What Happens When You Finish a PhD in Complex Systems

No cynicism or snark at all. :P

When you finish a PhD in complex systems, they take you to a special room and tell you that people are not actually particles.

After you recover, you’re sworn to secrecy, and you can try to publish papers in Nature again. Either that, or you can now join a sociology department. https://t.co/jXAzDuoJ7o

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) September 22, 2019

(By the way, I have been enjoying various instances of this meme that I have encountered during the last couple of days.)

Learn Anatomy from Dissected Knit Creatures

Here's another really cool thing: knitted versions of dissected creatures.

Now that is sweet!

(Tip of the cap to Leslie Porter.)

Update: Of course, for several years, people have been able to experience the joys of plush microbes (these are especially awesome), plush subatomic particles, and even plush statistical distributions.

Update (3/31/15): I now have a post about this on the Improbable Research blog.

See! I Told You That People Are Particles!

Even Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal agrees that people are particles! See! I told you so! :P

(Well, actually, they aren't --- though that perspective can be both useful and insightful. Just don't go overboard with that perspective...)

Distribution Plushies

Those of you who are not satisfied with plush microbes or plush fundamental particles might be interested in buying statistical distribution plushies, because those are also pretty cool.

Personally, I would love to have some plushies of fundamental particles (I don't have any yet) or of microbes (I recently received a bookworm, a brain cell, and a neuron as a gift).

(Tip of the cap to Joe Blitzstein and some of the people who have commented on his Facebook post. The person who posted the specific link above for the distribution plushies is Miruna Antonia.)

"Taxonomies of Networks from Community Structure"

Well, this paper has certainly taken a while to finally appear in final form. The project started in December 2007 as Stephen Reid's senior thesis project from the winter 2008 term. We put the first version of the just-published paper on the arXiv preprint server in June 2010. Here are more details.

Title: Taxonomies of Networks from Community Structure

Authors: Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Daniel J. Fenn, Stephen Reid, Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, Mark D. Fricker, and Nick S. Jones

Abstract: The study of networks has become a substantial interdisciplinary endeavor that encompasses myriad disciplines in the natural, social, and information sciences. Here we introduce a framework for constructing taxonomies of networks based on their structural similarities. These networks can arise from any of numerous sources: They can be empirical or synthetic, they can arise from multiple realizations of a single process (either empirical or synthetic), they can represent entirely different systems in different disciplines, etc. Because mesoscopic properties of networks are hypothesized to be important for network function, we base our comparisons on summaries of network community structures. Although we use a specific method for uncovering network communities, much of the introduced framework is independent of that choice. After introducing the framework, we apply it to construct a taxonomy for 746 networks and demonstrate that our approach usefully identifies similar networks.We also construct taxonomies within individual categories of networks, and we thereby expose nontrivial structure. For example, we create taxonomies for similarity networks constructed from both political voting data and financial data. We also construct network taxonomies to compare the social structures of 100 Facebook networks and the growth structures produced by different types of fungi.



And as an extra note, this paper includes the following line: "Moreover, the Louvain and simulated-annealing algorithms are much more popular than spectral algorithms in investigations of community structure [14] (and life is short), so we only compare results using the Louvain and simulated-annealing algorithms for the remainder of this appendix."

Update (9/23/12): Nick Jones has now described this paper on the blog he writes for his research group.

Subatomic particle plush toys

This is just so wrong... and yet it's both awesome and "awesome"...

Namely, this site is selling stuffed toys of subatomic particles. I was tempted to buy some, but the price is a bit too steep. Apparently, the weight of the stuffed toys is supposed to have some correspondence (via 'light' versus 'heavy') with their actual weights. I'm amused.

And when you complete your subatomic particle collection, don't forget to buy some stuffies of internal organs and microbes. (I've seen the microcrobes in a couple of places---first at DragonCon and then at J/L's place.)

There are also a bunch of crocheted Lorenz manifolds out there. (My link is to a page of the Bristol mathematicians who made the first one. Their page links to a few others.) I'd be up for buying or making something like a stuffed network. Does anybody want to help make a stuffed Watts-Strogatz graph? (I was going to suggest a random graph, but that would take more nodes to be able to appreciate.) One could get a bunch of stuffed spheres and connect them with stuffed rods.

(Tip of the cap to Jonathan Adams for posting the link to the subatomic particle zoo.)