This is not a shot at making a side career as a motivational speaker. There are of course tons of more creative people out there, and even science about it! Still, I couldn’t resist writing down my thoughts since I slightly disagree with some of the gurus out there. 😛 1. Be bored   Good ideas […]

I really like computational social science and love to identify myself as a computational social scientist. Having an identity in that sense is perhaps not so important. Through my entire career, I’ve got accustomed to be a [one field] person doing [other field] things, and learned to like it. Still computational social science very much […]

I needed some reasonably fast C code for SIR on networks. Funny enough, I just had C code for a discrete time version, nothing for the standard continuous-time, exponentially-distributed durations of infection. Although there are book chapters written about this that are probably more readable than this post (and accompanied by Python code), I decided to […]

If you haven’t heard about Zachary’s karate club, you should probably be careful calling yourself network scientist in the wrong company. It is a small network data set that is used as an example, and benchmark for community detection algorithms. It even has a club! The Zachary Karate Club Club. With a trophy going to […]

A day or two ago Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset arxived a paper about how rare scale-free networks really are. If network science was invented today, I think such a paper would not raise many eyebrows. Now it already got much attention, and I think it looks like a methodologically solid and important contribution. To someone […]

As a follow-up to my post about ten papers that shaped my science, here are ten favorite books. I limit myself to science-themed books, I get inspired by fiction /other non-fiction too. 🙂 Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, 1978 Many of my fellow computational social scientists have read it (and those who haven’t already, definitely should). […]

These are all paper that inspired me through my random walks in academia (with some emphasis on papers that deserve more attention). (It’s an updated version of a blog post from 2012.) 1. P Bearman, J Moody, R Faris (2002) Networks and history This paper blew my mind when I first read it. All of a sudden, […]