Category: Uncategorized

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 an article 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 articles 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, […]

Korea is, in general, a TV-friendly country. Regular restaurants have sets continuously showing soap operas, news, or reality shows. The surprise for 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 Fredrik Liljeros and me.) The use of computers and numerical techniques (except regression analysis) has always been outside of the mainstream social and behavioral science. At the same time, computational social science was not born later than computational physics or chemistry (although it is a bit […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

Foreword six years after this blog post originally appeared (November 2021). I agree to what I wrote below, mostly. I came to like this attempt (by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 181.) at a short answer (although any short answer is bound to be incomplete, and it might not apply to all fields): The simplest […]

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