Jonas Schöley

demoscapes.org is a visual atlas of demographic surfaces hosted at @mpidr.bsky.social. It is also my passion project growing out of my 2016 human mortality database explorer. Did you publish something containing Lexis surfaces? Consider reaching out and having your work featured on the site.

Ariel Karlinsky delivered a stunning talk @mpidr.bsky.social where he demonstrated that without institutional constraints and in election years, governments tended to underreport their COVID deaths. Lively discussion followed. The paper is well worth a read. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Incredibly proud of Ricarda Duerst @mpidr.bsky.social who defended her thesis on "Learning from past mistakes". Ricarda started with the idea that a prediction is only as good as similar predictions in the past turned out to be and applied it to demographic forecasts. hdl.handle.net/10138/637205

Incredibly proud of Ricarda Duerst @mpidr.bsky.social who defended her thesis on "Learning from past mistakes". Ricarda started with the idea that a prediction is only as good as similar predictions in the past turned out to be and applied it to demographic forecasts. hdl.handle.net/10138/637205

Der Podcast lohnt sich. Hier @maxikniffka.bsky.social wie sie ihr Thema souverän in Rostock vor versammelter Gesellschaft und Politik präsentiert.

Future death rates, wars, epidemics, disasters are uncertain. Does this matter for our individual uncertainty about the age of death? Not much, finds Ricarda Duerst in "The contribution of forecast uncertainty to lifespan uncertainty". Lifespan is intrinsically uncertain. doi.org/10.4054/DemR...

How much does uncertainty about future mortality contribute to uncertainty about how long an individual will live? Surprisingly little: Forecast variance accounts for less than 10% of total cohort lifespan variance in most cases. 👉 www.demographic-research.org/articles/vol... @jschoeley.com

Early in life we're getting away from death. Later, we're moving towards it at an ever increasing pace. Ontogenescence-Senescence.

Some of the stuff the LLM community produces is just hilarious for an outsider to witness.

🎉 Congratulations, Lina and Marc! Lina Lasar and Marc Luy won an EAPS Poster Award at the European Population Conference 2026 for their poster, "Healthy Life Years of Roma Populations in Europe". 🔗 All winners of the 2026 awards: www.eaps.nl/page/awards @eaps.bsky.social #demography #EPC2026

Today was a happy milestone — the first international guest coming to DST to give a talk at @skagerrak.bsky.social, and not just any guest but @jschoeley.com himself with a brilliant thought-provoking demographic talk and presentation of his brand new demoscapes.org 😍

I agree. Am I a conservative now?

On 15th June at 11:00 @jschoeley.com will present his shining new project that he was secretly cooking with the relentless help of silicone friends 😍 🔗 events.teams.microsoft.com/event/839793...

I can't judge the quality of this causal inference design. The effect sizes claimed are large. Does anyone care to weigh in?

And here is another Award for MPIDR! Congratulations! Aliakbar Akbaritabar and Tom Theile received the EAPS Open Science and Outreach Award for Population Studies for the Scholarly Migration Database. www.scholarlymigration.org #OpenScience #EPC2026 European Association for Population Studies

#EPC2026 workshops just kicked off with @ugobas.bsky.social starting the introduction to the @eaps.bsky.social working group on open science. Looking forward to four days of discussions and learning. @mpidr.bsky.social

Qualitative-sequential color scheme for distinguishing level from dynamics of age structure on a map, linked to sequence plots. Courageous viz. I love it.

We have a new major release! The Scholarly Migration Database 2.0 is now online! Working paper is here: dx.doi.org/10.4054/MPID... Updated data: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Website: www.scholarlymigration.org

From the days of typewriter prepared manuscripts to the LLMing of today's vibey journal submissions one constant remained: Double Spacing ! and All Figures Placed at the End ! Some changes are too disruptive to allow.

Here are some of my favourite Lexis plots. 1. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 2. ourworldindata.org/causes-of-de... 3. www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol3...

Ok, I'd like to on the record saying: "Everything in mortality is a tempo effect", "Excess deaths are an artifact of displaced deaths". -JS

This is so cool. This atlas has Lexis plots on how various things have changed over time in different age groups – mortality rates, fertility rates, number of parents and siblings. And you can reach out to Jonas to add your own plots too. I'd like to see Lexis plots for absolutely everything.

Fertility stats are conventionally denominated in births per *woman* - as if men have no agency. @cdudel.bsky.social & @demomapper.bsky.social hold men responsible by calculating trends in male fertility by age. Check out their male fertility collection on demoscapes: demoscapes.org/collections/...

🎉Congrats! Isabella Marinetti successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Effects of short-term events on mortality in Europe.“ University of Groningen | Rijksuniversiteit Groningen https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_events_6123/news_press_releases_4630/news/congratulations_isabella_marinetti_15488

Speaking as a demographer, the individualization of aggregate relationships is both impossible to resist in public discourse and an ongoing massive misrepresentation of research. It's not well known at all, how badly individual behavior is predicted using statistical regularities.

Excellent move.

New from me: "Pronatalism isn't sending their best." In which I cast considered doubt on the precious bodily fluids fecundity theory of fertility decline.

We are recruiting for a PhD student who will be studying jointly between Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and University of St Andrews, More information are attached. @phrg-standrews.bsky.social @cpc-cg.bsky.social @bspsuk.bsky.social

I was just asked about reproducibility issues in demography and healthy life expectancy came to mind.

Today marks 50 years since John Chambers and Rick Becker presented a new project to colleagues at Bell Labs - an interactive environment that became the S language. For more details, see the #RStats blog entry "S at 50": blog.r-project.org/2026/05/05/s...

Adding this directly to the slides for this week's lecture of the course on Introduction to demographic methods. Thanks for creating great resource and sharing @jschoeley.com et al.

What is the main reason for premature male mortality in Mexico? @ikashnitsky.phd and Aburto answered this question in 2019 for every Mexican state, every year since 1990 and all ages from 15 to 50. Their rich results are available on demoscapes. demoscapes.org/collections/...

🥳New article out! Exploring the full spectrum of reproductive experiences doi.org/10.20377/jfr... Using Czech health register data, we analyse reproductive trajectories of women born 1976–1991, including live births, miscarriages, induced abortions, stillbirths, and infertility treatment (ART).

I don't understand this comment... On an unrelated note, have you seen this cartogram below? Give it some days and you *really* start to see.

This is a fantastic project, and I am so honored to have contributed with the two dimensional hazard surfaces from my paper on transitions from cohabitation to marriage in Germany demoscapes.org/collections/... More 2D hazards to come - stay tuned

www.ratemygithub.com/u/jschoeley So LLMs are great at roasting. I would be somewhat upset if a human made these observations and told me - They are all true, of course - But I'm not upset at all being analyzed like that by a machine. This must be why we all got so comfy being intimately surveilled.

“Estimates of Under-Five Mortality From a Mobile Phone Survey”: This study by Julio Romero-Prieto et al. represents “one of the first attempts to collect survival data via mobile phones and to randomize different survey instruments.” @lshtm.bsky.social read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

💡New Research Article from Hal Caswell just out! He shows how delayed reproduction has unexpected effects on population growth and structure #demography @demographyvienna.bsky.social austriaca.at?arp=0x004183...

How many siblings does a recently born child in China likely have? @demography.bsky.social etal have estimated global kinship by age since 1950 and can answer the question (and a million others). Check out their results as interactive heatmaps on demoscapes.org. demoscapes.org/collections/...

Check out @jschoeley.com's very cool project: Demoscapes! It now features interactive Lexis surfaces based on our recent PNAS paper tracking cohort trends in major causes of death in the US. It's (to us data lovers) so fun! demoscapes.org/collections/...

Das sind mal geile Beutel.

Wir sind bereit für die Lange Nacht der Forschung morgen! 🥳 Besucht uns an der @oeaw.bsky.social und holt euch eine Tasche und andere Goodies! 👇

That must be a maximum entropy estimator. If one has no data or relevant prior information Laplaces principle of indifference leads to, "meh, prolly 50/50". Good that we're kept informed on the latest whale statistics.

There's a whale stranded on the German Baltic coast and the intensity of news reporting matches the crises of past years. The live news ticker borders on sarcasm.

💡 Changes life expectancy follow changes in total death counts @araksha.bsky.social ✨ 📝 doi.org/10.31219/osf... 🔗 #rstats code: github.com/ikashnitsky/... 🧙‍♂️ no ai jumpstarter this time, I worked off @jschoeley.com's code, all here github.com/ikashnitsky/... DAY 16 -- causation 💫 #30DayChartChallenge