Korea is, in general, a TV friendly country. Regular restaurants have sets continuously showing soap operas, news or reality shows. The surprise the last two days was that my lunch restaurants were showing a board game. Students all over campus were watching it too. Baduk (a.k.a. go) is a quite popular TV entertainment, but very […]

(This post is a spin-off from this essay by me and Fredrik Liljeros.) The use of computers and numerical techniques (except regression analysis) has always been outside of the main stream social and behavioral science. At the same time, computational social science was not born later than computational physics or chemistry (although it is a […]

With reference to the previous post on great paper titles. I have some scattered thoughts about how to make a bad paper titles too. In retrospect I have a fair share of such myself, and many papers that probably would be read more if I only had given some more thought to the title. Here […]

This is a repost of something I wrote two years ago . . I was going to steal some new ones from paper-title connoisseur Sebastian Ahnert but changed my mind. As for other types of human-made stuff the name for a paper could be as important as the content. For movies I once had the theory that X! Y […]

Science is a man’s world. My field is not the most macho, but still it’s worth mentioning some unsung female pioneers. Working on our essay about simulation in social science, I learned about three I didn’t know before: Klara von Neumann—coded the first simulation program, codenamed Monte Carlo. It was the second major project to run […]

What is a good model? A tweet by my colleague Hiroki Sayama a while ago prompted me to see if I could formulate my own description. Today’s quote from free open-access #IMACS: What is a good model? http://t.co/Sa5zUccfc6 pic.twitter.com/5rYmupkJ19 — Hiroki Sayama (@HirokiSayama) August 21, 2015 Another reason this is worth contemplating for me is […]

I had a lot of help presenting my research by the awesome cartoonist Mi Jin Lee. She is the PhD student of my colleague Beom Jun Kim and an excellent scientist too. Here are some of her drawings. Feel free to use them under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.