Last substantive change: 10 October 2001
These range from fussy typographical details (e.g., whether particular variables should be italicized) to fairly significant and/or confusing errors. Particularly important or confusing errors are marked *. See the ED web site http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/msmangel/ED.html for more details.
Thanks to Marc Mangel and Ray Hilborn for writing a great book that has relatively few errors, and to Tom Hobbs for pointing out several of the errors below.
Please contact me at bolker@mcmaster.ca if you know of any other errors in the text, or if you find mistakes in this list.
Suppose that the number of individuals observed, Iobs, is the true number plus an observation uncertainty V that is Poisson distributed. Thus, Iobs = I + V will always equal or exceed the true number because V ≥ 0.
In Figure 7.7/Table 1.1, Iobs (black dots in figure; third column in table) is not ≥ the true number I (dashed line in figure; second column in table). Furthermore, following this interpretation makes it hard to figure out what the mean of the Poisson distributed term should be.
What is probably meant is that the observed value, Iobs, is drawn from a Poisson distribution with a mean of I. Following this interpretation:
The negative log-likelihood in Pseudocode 7.5, step 3c is Pr(I = Iobs|I ~ Pois(λ = Ipre))—the probability of drawing a sample Iobs from a Poisson distribution with mean Ipre. [ed: I haven’t checked this error with the authors, there is some possibility that I’m just confused—but I don’t think so]