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In 1984, 3 techniques for the preselection of the child were known and practiced: 1) Ericsson's ESA gradient technique of separating, in vitro, sperm cells carrying the Y-chromosome from those carrying the X-chromosome by means of a filter, followed by artificial insemination of the sperm enriched with sperm cells carrying the desired chromosome. 2) Papa-Henrion's ionic technique based on 2 different diets followed by the future mother. 3) The Shettles-James regime of timing intercourse within the monthly cycle of the future mother. The Shettles regime proved to be utterly inefficient in the famous Singapore trial. Papa-Herion's ionic technique was applied during the 1980s in Paris in several hundred cases, but was apparently abandoned around 1990. Ericsson's ESA gradient is the only technique that is still easily accessible in the US, England, and other parts of the world. It has never claimed to have a rate of success of more than 70%, 75%, or at most 80%. In the late 1980s came a 4th technique, Handyside's, which relies on pre-implantation diagnosis. The first step consists of the in vitro fertilization of a number of oocytes. Between 40 and 48 hours after fertilization, when the preembryos reach the 8-cell stage, a hole is drilled through the zone pellucida, 1-2 cells are aspired for DNA analysis, and the sex chromosome X or Y are accurately identified by means of the dioxyribonuclear amplification technique. One or more preembryos of the desired sex can be transferred to the uterus of the mother on the same day. Handyside's technique is hardly ever used for sex selection, which is probably due neither to its inconvenience to the mother nor to its price. Physicians are reluctant to use the technique for sex selection because: they generally hesitate to manipulate embryos or preembryos for any reason; they are especially unwilling to discard healthy, viable embryos because of their sex; and they are ethically opposed to taking the first steps onto the path that leads to eugenics.

Migration trends in Southeast Asia are reviewed. The author looks separately at emigration from the region, migration within the region, and internal migration within individual countries. Separate consideration is given to the Indonesian transmigration program and to urbanization. The policy implications of these movements are examined.

If the sex-age structure of the population is equilibrated, observed marriage patterns are assumed to reflect preferred mate selections. With regard to age, these preferences can be expressed in terms of the probabilities of unmarried persons of given ages marrying persons of various ages. To study the situation of unequilibrated sexes, these probabilities can be used to compute, for each combination of ages of groom and bride, the expected number of grooms and the expected number of brides. If either of these numbers exceeds the other, the corresponding sex is in a “marriage squeeze.” The comparison among the expected number of grooms, that of brides, and the observed number of marriages supplies information on the effects of the squeeze. In Australia, marriage statistics of 1949 were considered to reflect preferred selections. In 1958, men of most ages were in a squeeze. As a consequence, some relatively younger and older men did not get married, and some relatively younger and older women improved their chances of marriage in the year under consideration. 291–299

No population survey is exempt from omissions and erroneous inclusions. This is also true for post-enumeration surveys, performed in order to check the reliability of a census count. It is therefore a dangerous procedure to rely on such a check as if it were perfectly correct. It can, however, be shown that, under certain reasonable assumptions, three consecutive enumerations of the same population, a census, a census check and a check on the check, contain sufficient information to estimate the numbers in a population without assuming that any of the three is correct, while with four enumerations no simplifying assumptions are needed. Instead of several consecutive enumerations, the division of the population into several segments may also lead, in theory, to an unbiased estimate of its number, but in practice this approach cannot be expected to yield the desired result.

Since students of biology recognized the importance of the life table in biological research, an increasing number of life tables for different forms of life, besides man, have been constructed. Consequently, the need for a method of comparing life tables appeared. A classification scheme has been worked out, for the first time, by Pearl (7), and the results of the present investigation will be compared with the types proposed by Pearl.

SUMMARY. Life tables for the imago of Musca vicina and Calliphora erythrocephala were compiled from flies kept under controlled conditions. Musca were fed on diluted milk and Calliphora on 10% sugar solution and chicken liver. In Musca females are slightly longer lived than males and the contrary is true for Calliphora. The survivorship curves, and more strikingly the death eurves, exhibit a relatively high mortality during the early days of imaginal life. For the purpose of graduation, the life tables were broken up into two portions and the first one, containing the period of “premature imaginal mortality,” fitted by a fifth order parabola, and the second one by the Gompertz-Makeham formula. For Musca, a complete life table, covering all stages of development, has been compiled and compared to the human life table including miscarriages. This comparison reveals a parallelism between portions of the survivorship curves representing respectively the periods of foetus—egg, infancy—larva, youth and puberty—pupa and young imago, adult man—fertile imago.

This paper discusses the suitability of data on the fertility of polygamous marriages for drawing inferences on the effect of coital frequency on fertility. The author concludes that it may be possible to utilise these data, provided polygamous husbands distribute their sexual activity among all their wives, so that coital frequency for a polygamous wife is lower than that of a monogamous one. Polygamous Arab Beduin may be supposed to have intercourse regularly with all their wives. The author shows that childlessness is higher among first and second polygamous wives than among monogamous ones, and that the average number of children per fertile woman is lower. The higher incidence of childlessness may be due to response errors, or may demonstrate that childlessness is an incentive to polygamy. But the smaller average number of children per fertile woman shows a real differential. It is also shown that although the number of children born to polygamous women is smaller than that of monogamous wom...

Differences between sexes in the duration of larval and nymphal quiescence in Ixodid ticks were investigated in Israel in the laboratory. In H. dromedarii Koch the larval quiescence of the male was, on average about 4 hours longer than that of the female, but in Rhipicephalus sanguineus (Latr.) no significant difference was found. In five species a statistically significant difference in the length of nymphal quiescence was found between males and females; in three of them, R. sanguineus, R. secundus Fel.-Muh. and H. dromedarii, that of the male exceeded that of the female by 1/2 to 1 1/2 days and in the other two, H. marginatum Koch and H. excavatum Koch, the opposite was found, the difference being 1·3 and 3·7 days, respectively.

"Two kinds of Family Transition matrices are identified--Distant transition matrix and Immediate transition matrix. The former studies transitions which produce changes in the distribution of families of different structural types between two time points while the latter takes into consideration the paths by which each family reached its final state. Using the data of Freed and Freed (1983) from an Indian Village, at two time points separated by 19 years, the changes in the family structure and the pattern of domestic cycles are studied."

"In this paper the author presents the state of the art of preselection of the sex of children. To this purpose attempts to control the sex of offspring are classified into four categories: 1) selective conception; 2) treatment of ova or embryos, 3) presexing of embryos; and 4) selection of sperma. The nature and the availability of the different approaches are described as well as the various socio-medical aspects involved. In spite of the general impression that, at present, no reliable technique with clearly known probabilities of success and failure is available, this goal seems to be at close reach and sex selection of children will certainly become accessible in a not very remote future." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND ITA)

The eventual demographic consequences of techniques for preselecting the sex of children are assessed. In particular, the author discusses such related questions as what percentage of couples would avail themselves of a preselection capability, in which situations would they do so, how would the numbers of births (male, female, and total) be affected, and what social and economic effects would result from a marked disequilibrium in the sex distribution of a population. (summary in FRE, ITA)

Démographie et destin des sous-populations. In: Population, 37ᵉ année, n°2, 1982. pp. 235-246.

One of us (P. R.) had the opportunity of working in the city of Jaffa right after the establishment of the state of Israel. Our attention was called to the condition of geographic tongue by the frequency of this condition among the population of Jaffa. Over a period of five years (June, 1949-June, 1954) we observed 1246 children with geographic tongue out of a total number of 8305 examined, which amounts to 15%. Such a high percentage has never been described before. Out of the total of children observed, 5425 were infants up to 2 years of age and 775 of them (14.29%) had geographic tongue. The observations were made in the center of the city of Jaffa, which up to 1948 had been inhabited by Arabs. During the Arab-Israeli war the city was abandoned by the Arabs and afterward settled by Jews who had immigrated from Central, Eastern, and

Les relations entre la croissance de la population et l'évolution économique (en particulier celle du niveau de vie) ont depuis longtemps soulevé de vives controverses et donné lieu à des théories divergentes, sinon opposées. Les recherches actuelles sont surtout orientées en vue de l'application aux pays en voie de développement, lesquels connaissent presque tous une croissance très rapide de la population. Nombreuses sont les personnes qui concluent, dans ce cas, à une relation inverse entre croissance démographique et croissance du revenu national par habitant. La prise en considération des investissements démographiques est l'argument le plus souvent utilisé pour parvenir à cette conclusion. Sous une forme plus souple et moins profondément pessimiste, la théorie de « la souricière » de Nelson montre aussi les difficultés rencontrées par un pays hors d'état de sortir du cycle de la misère et de la prolifération. Cependant, l'économiste S. Kuznets aux États-Unis a critiqué ces deux théories, en particulier au Congrès mondial de la population à Belgrade en i 965. M. H. V. Muhsam, professeur à l'Université hébraïque de Jérusalem, reprend ici les arguments des uns et des autres. Critiquant à son tour les positions de Kuznets, il fait ressortir les difficultés, même purement théoriques, d'une question fort complexe. Précisons que, dans les modèles économiques analysés ici, en dehors de tout aspect sociologique, il s'agit toujours de la croissance de la population globale, sans prise en considération de la population par âge et des changements de cette composition, à la faveur d'un changement de fécondité. Il s'agit donc, dans l'hypothèse, depopulations stables ou quasi stables, bien que l'expression ne soit pas mentionnée., Mühsam H. Sur les relations entre la croissance de la population et le développement économique. In: Population, 25ᵉ année, n°2, 1970. pp. 347-362.

It has therefore been thought worth while to attempt to extract from the data collected in 1946 relating to the nomadic population of the Negeb some information which permits the estimation of the fertility and reproduction of the Beduin. There were two main sources of raw material for this purpose: (i) a sample inquiry covering 3000 Bedui households selected at random among the encampments in the Negeb; and (ii) a fertility inquiry covering 525 Bedui women who had been visited during the late summer of 1946 by a medical team charged with smallpox vaccinations in the Negeb. Both these sources permit the estimation of fertility or reproduction by various methods and by studying the results which sometimes diverge considerably it is hoped that a fairly reliable estimate can finally be arrived at. Some of the information is available for various regions of the Negeb or separately for monogamous and polygamous marriages. In the present paper we consider only figures referring to the whole Negeb and either to all women or to those living in monogamous marriages. (excerpt)

THERE are two types of semi-logarithmic grids : one, called arith-log grid (a system of rectangular co-ordinates, in which the axis of abscissae is divided arithmetically and that of ordinates logarithmically), is frequently used for graphical representations because, on such a grid, the relative increase or decrease of the intensity of a phenomenon is shown immediately by the slope of the curve obtained by plotting its value at different times; the other, which may be termed ‘log-arith’ grid (a system of rectangular co-ordinates in which the axis of abscissae is divided logarithmically and that of the ordinates arithmetically), is used rarely; although this type of grid has some very useful peculiarities. It has been recognized that many moderately skew frequency distributions arising from empirical data1 or fulfilling certain theoretical conditions2 are reduced to normal curves of errors when plotted on a log-arith grid. Whereas the log-arith grid shares this peculiarity with other grids where the abscissa is scaled according to different functions3, another feature, peculiar to the log-arith grid and corresponding to the well-known peculiarity of the arith-log grid, seems to have never been appreciated.