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 …
Do your friends influence your behavior? Of course they do. But it's hard to actually measure their influence. Social contagion is difficult to distinguish from homophily, the tendency we have to seek relationships with people like ourselves. In response to the "happiness is contagious" phenomenon promoted by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, we here at onehappybird …
Possible answers: Immediately adjacent to any hot dog stand. Madison Square Garden during moments of Linsanity. Tim Tebow's new apartment building. No really though, let's measure some stuff. Facts: (1) New York City is the most populous city in the US and (2) Manhattan streets are arranged on a rectangular grid. We have already seen how cities, airports, and even streets …
Last week, news broke of a paper published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review by Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto claiming to observe a positive relationship between the “right-handedness” of a word and its emotional valence. This is being called the ‘QWERTY effect’. (You may recall that ‘valence’ is psych-speak for ‘happiness’ associated with words. What I called …
In the 1960’s, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz was investigating the effects of nonlinearity on short-term weather prediction in a model of convection. In his ground-breaking paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow," Lorenz showed that numerical solutions of the model exhibit sensitive dependence on their initial position, leading virtually indistinguishable states to diverge …
Please Note: Twitter feeds are currently not displaying due to an update made by Twitter. Click on “Tweets from @compstorylab” below and log into your Twitter account to view.
Tweets by compstorylab