Making analogies is the engine of human intelligence, but for humanity as a whole, and our collective-intelligence enterprise called science, it is an obstacle. I’ll try to expand on that in this, maybe not sharpest of posts. Hypotheses In science and life alike, we use analogies as shortcuts to form hypotheses. Any other strategy—experimenting, making […]
Category: Scientific practice
The poster lovers’ manifesto
The arguments As in-person conferences are returning after the pandemic, here’s a tongue-in-cheek blog post to set the priorities straight. It’s simple: poster presentations are better than oral. Or, more precisely, the only reason not everyone is excited about poster sessions is that they are the Cinderellas of academic conferences: tucked into some small and […]
Temporal networks and the extraordinary fluidity of effortless abstractions
This is a semi-grumpy post about the many ambiguities and reinventions in the field of temporal networks. Cheerful posts are more fun, so do consider browsing away. Also, I’m not always contributing to clarity myself, so maybe I’m not entitled to whine about this. Many types of data consist of discrete interaction events, where we […]
Reproducing computational studies in general and general network dismantling in particular
June 21, that authors of the General Network Dismantling paper sent me a reply with their comments on this blog post. You can read it here. I will comment on it later. This post is about some recent experiences and thoughts of reproducing the computational results of a paper. Thoughts about computational reproducibility The reproducibility […]
The importance of being earnest about the importance of nodes
One of the problems network science sets out to solve is to find important nodes. Of course, what is important depends on the context, but an applied scientist coming to network science for an answer probably has a clear idea of what it means in her study system. There is no shortage of methods in […]
Not so great paper titles
Following up on the previous post on great paper titles, I have some scattered thoughts about how to make a lousy paper title 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 […]
Great paper titles
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 of a paper could be as important as the content. For movies, I once had the theory that X! […]
Female pioneers in our field
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 some I didn’t know of before: Helen Hall Jennings—was behind both the methods and data collection of Jacob Moreno’s “sociograms.” Even though there […]
Petter Holme 