I invited Jonathan Pruitt to SFI to give a Colloquium talk. This is SFI’s premier talk series, and Jonathan wowed and amazed us with his recent work on social spiders. While at SFI, he also led a Research Jam, an unstructured brainstorming session for early-stage ideas, that has since become a big collaborative review paper involving several SFI researchers.… [Read full details]
Clay-eating parrots, Altmetrics
I was really excited to get news from the Ibis journal that my paper with Don Brightsmith and Gustavo Martinez was the journal’s top-scoring paper in 2017, according to the Almetric score.
A lot of the credit for getting the news out about this paper goes to Jenna Marshall and Katie Mast of the Santa Fe Institute’s Communications department.… [Read full details]
Grant funding for human experiments
Co-PIs Simon DeDeo and Dan Mønster and I received funding from the US Army Research Office to investigate the role of information in conflict. This funding will allow me to make my first foray into experimental work with humans. We’ll be working with undergrads at Aarhus University in Denmark to see how they process and understand social knowledge as they play networked computer games in groups.… [Read full details]
New network metrics
My paper with Dave McDonald was published in the special issue Animal Behaviour, Social Networks (full text). We developed new metrics for weighted social network analyses that were inspired by methods used in population genetics. Our new metrics focus on variance in the strength of relationships, and allow for comparison across different social scales.… [Read full details]