Room 3218 William H. Sewell Social Science Building at UW-Madison
Date: 3/31, 4/2
Time: 2:00 - 3:30 P.M.
Instructor: Dave Long

Demography - Social Science - Statistics Workshop

This series of four statistical workshops will focus on recent advancements in spatial data analysis and the potential applications to demography. We will discuss some perspective on the types of problems encountered in demography for which spatial statistical methods can be helpful. Spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity will be covered. The background of some of the underlying statistical ideas will be presented.
Location: Agriculture Hall 354 at UW-Madison
Date: 4/2, 4/9, 5/7
Time: 12:20 - 1:50 P.M.
Location: Agriculture Hall 301 at UW-Madison
Date: 4/23
Time: 12:20 - 1:50 P.M.

Fall of 2008

Women's Health and Retirement Security: How Far We Have Come and Where We Need to Go

This preconference workshop was held at the Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting, in National Harbor, Maryland on November 21 at 1:30- 5:30 P.M. This conference focuses on the health and economic well-being of older women, with particular emphasis on race and socioeconomic differences.

GeoDa Workshops

The Applied Population Lab is offering three workshops on using GeoDa. GeoDa is software designed to provide a graphical interface to methods of descriptive spatial data analysis, such as spatial autocorrelation statistics, as well as basic spatial regression functionality. For more information about GeoDa, visit this site: www.geoda.uiuc.edu.
Location: Room 3218 William H. Sewell Social Science Building at UW-Madison
Date: 10/3, 10/10, and 10/17
Time: 9:30 - 11:30 A.M.
Topics: Spatial Weights and Spatial Autocorrelation in Geoda, Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis in Geoda, and Spatial Regression Analysis in Geoda and R
Instructors: Bill Buckingham and Dave Long