Monthly Archives: July 2010

My friend Sarah Covshoff, a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, has a great piece over at the Science Creative Quarterly entitled The Wishing Well. It’s a fairy tale for scientists, a demographic that for far too long has gone without such stories. And Sarah is working on more fairy tales and bedtime stories for [...]

I recently downloaded the useful program Alfred for the Mac. When I was fiddling with the preferences, I discovered that there is a button labeled ‘Do not press this button.’ Naturally, I clicked it. And it took me to a video of the well-known Marshmallow Test, which you might know from an article showcasing its [...]

In 1991, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures approved the largest and smallest metric prefixes, which are respectively yotta- (10^24) and yocto- (10^-24). It turns out that the addition of prefixes over time follows roughly an exponential curve, as seen below: The red points are for prefixes less than one (and therefore decrease), and [...]

I have an article in this Sunday’s Ideas section of the Boston Globe entitled Hard to find: Why it’s increasingly difficult to make discoveries – and other insights from the science of science. It discusses a scientific paper of mine published recently in Scientometrics, which is the journal of the “science of science”. The journal [...]

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, a woman is described as follows: “… Fabiana Rubeo, an Argentine lawyer who works with soccer hooligans.”

A shameless plug for a symposium I’m helping to organize this October: We are pleased to announce the first ever CONNECTING THE DOTS symposium on network visualization, at Harvard University on Friday, October 22, 2010. The symposium will feature two exciting keynote speakers: Alessandro Vespignani, Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington Ben Fry, [...]