• The end of Supporting Material?

    Maybe this is how it happens: You see an interesting (seemingly innocuous) paper and decide to read it. Upon finding it very information-dense, you decide to take a look at the supporting information (SI) and notice that the SI has a word count greater in size than an average PhD thesis. Or maybe it’s when…

  • Bipartite Network gets a Makeover

    I guess my research is slowly changing focus and is more and more about some kind of data science (although I still bill myself as a physicist turned network scientist). While statistics and mathematical models are still driving this type of research, an increasingly important part of data science is visualization – finding neat ways…

  • Worlds Colliding. Part II

    Back in March, I wrote a post entitled Worlds Colliding explaining the failure of Google Buzz as a failure to understand the fundamental structure of complex networks. Buzz received a large amount of criticism for automatically adding the most contacted people from your inbox to your Buzz follower list. My post explained that because individuals…

  • Mood, twitter, and the new shape of America

    Twitter is a gigantic repository for our collective state of mind. Every second, thousands of tweets reveal what everybody and their mother had for lunch, what Justin Bieber is up to, or what magnificent link you should be checking out right now. Individually, each tweet is mostly interesting to friends/fans of the tweeter, but taken…

  • Erdös Number

    The scientific version of the Bacon number is the Erdös number. Via a post on Finn Nielsen’s blog, I learned that i have a reasonably low Erdös number – three. (I also learned that Finn is one of the few people with a finite Erdös-Bacon number). The reason for both Finn’s and my own low…

  • Pervasive Overlap

    Just recently, I came across the following video showing LinkedIn chief scientist DJ Patil explaining the egocentric networks (networks consisting of an individual and their immediate friends) for a few individuals based on their LinkedIn connections. Although the individuals in the center of these egocentric networks are unusual (in the sense that they have many…

  • An animation

    A couple of days ago, David Lazer asked me to help him generate an animation of the spread of MFN (trade) treaties in the 1860s. His resulting post on The emergence of international order: The case of MFN treaties in the 1860’s is worth a read! Also, David’s post sparked a nice follow up blog…

  • Starting a real page

    I wanted to start a real page, to upgrade from my somewhat one-dimensional page over on www.imm.dtu.dk/~slj. As you can probably see, I’m far from done, but I will be updating the site and posting more in the following few days/weeks.

  • High Throughput Humanities: Final Call for Abstracts

    Note: This post was originally posted on the Complexity and Social Networks Blog. A quick reminder that April 30th is the final chance to submit an abstract to the High Throughput Humanities Workshop that I’m organizing along with Riley Crane , Gourab Ghoshal, and Max Schich, at this years European Conference on Complex Systems in…

  • Worlds Colliding

    During a press conference at last week’s SxSW conference, product manager of Google’s gmail team, Todd Jackson, revealed an interesting bit of information about the company’s problem-ridden new service Google Buzz: Jackson told the crowd, as he’s previously said to reporters, that too much was assumed about how Buzz would work best and be received…