What is the shape of all knowledge? How has knowledge grown over time? Can we anticipate ways in which knowledge will grow? Knowledge is certainly hierarchically structured but it's also richly scaffolded and networked with concepts and ideas linking within and across domains. We can attempt to answer some of these questions by computationally exploring the Network of … [Read more...]
Finding the shapes of games
Each game is a story If you pay much attention to news of any kind, it’s almost impossible to go a day without hearing about some sporting event going on in the world. Annual competitions like the Super Bowl and Major League Baseball’s World Series mark the culmination of grueling seasons for athletes and fans alike. Almost every hour of every day plays host to some sporting … [Read more...]
Transitions in Climate and Energy Discourse Between Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy
Climate change is real, and that’s just science. But if we aren’t feeling climate change on a day-to-day basis, then how do we know it’s really happening? The problem is especially challenging considering that weather in the U.S. has actually become more pleasant over the last few decades. Behavioral economics studies have repeatedly shown that human beings respond best to … [Read more...]
Novel data assimilation improvements for limited observations
The availability of data on the current state of Earth's atmosphere/ocean/land system continues to improve. As the state-of-the-art weather models and supercomputing power allow for higher resolution forecasts, down to 1km resolution on massively parallel computers, data assimilation techniques are needed to quickly combine the mass of available data. Here at the University … [Read more...]
Moose on the Loose!
Note: a version of this post was given by the author for Invocation at the UVM College of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences graduation ceremony, Flynn Theatre, May 18, 2014. A few weeks ago—on one of those beautiful spring mornings that makes the long winter seem like it happened elsewhere—something quite remarkable took place here at the University of Vermont. At the … [Read more...]
Now Published: The Geography of Happiness
Today we're pleased to announce that our article "The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place" has been officially published by PLoS ONE. We wanted to tell you about one key piece we've added to the paper and an unusual new Twitter account we've created. After our three blog posts (which … [Read more...]
Chaos in an Atmosphere Hanging on a Wall
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 publication of Ed Lorenz's groundbreaking paper, Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, by the Journal of Atmospheric Science. This seminal work, now cited more than 11,000 times, inspired a generation of mathematicians and physicists to bravely relax their linear assumptions about reality, and embrace the nonlinearity governing our … [Read more...]
The Twitter Diet
How does food (or talking about food online) relate to how happy you are? This is part 3 of our series on the Geography of Happiness. Previously we've looked at how happiness varies across the United States (as measured from word frequencies in geotagged tweets), and then at how different socioeconomic factors relate to variations in happiness. Now we focus in on one particular … [Read more...]
What makes a city happy?
Welcome back, onehappybird watchers! Wow, what a crazy week of coverage of our post about how happiness varies by city and state across the United States. Many, many people read, shared, and commented on the post, for which we are grateful. For the detailed explanation of the results, check out the full paper we recently submitted to PLoS ONE. A number of readers wondered how … [Read more...]
Where is the happiest city in the USA?
(Update: this work is now published at PLoS ONE) Is Disneyland really the happiest place on Earth?* How happy is the city you live in? We have already seen how the hedonometer can be used to find the happiest street corner in New York City, now it's time to let it loose on the entire United States. We plotted over 10 million geotagged tweets from 2011 (all our results are in … [Read more...]
Who will your friends be next week? The link prediction problem
Sitting in the student center of our university, I am surrounded by hundreds of students enjoying their lunch and socializing. They’re strengthening (and in some cases weakening) their social ties. Given the ability to observe this social network over time, we would see that some relationships flourish, while others disappear altogether. This situation is not unique to … [Read more...]
The Daily Unraveling of the Human Mind
Each morning we find ourselves in wide flung arms of drowsy possibilites. Cradled by the warm embrace of our beds, we begin our day, rebooted and rejuvenated. Having not eaten for a full eight hours, we can enjoy a guilt free breakfast, setting a blissful tone for the day. Last night's dreams of victory and triumph bolster our delusions of adequacy, preparing us to surmount … [Read more...]
What’s the Most Important Theorem?
Mathematical truths are organized in an incredibly structured manner. We start with the basic properties of the natural numbers, called axioms, and slowly, painfully work our way up, reaching the real numbers, the joys of calculus, and far, far beyond. To prove new theorems, we make use of old theorems, creating a network of interconnected results—a mathematical house of … [Read more...]