2025 Inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2025 inductees.

It's great to see Cyndi Lauper, Warren Zevon, and Joe Cocker take their place in the Hall among the greats!

"A Non-Expert’s Introduction to Data Ethics for Mathematicians"

My chapter in our new book is also out. Here are some details about it.

Title: A Non-Expert’s Introduction to Data Ethics for Mathematicians

Author: Mason A. Porter

Abstract: I give a short introduction to data ethics. I begin with some background information and societal context for data ethics. I then discuss data ethics in mathematical-science education and indicate some available course material. I briefly highlight a few efforts—at my home institution and elsewhere—on data ethics, society, and social good. I then discuss open data in research, research replicability and some other ethical issues in research, the tension between privacy and open data and code, and a few controversial studies and reactions to studies. I also discuss ethical principles, institutional review boards, and a few other considerations in the scientific use of human data. I then briefly survey a variety of research and lay articles that are relevant to data ethics and data privacy. I conclude with a brief summary and some closing remarks.

My focal audience is mathematicians, but I hope that this chapter will also be useful to others. I am not an expert about data ethics, and this chapter provides only a starting point on this wide-ranging topic. I encourage you to examine the resources that I discuss and to reflect carefully on data ethics, its role in mathematics education, and the societal implications of data and data analysis. As data and technology continue to evolve, I hope that such careful reflection will continue throughout your life.

"Mathematical and Computational Methods for Complex Social Systems"

Our edited book is out! You can find it on this website. Here are some details.

Title: Mathematical and Computational Methods for Complex Social Systems

Authors: Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, Mason A. Porter, and Alexandria Volkening

"Bounded-Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics with Adaptive Confidence Bounds"

Another of my papers just came out in final form. Here are some details.

Title: Bounded-Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics with Adaptive Confidence Bounds

Authors: Grace J. Li, Jiajie Luo, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: People's opinions change with time as they interact with each other. In a bounded-confidence model (BCM) of opinion dynamics, individuals (which are represented by the nodes of a network) have continuous-valued opinions and are influenced by neighboring nodes whose opinions are sufficiently similar to theirs (i.e., are within a confidence bound). In this paper, we formulate and analyze discrete-time BCMs with heterogeneous and adaptive confidence bounds. We introduce two new models: (1) a BCM with synchronous opinion updates that generalizes the Hegselmann–Krause model; and (2) a BCM with asynchronous opinion updates that generalizes the Deffuant–Weisbuch model. We analytically and numerically explore our adaptive-confidence BCMs' limiting behaviors, including the confidence-bound dynamics, the formation of clusters of nodes with similar opinions, and the time evolution of ``effective graphs,"" which are time-dependent subgraphs of networks with edges only between nodes that are receptive to each other. For a variety of networks and a wide range of values of the parameters that control the increase and decrease of confidence bounds, we demonstrate numerically that our adaptive-confidence BCMs result in fewer major opinion clusters and longer convergence times than the baseline (i.e., nonadaptive) BCMs. In our numerical simulations, we also observe that our adaptive-confidence BCMs can have adjacent nodes that converge to the same opinion but are not receptive to each other. This qualitative behavior does not occur in the associated baseline BCMs.