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The external links are both dead. Need updating. â Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.112.148.179 ( talk) 03:00, 16 November 2005â
Both links work fine for me. On is a pdf file; one reads it with acrobat. The other is a ps file. On the Linux machine I'm using, with my preferences set as they are, I read it with ghostview. On Microsoft systems, I suspect the appropriate software would be called gsview or something like that. Michael Hardy 20:19, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Suggest:
"As a concrete example, suppose in one generation there are 100 persons (50 male and 50 female) with unique surnames, and a requirement that every person can participate in the conception and naming of at most one child. Then the next generation can have at most 50 unique surnames."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy â Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.228.79.25 ( talk) 20:57, 11 July 2006â
I just went through the Galton-Watson paper mentioned in the history section, which concludes by saying (incorrectly) that "whenever the survival probabilities can be represented by a polynomial, ... all the surnames, therefore, tend to extinction." It comes to this false conclusion because it says,
We get the equation
- [Here rm0 denotes the probability of extinction after r generations.]
whence it follows that as r increases indefinitely the value of rm0 approaches indefinitely to the value y where
that is where y=1.
The first formula is correct, but the second is not; it should be
this does have y=1 as one solution, but there are other solutions if the expected number of male descendants is greater than 1. Moreover, the sequence (rm0) will approach one of the other solutions, so the probability of the surname surviving indefinitely is nonzero. This is in agreement with the Wikipedia article, but not the Galton-Watson paper.
Meanwhile, all of this is original research, so Wikipedia can't include any of it without a citation. skeptical scientist ( talk) 19:53, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
The definition uses (n+1) in the superscript, it is not clear what this means. The paragraph below implies is is \xi_j^{(n)} is a sequence. I am not sure what it means to be summing whole sequences (as opposed to elements), especially ones with a different number of elements. I think something else is meant here. If it is not wrong, I think there is something missing in the explanation of the notation. -- MATThematical ( talk) 16:20, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
Nbarth ( talk · contribs) added Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese as examples of surname extinction. Unless a source is provided, I will remove them.
I do not think these Sinitic names underwent surname extinction. A Sinitic surname is a name for a whole lineage and extremely rately goes extinct (Japanese surnames are totally different as I already described at Talk:Japanese name#Surname extinction?). In Korea and Vietname, a limited number of ruling class clans first adopted Sinitic surnames, and as a result, a small number of surnames came into use. Later commoners followed them chosing surnames from the small name pool. That's why they have few surnames. -- Nanshu ( talk) 05:28, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
{{
citation}}
: External link in |postscript=
(
help)CS1 maint: postscript (
link)Only 3,100 surnames are now in use in China [...] compared with nearly 12,000 in the past. An 'evolutionary dwindling' of surnames is common to all societies. [...] [B]ut in China, [Du] says, where surnames have been in use far longer than in most other places, the paucity has become acute.
Why the lack of surnames, then? The reason, according to Du Ruofu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is that all societies experience an 'evolutionary dwindling' of family names as less-common ones die out. Because the Chinese have used surnames for thousands of years (compared to just a few centuries in many parts of Europe), this effect has become particularly significant.
I have quickly scanned Du et al., 1992. Its main subject is not surname extinction and it makes no mention of the GaltonâWatson process. So I am unsure if the following citation at Chinese surname#Surnames at present is valid:
The authors give some possible reasons for the dwindling of surnames (pp.19â22). The no-children assumption is not presented. Personally I doubt that a lineage dies out peacefully. If one lineage died out, it must involve a catastrophe that characterized the end of a dynastic cycle, with which the population reduced to a half, a quarter or even worse (The Three Kingdom period is a well-known example). It is unfortunate that I have never read literature that relates it to surname extinction. -- Nanshu ( talk) 13:57, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
I modified the sentence "Assume, as was taken for granted in Galton's time, that surnames are passed on to all male children by their father".
Indeed it is quite absurd to suggest that this assumption was ever taken for granted. Children out of wedlock have always been a known reality. Moreover, even within the traditional family paradigm this assumption was not at all the standard in all cultures, so that it is not a question of "time" but also of place. â Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.178.14.162 ( talk) 12:48, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
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It's true that the Galton-Watson process was originally invented as a model for family names, but the idea itself is now quite a fundamental plank of stochastic process theory, and has applications in evolutionary biology and nuclear physics, among other fields. I wonder if the article could/should be changed to place more emphasis on its fundamental mathematical nature, and less on its original historical purpose? I say this because currently, without careful reading, the article comes across as talking about quite a specific model of genealogies of names, and doesn't really hint at the idea's broad applicability in other fields. (I realise this re-writing would be a substantial amount of work.) Nathaniel Virgo ( talk) 01:05, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
I think there should probably be a warning about the fact that Francis Galton is the father of eugenics. As it likely affected the study. I think in the history section there should be more context given to "In 1869, Galton published Hereditary Genius, in which he treated the extinction of different social groups." Perhaps "In 1869, Galton published Hereditary Genius, which has earned him the name the Father of Eugenics [1]. 128.119.202.49 ( talk) 20:09, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The external links are both dead. Need updating. â Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.112.148.179 ( talk) 03:00, 16 November 2005â
Both links work fine for me. On is a pdf file; one reads it with acrobat. The other is a ps file. On the Linux machine I'm using, with my preferences set as they are, I read it with ghostview. On Microsoft systems, I suspect the appropriate software would be called gsview or something like that. Michael Hardy 20:19, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Suggest:
"As a concrete example, suppose in one generation there are 100 persons (50 male and 50 female) with unique surnames, and a requirement that every person can participate in the conception and naming of at most one child. Then the next generation can have at most 50 unique surnames."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy â Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.228.79.25 ( talk) 20:57, 11 July 2006â
I just went through the Galton-Watson paper mentioned in the history section, which concludes by saying (incorrectly) that "whenever the survival probabilities can be represented by a polynomial, ... all the surnames, therefore, tend to extinction." It comes to this false conclusion because it says,
We get the equation
- [Here rm0 denotes the probability of extinction after r generations.]
whence it follows that as r increases indefinitely the value of rm0 approaches indefinitely to the value y where
that is where y=1.
The first formula is correct, but the second is not; it should be
this does have y=1 as one solution, but there are other solutions if the expected number of male descendants is greater than 1. Moreover, the sequence (rm0) will approach one of the other solutions, so the probability of the surname surviving indefinitely is nonzero. This is in agreement with the Wikipedia article, but not the Galton-Watson paper.
Meanwhile, all of this is original research, so Wikipedia can't include any of it without a citation. skeptical scientist ( talk) 19:53, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
The definition uses (n+1) in the superscript, it is not clear what this means. The paragraph below implies is is \xi_j^{(n)} is a sequence. I am not sure what it means to be summing whole sequences (as opposed to elements), especially ones with a different number of elements. I think something else is meant here. If it is not wrong, I think there is something missing in the explanation of the notation. -- MATThematical ( talk) 16:20, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
Nbarth ( talk · contribs) added Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese as examples of surname extinction. Unless a source is provided, I will remove them.
I do not think these Sinitic names underwent surname extinction. A Sinitic surname is a name for a whole lineage and extremely rately goes extinct (Japanese surnames are totally different as I already described at Talk:Japanese name#Surname extinction?). In Korea and Vietname, a limited number of ruling class clans first adopted Sinitic surnames, and as a result, a small number of surnames came into use. Later commoners followed them chosing surnames from the small name pool. That's why they have few surnames. -- Nanshu ( talk) 05:28, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
{{
citation}}
: External link in |postscript=
(
help)CS1 maint: postscript (
link)Only 3,100 surnames are now in use in China [...] compared with nearly 12,000 in the past. An 'evolutionary dwindling' of surnames is common to all societies. [...] [B]ut in China, [Du] says, where surnames have been in use far longer than in most other places, the paucity has become acute.
Why the lack of surnames, then? The reason, according to Du Ruofu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is that all societies experience an 'evolutionary dwindling' of family names as less-common ones die out. Because the Chinese have used surnames for thousands of years (compared to just a few centuries in many parts of Europe), this effect has become particularly significant.
I have quickly scanned Du et al., 1992. Its main subject is not surname extinction and it makes no mention of the GaltonâWatson process. So I am unsure if the following citation at Chinese surname#Surnames at present is valid:
The authors give some possible reasons for the dwindling of surnames (pp.19â22). The no-children assumption is not presented. Personally I doubt that a lineage dies out peacefully. If one lineage died out, it must involve a catastrophe that characterized the end of a dynastic cycle, with which the population reduced to a half, a quarter or even worse (The Three Kingdom period is a well-known example). It is unfortunate that I have never read literature that relates it to surname extinction. -- Nanshu ( talk) 13:57, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
I modified the sentence "Assume, as was taken for granted in Galton's time, that surnames are passed on to all male children by their father".
Indeed it is quite absurd to suggest that this assumption was ever taken for granted. Children out of wedlock have always been a known reality. Moreover, even within the traditional family paradigm this assumption was not at all the standard in all cultures, so that it is not a question of "time" but also of place. â Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.178.14.162 ( talk) 12:48, 20 June 2014 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on GaltonâWatson process. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.â InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 13:34, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
It's true that the Galton-Watson process was originally invented as a model for family names, but the idea itself is now quite a fundamental plank of stochastic process theory, and has applications in evolutionary biology and nuclear physics, among other fields. I wonder if the article could/should be changed to place more emphasis on its fundamental mathematical nature, and less on its original historical purpose? I say this because currently, without careful reading, the article comes across as talking about quite a specific model of genealogies of names, and doesn't really hint at the idea's broad applicability in other fields. (I realise this re-writing would be a substantial amount of work.) Nathaniel Virgo ( talk) 01:05, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
I think there should probably be a warning about the fact that Francis Galton is the father of eugenics. As it likely affected the study. I think in the history section there should be more context given to "In 1869, Galton published Hereditary Genius, in which he treated the extinction of different social groups." Perhaps "In 1869, Galton published Hereditary Genius, which has earned him the name the Father of Eugenics [1]. 128.119.202.49 ( talk) 20:09, 28 May 2024 (UTC)