Our Work on Modeling of Bipolar Individuals in The Guardian

The title of the entry basically already says everything, but Marc Abrahams (of Ig Nobel Prizes fame) has written an article about our work on modeling bipolar individuals in The Guardian. An excerpt of the blurb also appears in the Improbable Research blog.

The peanut gallery is skewering us. (Well, there is a mixture of coherent opinions that happen to be different from mine --- which I respect, as one could then have an intelligent discussion with such people about the merits or lack thereof of our research --- and then people who are just either trolling or being vitriolic.) I still need to learn not to read the comments section when one of my articles makes the press. Inevitably, those comments are not going to improve my mood.

In case you were wondering, if you look in the papers that have cited our paper (even though there are not many such papers), you will see that some of our ideas have helped subsequent work, that there is now more scientific evidence that the toy model that we cooked up does seem to capture some things (a similar model has now been derived mechanistically drawing from biochemical considerations), etc. The idea is that one can start with a toy model as a perspective to try to get at the simplest possible mechanisms and use such things --- in combination with clinical data to estimate parameters in such simplistic models --- to really try to get somewhere. This is a complementary way to "Big Data" approaches, and I think that trying to use simple (and even extremely simplistic) models can guide experiments, clinical studies, and so on. Our work on its own cannot do this, as we didn't use real data (which we didn't have), but modelling can inform clinical studies (and experimental studies more generally), and data from such studies can be incorporated into simple models to really try to get somewhere. Our paper is one extremely small stone in this endeavor, but I do believe that it is genuinely a stone.

Contest of the Day: Come up with a Punchline

I will buy a drink for whoever comes up with the best punchline for this announcement.

By the way, when I saw this link, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

(Tip of the cap to Ben Williamson.)

Congressional Networks Research Back in the News

You can find the blurb about my research here. I had never heard of the venue io9 before, but it seems to have a pretty healthy readership.

Community Detection and Dating?

The Oxford press release about my new community-detection article in Science has now been picked up by a dating advice website. WTF?

Taking Over the Blogosphere (well, not really, but it's a dream)

The baseball networks story has been picked up by the Freakonomics Blog.


It's also been picked up by a few baseball/sabermetrics blogs, including a couple of them that are hosted by prominent people in the business. Ones that have followed up on the Wired story include 27pitches.com, The
Book--Playing The Percentages In Baseball, Baseball Musings, and Baseball Think Factory.

I wonder if my dreams of being made fun of on SportsCenter (or at least by Bill James) will come true? ;)


The story has also been picked up by USA Today online and reached #4 on digg.com in the category of sports for a 24-hour period. As usual, the comments in the various venues have included a mixture of intelligent ones and not-so-intelligent ones. (The ones on the sabermetrics blogs have been almost uniformly great. Some of those folks have looked at our actual paper and not just the Wired article and have given some very nice academic-style food for thought regarding some things we might want to consider rephrasing in the paper when it is back on our desks. That is much appreciated!) I especially "love" the ones that expressed extreme moral indignation about some combination of (1) not incorporating PED information into our rankings, (2) not using data to which we just don't have access, or (3) not coming up with results that match their preconceptions. (Um, science isn't automatically wrong if it doesn't give the answer for which you were hoping and/or expecting!)

Oh, and I haven't gotten as much work done during the last couple of days as I was hoping... I really need to work on my scholarpedia article about solitons.