Tales from the ArXiv: The Power Law OF DEATH

First I saw a researcher (Geoff West) claim that there is The Power Law of DOOM! (That's my name for it — not theirs.) At some point, I thought I had that in a blog post, but now I think it was only verbal snarky remarks and a Facebook entry. It started with a talk that he gave years at Oxford in which Geoff started off by saying that he was only going to have very modest conclusions in his seminar, but by the end of the talk, he was predicting the imminent decline of civilization.

And on the heels of The Power Law OF DOOM, we now have claims of The Power Law OF DEATH in a new arXiv paper called "Statistical study of time intervals between murders for serial killers".

In both cases (and as is common), the claims of a power law are unlikely to be justified statistically.

See also The Small-World Network OF LUST, this old blog entry, and this old blog entry.

Data Analysis of Gender in Film Dialog

The data set used in this analysis would be really cool to explore (perhaps in combination with movie networks).

The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines https://t.co/QV7NzluIpL pic.twitter.com/ampVQskeAu

— Sinan Aral (@sinanaral) May 26, 2017

A UCLA Math Undergrad's Data-Analysis Blog

UCLA undergraduate student Ritvik Kharkar, who is doing some research with me, is doing some spiffy data analysis on his blog. Go take a look at it!

It includes entries about community detection (in the Harry Potter universe), education issues, and UCLA salaries.

A Fine-Scale, Historically Awesome, Genetic Map of the U.K.

A new genetic map of the U.K., which is the product of several-years-long collaboration between geneticists, historians, and others. This looks really neat, and I recommend looking at the map at the other end of the link.

The first line of the news article articulates how cool this is: A remarkable new map of Britain shows how the nation was forged by successive waves of immigration from continental Europe over 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.

Again quoting the article: Geneticists and historians collaborated closely on the 10-years project and have been astonished to find that patterns in the DNA of Britons living today reflect historical events going back centuries, and in some cases millennia. Take a look in the news article for some specific examples.

I am sure that there is a ton more than one can do with the data---and of course, I wonder how much one can improve on the analysis (and, without having looked with seriousness at the Nature article, naturally I have no scientific opinion on its correctness). Many of the coauthors are my colleagues at Oxford, so maybe I will eventually have a chance to play with the data? :)

Update: Taking a quick look at the paper, one could certainly try to use more sophisticated clustering methods. Whether that would have any effect on the qualitative conclusions remains to be seen.

"Best". Figure. Ever.

Check out Figure 15b of this new paper on community detection in directed networks.