Author Archives: Samuel Arbesman

The incredible Longshot Magazine–a project that creates an entire magazine in 48 hours–just completed its most recent issue, with the unifying theme of debt. I wrote a piece that was selected, In Praise of Mediocre Research, which is all about how each scientist is indebted to those who have come before them. And how, unsurprisingly, [...]

The first sentence in Egg Production in a Coastal Seabird, the Glaucous-Winged Gull (Larus glaucescens), Declines during the Last Century is as follows: Seabirds integrate information about oceanic ecosystems across time and space, and are considered sensitive indicators of marine conditions. The rest is here.

Going back to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, there has been a tradition of sidewalk astronomy. Sidewalk astronomy is really just what it sounds like: using a telescope on the sidewalk or street corner. Whether for free or for a small fee, these astronomers enticed the public to engage with outer space in [...]

This is one of those announcement posts: I’m finishing my postdoc at Harvard this summer and, as of mid-August, I will be beginning a position as a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Foundation is devoted to understanding entrepreneurship, broadly construed, and is one of those places positively brimming with interdisciplinary [...]

I co-authored a perspective piece in the June issue of PLoS Computational Biology about a new subfield of scientometrics that Nicholas Christakis and I are calling eurekometrics: Until recently, the quantitative study of science has focused on studying patterns in publications, such as citation counts to discern impact, and in coauthorship networks to discern collaboration. [...]