The Life and Work of Bland Ewing
This site is dedicated to the life and work of Bland Ewing. I am
writing his biography, and am actively working with him and others on
his ideas on population ethology modeling.
Bland Ewing was my first mentor. I worked for him at UC-Berkeley
during the summers while I was an undergrad at Caltech in the early
1970s. By the late 1970s we lost touch, and only reconnected in the
mid 1990s. At that time, Bland was suffering in a serious way from
Huntington's Disease, the same malady that took
his father, grandfather, and Woody Guthrie.
Bland Ewing is now approaching 70. His mind is quite active, while he
is largely confined to his apartment due to low energy and difficulty
walking. Bland' short-term memory is sporadic, and he ocassionally has
trouble with names, but his depth of reasoning is phenomenal, as it
always was.
During the past two years, Bland and I, along with Jim Barbieri and
more recently Bob Luck, have been reviewing the modeling ideas that
Bland first proposed in his intended dissertation. As near as any of
us can tell, these ideas have not been superseded in the past quarter
century. In fact, they may be more relevant today than
ever.
Current Work
- B Ewing, BS Yandell, JF Barbieri, RF Luck, LD Forster (2001) "Event-driven
competing risks," Ecological Modelling 158: 35-50. Technical Report #1032, Department of Statistics,
UW-Madison.
- B Ewing, BS Yandell, JF Barbieri, RF Luck and DL Wood (2001)
"Quantitative population ethology," Technical Report #1033, Department
of Statistics, UW-Madison.
- B Ewing, BS Yandell, JF Barbieri, and RF Luck (2001) "Practical model building for quantitative population ethology
with event-driven competing risks," Technical Report
#1034, Department of Statistics, UW-Madison.
Unpublished Work from the 1970s
- B Ewing (1973) "Population ethology," dissertation outline,
Department of Entomology, UC-Berkeley.
- B Ewing (1974) "Population ethology," unpublished manuscript,
Department of Entomology, UC-Berkeley, Jun 1974.
- B Ewing, P Rauch, and J Barbieri (1974) "Simulating the dynamics
and structure of populations," Lawrence Livermore Laboratory Report,
UCRL-76046 (Rev. 1), Sep 1974.
- B Ewing, P Rauch, JF Barbieri (1974) "Simulating the dynamics and
structure of populations," unpublished manuscript, Sep 1974.
This paper was prepared for presentation at
the Third Annual Integrated Pest Management Modelers' Meeting: The
Principles, Strategies and Tactics of Pest Population Regulation and
Control in Major Crop Ecosystems, New Orleans, LA, 8-10 Jan 1975.
- B Ewing, JF Barbieri and PA Rauch (1975) "Stimulating the
Dynamics and Structure of Populations," 1 Aug 1975.
Prepared for inclusion in "The Principles, Strategies and
Tactics. . . in Western Pine Beetle Ecosystem," Progress Report,
Vol. 2, 1975.
- PA Rauch, B Ewing and DL Wood (1975) "Information transfer and
the systems approach in large-scale ecological studies," unpublished
manuscript, Entomology, UC-Berkeley, 10 Aug 1975.
- B Ewing, J Barbieri, P Rauch, D Baasch [and BS Yandell] (1976)
"Simulating the dynamics and structure of populations," 15 Jul
1976. Prepared for inclusion in: "The Principles, Strategies, and
Tactics ... in Western Pine Beetle Ecosystems" Progress Report, 1976.
Related Unpublished Work from 1970s
- P Bunnell (1973) A stochastic model of a lizard
community. PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
- JF Barbieri (1974) "A method for modeling sparse systems",
memorandum to JB Knox, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 29 Apr 1974.
- JF Barbieri (1975) "Progress report on modeling structured
ecosystems using Monte Carlo techniques," Memorandum to JB Knox,
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 1 Jul 1975.
- JF Barbieri (1975) "Problems with modeling structured ecosystems
and the EPA-SBNF project," Memorandum to JB Knox, Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory, 13 Jun 1975.
- BS Yandell (1978) "Random numbers: where do they come from?"
project for D Brillinger's Time Series course, UC Berkeley, 7 Apr 1978.
We are developing software to implement the quantitative population
ethology simulation approach using the R statistical computing system.
Please read the Practical Model Building
paper for detailed information on our code. First one needs to install
the R system, however. See the R Project for instructions.
Both our code, and the R system, are freely available and covered
by the GNU General Public
License.
Brian Yandell
(yandell@stat.wisc.edu)