monkey's uncle

I’ve been thinking some more about the issues that are raised by the debacle over Jared Diamond’s 21 April 2008 New Yorker piece and the recent announcement of a lawsuit against him.  There are many things to think about here.  Probably foremost amongst these are the ethical concerns relating to preserving research subjects’ privacy and [...]

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Every once in a while someone asks me for advice on the platform to use for developing models of infectious disease.  I typically make the same recommendations — unless the person asking has something very specific in mind. This happened again today and I figured I would turn it into a blog post.
The answer depends [...]

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My holiday reading on modularity has led me into some of the literature on the evolution of complexity.  Some of the most interesting work in theoretical biology that I’ve read in a while relates to the ideas of nearly neutral networks and holey adaptive landscapes, an area developed by Sergey Gavrilets at the University of [...]

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Oh, how this bugs me.  I think behavioral economics is a great thing.  However, the language that is used to discuss behavioral economics — and specifically, the types of problems it addresses — is hugely problematic. There is this pervasive idea, largely arising from economics, that because people do not behave according to the predictions [...]

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Using the network package, you can plot graphs in a flexible and powerful way.  Often, when plotting a network, we want to vary the color, size, or shape of the vertices based on some attributes.  Let's say that we have a freewheeling sexual network (easier to simulate) and we would like to color the vertices [...]

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Once again, I am simply blown away by the participation rate in my kids' school Halloween parade this year.  In a school of around 500 students, I'd say 98%+ wore a costume today for the Halloween parade.  A substantial fraction of the parents wear something, even if just a silly hat, as well.  Based on [...]

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This may seem obvious to an expert statnet user, but it took me a bit of careful reading of Carter's paper and some trial and error to figure it out. We are using the frequency of behaviors based on ethological observations as edge weights and would like to be able to extract a matrix of [...]

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I've been using the statnet suite of tools a lot recently.  As with any powerful software, there is quite a learning curve.  I will write some notes in my blog to help me remember tricks that I learn along the way.  And who knows? They might even be useful to other people!
For a variety of [...]

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