In a fun paper recently published in PNAS, Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humans, Dave Rand, Nicholas Christakis, and I explored how a dynamic social network affects cooperation. Scientists have been using the public goods game for a long time to understand people’s tendency to cooperate with others. Recently, research has explored [...]
Category Archives: Science
Personalized Subways
In the September issue of Scientific American, the editors asked a number of people about an innovation that would make cities more livable. My answer? Personalized subways: Transportation innovation is one of the keys to creating a more livable city. And one innovation that has the potential to greatly impact life through transportation is personal [...]
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Traces of Humanity
I have an article in this week’s Ideas section of the Boston Globe titled Traces of Humanity: What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space. In commemoration of the forty year anniversary of the placement of the Fallen Astronaut monument on the moon, I explore how what we place in space, consciously [...]
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The Life-Spans of Empires
I recently published my first history article. Titled The Life-Spans of Empires, it’s published in the delightfully-named journal Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. Using a fun dataset I unearthed from some articles in the Nineteen Seventies, I explore the lifespans of empires, and their similarities to other complex systems: The collapse [...]
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In Praise of Mediocre Research
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, [...]
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Why Studying Eggs Over Time Can Explain the Earth
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.
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Sidewalk Astronomy
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 [...]
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Science, Technology, and Google News
Recently, Google News separated its Science and Technology sections into two distinct parts. This seems to have been desired for some time and is a welcome change. For many people, technology and engineering are part of the same intellectual package that science is a part of. But that’s not really true. While it’s sometimes difficult [...]
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Baseball Teams and Jet Lag
Do baseball teams that have to travel across time zones, and are therefore subject to jet lag, more likely to lose games? This question, resulting in the concept of circadian advantage, was taken up in a letter in Nature back in 1995: Many factors undoubtedly contribute to winning baseball games, but our data indicate that [...]
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Announcement: Position at the Kauffman Foundation
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 [...]
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