Here is David Lazer’s keynote talk at the Political Networks 2009 Conference that took place recently (James Fowler’s talk is also worth watching): David Lazer at Political Networks 2009 from David Lazer on Vimeo. Lazer shows examples from a lot of state-of-the-art network research, mostly centred around politics. It gives you a pretty good idea […]
Atul Gawande from his most recent book, Better: The third requirement for success is ingenuity – thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from […]
I read Why Stock Markets Crash by Didier Sornette last year, and I thought it was a pretty good book. Sornette builds on the quantitative work of Benoit Mandelbrot to make models of market bubbles using non-linear dynamics. The basic idea is that bubbles are created when the expectations of people in a market become […]
Another book that I read on my trip is Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch. It looks at a number of conspiracy theories from around the start of the 20th Century up to the present time. Some of them have had deadly consequences (e.g. the myths […]
I just finished reading Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt by Sean Safford. It’s a very good book. Safford compares the histories of Youngstown, Ohio and Allentown, Pennsylvania in an effort to discover why Allentown has been able to recover economically from the collapse of its primary industry […]