Over 900 e-mails in October...

I sent over 900 e-mails this month. (A decent number of them were pleasure e-mails.)

This isn't my record, but it is my most in a while. The other months that reached these epic proportions included enormous numbers of messages pertaining to the Legends of Caltech book that Autumn Looijen and I wrote. (Writing Legends + teaching courses + research = lots of e-mail. Now we can add College business to that particular equation.)

I really should be going to bed instead of writing this.

Werewolves of Oxford

Tonight was Halloween.

I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada milkshake at G & D's. And his hair was perfect!

Actually, I didn't go out at all for Halloween. (For people across the pond, G & D's is the local ice cream place that I frequent. I often see other Somervillians there, and I have run into a couple of my students there on multiple occasions. As I told one of them, we're going to make Somerville the hip place in Oxford to study mathematics.) I played some Vampire today (which is appropriate), I went to our first event for OCIAM's Masters students (where I had one of my patented "Mason moments," as Carlos Torre used to call them... it was actually pretty classy and it helped get the right point across, so the strategy and its concomitant [very] pointed question that I asked the speaker seemed to work pretty well), and then I've spent most of the day and night marking assignments in preparation for my tutorial session assignments tomorrow. (The marking and the Governing Body meeting, which is the other main thing I did today, are absolutely mind-numbing.) Actually, I still have one problem left to mark, but I am taking a break from it. I also ending up not having a proper dinner tonight, although I did grab a couple of pieces of fruit in the SCR during my last break an hour ago. (Have I yet mentioned here that two of my students have absolutely awesome first names? Well, one of the names is "merely" cool and the other is spectacular.)

I'm going to need to show my students what a phase plane is even though they don't officially learn it until next year. It will help them understand some of the dynamics stuff they're doing a lot better, and I think giving them this kind of preview is good anyway.

Oh, and if you don't know the allusion in the title, you should look at this web page. (Also, if you've never heard the title track to this album, then you owe it to yourself to listen to it. I really appreciate the sense of humor in that song! In fact, I really like several of the songs on this album --- I never previously realized that all of these songs actually come from the same album.)

Update on finances and possessions

I just got paid by both Somerville and the Mathematical Institute, so I actually have money now.

Actually, I have a decent bit in my UK account because having free rent, free utilities, and free food removes the need for a lot of the spending I used to have. Now I can safely buy my Alison Moyet and Van Morrison tickets without worrying about how much money is left in my bank account.

Also, I found out to today that my stuff --- which previously got delayed to arriving on 10/28 in the UK --- is now slated to arrive in the London on 11/02/07. It will then need to clear customs, which is supposed to take about 5 working days, and then it should finally arrive at my doorstep in Oxford.

It's a good thing, too, because I am going to host a games night at my flat for the Somerville mathematics students I am tutoring. There will be games, and there will be ice cream. You have to love that... (Also, I know at least some of the OCIAM faculty want to come over and play with the Wii, so I also plan on having a games night for them and some of the folks from Somerville who are my age.)

I've been meaning to post my baseball award prediction blog entry, but I'm tired and want to read a bit for pleasure, so I'm going to punt that. Because of the massive amount of marking I'll be doing tomorrow, I am very unlikely to post this entry then. Anyway, stay tuned...

Dodger manager Grady Little resigns

Amidst rumors of being fired imminently and Joe Torre taking over, ESPN's breaking news has reported that Grady Little has resigned as manager of the Dodgers. I'm guessing that Torre will become our new manager (which I would welcome), but let's see how things go...

(By the way, if the new Dodger manager is smart, he'll try to convince Orel Hershiser to become our new pitching coach.)

Seinfeld metaphor of the day

You can find the Seinfeld metaphor of the day at this website. (I saw this link on Rob Neyer's blog.)

In other news, I still have to finish preparing my talk for tomorrow. I shouldn't have spent all that time thoroughly looking through one of my 2007 SURF student's papers. I really need to be less accomodating when they wait to the last minute on these things... Commenting on their papers when I need to prepare my slides is not what I should be doing at 1am.

Pictures from the road

Courtesy Charles Lee, here is a picture that he and some friends took on a recent road trip.

Wow. That's spectacularly "impressive"... I am extremely amused!

And I definitely appreciate the Blues Brothers reference...

Optical illusion of the day

Take a look here for the optical illusion of the day.

I've, of course, encountered this particular type of illusion many times, but I think it's just fantastic for it to occupy the entire facade of a building.

(I found this image on the MAA website.)

The spatio-temporal dynamics of purchasing travel tickets

Continuing my past adventures in arranging my travel, I managed to be off by one day in my departure and return train tickets that I purchased for my trip to Durham to give a seminar.

I also added to my headaches by doing this, as it will probably take a month to get reimbursed for the old tickets (the process doesn't start until I send the old tickets back, which won't happen until I actually receive them). I lose 10 pounds in an administration fee, and depending on whether this morning's registers in my bank account before my transaction, I may also go negative very briefly and possibly incur a small charge for doing so. I am such a champ.

My other really "awesome" traveling adventure was when I accidently booked a flight to the wrong city in January 2002 (I didn't realize that the College Park crowd was holding their conference in Baltimore and I flew to a DC airport because I had had a bad experience at the Baltimore airport the previous year).

Well, at least I have always been correct in at least one of space and time for every plane and train ticket I've purchased. (I was going to write 'one of the space and time variables', but I've basically gotten all three spatial variables right when I've gotten any of them right.)

Somehow, I feel that there must be an analogy with spatio-temporal chaos lurking in here somewhere...

Riddle me this

This is a mini-rant.

Riddle me this: How come when people are trying to reacquire stray ping pong balls and the ball goes to the next table, so many of them will aggressively go after it even if the players at the other table are in the middle of a point (which means they should bloody wait until the point is done!) even at the expense of their own health? I have seen this everywhere I've played ping pong and because the quarters we have at Oxford are close ones, I see it more often than usual here. It's also a great way to get seriously hurt --- I've seen multiple people get smacked in the head by a paddle because they did this, although nothing truly serious happened to them as a result of that. The most extreme case I saw today was that I was about to return a ball with a very hard top spin and I suddenly noticed out of the corner of my eye (or out of half of my eye) that somebody's face was suddenly between my paddle and the ball (and I was about to hit the ball really hard and was swinging accordingly). I had to stop short to make sure I didn't nail the guy in the side of the face and I twisted my knee slightly in the process of cutting short my stroke (basically, it's all people involved that can get hurt when people go too close to another table with a point in progress). It still hurts a bit but it should be ok (but part of my mind is telling me I should have just finished my stroke and not risked hurting myself because it was the other idiot who couldn't even wait 20 seconds for the point to finish). Be patient, people!

George Carlin had it right:People are fucking stupid!

(At least this post reminded me to add the 'ping pong injuries' label. That became a meme among the ping pong gang at Caltech the last couple of years.)

Chance meeting in the Senior Common Room

Maybe a good short vignette that indicates a little bit how life on the Oxford faculty is a bit different from life at Caltech is the following:

I was making a pit stop in the Senior Common Room in Somerville about 30 minutes ago to get some coffee and one of Somerville's famous alums happened to be in there at the time. She has a ward who wants to come to Somerville to study mathematics, so we'll perhaps get a chance to talk a little bit more later. Maybe I'll also pick her brain about politics at some point.

Anyway, it's time for me to head off the ping pong.

Time zone adventures

We just fell back over in the UK, so I am temporarily only 7 hours ahead of the Pacific time zone from whence I came.

Do you know what this means? It means it's only about 1:10 am, so I haven't stayed up too late playing Civ IV tonight (though my body and eyes would tell you otherwise, except for the fact that they're mute).

Today's adventures in Eurocracy

Today was spent marking problem sets --- which is just as much "fun" as it was when I was TAing back in the day --- and trying to get the ball rolling to get my National Insurance Number (the UK equivalent to a Social Security number). It's supposed to be abbreviated NINO, but I keep abbreviating it as NIN (first by accident and now on purpose) even though I don't actually like Nine Inch Nails. I now feel like getting this abbreviation wrong is expected of me, so I'm just going to keep doing it.

Anyway, there was some confusion with this because the financial staff in the Mathematical Institute told me I will get instructions with my first pay check. (They are busy with a major time sink with massive quantities of forms involving how much government funding the Mathematical Institute will get, so they are scrambling and because there were so many new people in the department --- which is linked to the particular thing they're doing (for those of you from back home reading this) --- they decided that we should take care of that ourselves. And for many people there probably isn't an issue, but I don't think they truly appreciate just how clueless I am about how this stuff works. I basically feel quite lost when it comes to this sort of thing.

Anyway, I got a message from Somerville today indicating they hadn't gotten some information with me yet and some of the language seemed to me to imply that none of my employers (I am dually employed by Somerville College and Oxford University, as far as where my $ [pounds, actually] comes from) can pay me without an NIN. So then I have these seemingly contradictory pieces of information about the (hopefully!) comprehensible version of the instructions to get an NIN coming with my first paycheck and the comments that made me think that perhaps I cannot get paid without getting the NIN first. (That would be bad for multiple reasons---among them the fact that I would need to borrow more money from my colleagues. I already borrowed some cash so that I wouldn't have to pay annoying fees to transfer money from my U.S. accounts. I find it embarrassing to have to borrow nontrivial sums of money from people like that, and I would really like to repay my debt and actually have money in my U.K. back account so that I no longer have to do that.)

So the gist I got today (and I needed to spend a good amount of time looking at forms, sending e-mails, making phone calls, filling out forms, photocopying every page of my passport, and mailing forms) was that I can turn in the forms with my NIN blank; I will be given a temporary NIN by my employers so that I can get paid; and then now that the ball is rolling, once I have the NIN we can replace the temporary one with the permanent one. I still hope that all the accounting stuff works out correctly (the dual employment thing will confuse matters, and the fact that I still have some U.S. income will confuse matters even more... sigh...) and the plan of attack is basically to look closely at my paychecks when they arrive and take appropriate action as needed if the tax withholdings aren't working out correctly.

Tomorrow is a big teaching day. I will be giving three tutorials, one lecture, and a seminar. And if I have a spare moment, I'll try to find some time to breathe a bit as well.

Hunted by the Yakuza

Or something like that...

We had our second session of Vampire today (I'm in a short tabletop Vampire campaign, for those who haven't heard), and it was really the first full session because we spent the bulk of the time creating characters in the first meeting. The game is set in contemporary Oxford, except with the twist of supernatural things in the air. (Our next session is on Halloween. Spoooooooky....) All of us are humans but have psychic powers (from the book Second Sight) that have just been awakened via a psychological experiment. (We're currently trying to pin down how this happened.) I am playing Billy McLatte, a mild-mannered employee of the Starbucks that is attached to the location of Border's a bit down the road from where I live in real life. Billy has always been interested in the occult, especially the spirit world, and I chose his various skills and specialties (before we picked psychic powers) to give him very good roles in that. His three psychic powers use those good rolls and are actually pretty powerful. He can see and speak to dead people (death sight, ghost calling) and can also do ghost channelling (call either a specific ghost or some random ghost with specific desired abilities --- say, a ghost that's buffer than he is --- into his body). He finds his new powers really cool and always wanted to do the seance thing anyway.

So, why is our party (not just me) now being hunted by the Yakuza (or, more technically, this campaign's version of it). Simple... I called and conversed with the wrong ghost (though I'm pretty sure that conversing with him was an intended part of the plot), who (along with his allies) has basically told us that we should all be killed for breaking the natural balance of things. Hence, because of my character's actions (oops), we are now effectively hunted by the Yakuza. Billy ended up getting chased through the streets of Oxford by a 12-foot tall spectral Hell Hound that started stalking him near St. John's College. Ugh, he can talk to ghosts and do other cool stuff but his physical attributes are craptacular and he can't even come close to defending himself from that. (It's great when the party splits up, huh?)

You know, this isn't the first character I've played that has created party enemies. None of you actually played with Famish, who was my very kenderish sorceror. Sawtooth caused some trouble as well, but his enemies didn't typically leave battles alive and the DM in that game didn't do nasty things like sending assassins to kill us the way my DM at Georgia Tech did. That said, the GT DM was an awesome DM, but the action definitely sometimes came very directly to us. He warned us that people would remember our actions and things like that could happen if we pissed people off. And Famish definitely picked up the 'hunted by the Yakuza' trait --- though I can't remember at the moment what the organization was actually called in that game.

Demographics of designated hitter support

Courtesy of the blog at improbable.com (i.e., the online presence of Annals of Improbable Research), here is a new report on the demographics of people who support the designated hitter in baseball. The article, which appeared recently in Journal of Political Science (one of the top political science journals), has the following abstract:

Since its introduction in 1973, major league baseball’s designated hitter (DH) rule has been the subject of continuing controversy. Here, we investigate the political and socio-demographic determinants of public opinion toward the DH rule, using data from a nationwide poll conducted during September 1997. Our findings suggest that it is in fact Democrats, not Republicans, who tend to favor the DH. In addition, we find no effect for respondents’ proximity to American or National League teams, though older respondents were consistently more likely to oppose the rule.


This article cites an older one, which I am gathering based on the phrasing in the abstract had the opposite conclusion concerning Democrats and Republicans.

For what it's worth, I'm ok with the DH in one league and not in the other. I'm also registered as an Independent ("no party affiliation", to be technically correct).

A mathematical contest from the Annals of Improbable Research

This month's lymerick contest from the Annals of Improbable Research is the following:


'A Proof Less Strange is the subject of this month's limerick
competition. To enter, compose an original limerick that
illuminates the nature of this report:

"A Less Strange Version of Milnor's Proof of
Brouwer's Fixed-Point Theorem," C.A. Rogers,
American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 87, no. 7,
August/September 1980, pp. 525-7.
this url

RULES: Please make sure your rhymes actually do, and that your
poem is in classic, trips-off-the-tongue limerick form.

PRIZE: The winning poet will receive a (if we manage to send it
to the correct address) a free, possibly strange issue of the
Annals of Improbable Research. Send entries (one entry per
entrant) to:

PROOF LESS STRANGE LIMERICK COMPETITION
c/o '



We'll see whether or not I have time to do this. Eventually, I'll also write the lyrics for "88 Lines about 44 Math-men" (perhaps with a different title because I plan to include both male and female mathematicians; I just haven't yet found a catchy title for that yet) to the tune of "88 Lines about 44 Women" by The Nails. This particular parody will take some time to write, so I remain in punt formation for now. But I'll get to it eventually...

Like Caltech's House system, but on crack...

I've been meaning to write a little bit more about the College system at Oxford.

I still don't really know too much as far as specific details go, so I'll give some of my impressions and maybe add in some details on a future occasion.

Oxford has 39 official Colleges and 7 Permanent Private Halls. Much like Caltech's House system, they provide an instant network of people that one can meet. For the undergrads, this seems to be especially true for people who are both in the same year and major, as they are tutored by people like me [this is where I laugh evilly] in very small groups. (Of course, only the people in Somerville College have to put up with me. Well, my OCIAM colleagues and others of that ilk have to put up with me too, but that's a different one of my socio-professional circles.) I am tutoring 3 pairs of 2 people this term. Things like parties, athletics, and so on are also organized by College. The students live and eat together and so on.

The people don't seem as tightly knit as, say, the residents of the Houses at Caltech (and for non-Techers reading this, Caltech's House system took the Oxbridge system as its primary inspiration). But that's easily explained by the numbers: Somerville has about 500 people and, for example, Lloyd House has about 120 people (with 80 living in the confines of the House and the entire Caltech campus being extremely tiny). Of course, given that there are 45 other comparable units, the College system serves to provide a much smaller, more personal social center amidst a much larger whole. Caltech's "larger whole" isn't really all that large, so it's really great to be able to provide this kind of atmosphere at a big school.

The thing that struck me about the being associated with a College (and, in my case, I am also in residence) is that it makes meeting people so much easier. This is the same boon that I experienced as a frosh at Caltech because of the House system and it's been wonderful to have it again---especially given that I am in a new place in which I started out basically not knowing anybody. In this case, I've also met interesting, nice people with academic interests that are so different from mine that I would not have had the chance to meet them elsewhere. And being able to talk to them regularly has really been great. The younger faculty and postdocs have been sticking together as well. (I still don't know anybody really well from either Somerville or OCIAM, but tomorrow is the three-week anniversary of my arrival, so this is obviously very much expected.) I bought my copy of the British Isles edition of Apples to Apples and should soon get my stuff from oversease, so I'm hoping to haost a game night soon. (I checked on wikipedia and the second expansion of the Apples to Apples party box for the U.S. edition is the one that consists of cards that are orthogonal to mine, so please remind me when I'm back in the U.S. that that is the one I should buy for that set.)

Like with the Houses at Tech, the students here seem to identify themselves by College (and I had heard before I got here that that was the case). When I asked my perturbation theory students to write down their e-mail addresses, they instead wrote down their Colleges (which uniquely specifies one of their given Oxford e-mail addresses). The reason I mention that the College system is like the House system but on crack is that not only are the undergrads affiliated, but so are the graduate students, the postdocs, and the faculty. So many of us identify at least a little bit with our College. I have been asked what College I'm in a couple of times, although it doesn't seem to have the ubiquity of "What House are you in?" I'm waiting to find someone who was (or is, in the case of exchange students) a Caltech undergrad so I can ask them what House they were in. :) Having both students and faculty affiliated with the College is a great way to get them to interact with each other much more than they otherwise might.

The students often eat together, but Somerville doesn't have the daily waited dinners that Caltech does. A couple of times a week, there are some fancier dinners that more people attend (including more faculty, postdocs, and staff) that are waited, but other dinners are just like eating lunch in a dorm. There isn't any floating, roll-tossing, table takeovers, or anything like that, so dinners don't seem to bring people together the way they can at Tech. Of course, it's worth noting again that we're talking about 500 students in a College rather than 120.

Another thing that's interesting is that some aspect of my interactions with my students reminds me of my days TAing at Tech while still an undergrad. For one thing, tutoring sessions bear some resemblance to office hours. For another, the "classes" I teach that go with my perturbation theory lectures are pretty much the same thing as the recitation sections from the U.S. (However, attendance for lectures, classes, and [of course!] tutoring sessions is much better here! More of the students are serious about such things here. The quality of the students seems very high --- no surprise there! --- though I've been at Caltech, so you know what I think about the students there... I did see familiar mistakes and conceptual difficulties on the calculus stuff. Some things are universal. :) ) Also, I see several of my students (especially the ones I tutor) around Somerville when I'm doing stuff. It's kind of like running into my SURF students on campus, but there's a bit of the old flavor too in that at least one of them lives in the same building I do and I've occasionally seen them eating in the dining hall. (Of course, I think there will be a duplication of my junior year at Tech. People turned in their assignments to my room --- that actually might happen a bit because the door to the room with my pidgeonhole gets locked --- and one person who was living across the hall from me and in my recitation section could literally turn in his assignments without leaving his room, so he did that on a regular basis just because he could. This won't surprise anybody who knows me, but I very much like being able to have close interactions with my students. That's one of the great perks of this job, which is veritably cushy in many respects. (I have to work my ass off, but I'd do that anyway no matter what faculty job I got. I get as much free food as I want, I don't pay for my apartment, I can get free espresso drinks and pastries [though I still go and pay for proper iced lattes in the morning because I prefer my coffee cold], and Somerville even bought a suit for me that I will be using as an Examiner and at dinner functions like the one with Baroness Jay.)

Thankfully, there is nothing here like Rotation. However, students apply directly to Colleges and people like me interview them and decide who is going to get in. (I don't know exactly how this works yet, but I'll be helping to decide who Somerville's future mathematicians will be. So I'm thinking that the prospective students ought to brush up on their Super Smash Brothers Melee skills before they come here for the interview in order to have any chance of getting in. That could supplement some of the mathematical questions we give them, and it's testing a more important set of skills anyway. :P Well, I'll be taking an online training course and finding out what types of questions actually are given soon enough, but once my stuff arrives from overseas, I plan on digging around my old notes and homework to find the sailboat problem... I'll try to find some framework around here where it fits, and the mathematics curriculum here does include some mechanics.)

I'll add more about the College system when I actually know more about it. (And people who know more about how things work here should definitely correct anything I messed up.) I just wanted to make some comments about some similarities and differences that I see here versus at Caltech. There are, naturally, differences across Colleges. I believe that some of them have waited dinners much more often, for instance. To give another example, some of them are more formal than others. Some of the Colleges have rivalries with each other, although I doubt any of them are as heated as Page-Fleming sometimes gets. (I was asked a couple of weeks ago who Somerville's rival College was. I don't even know if we have one.)

Ah well, this entry is long enough.

Comment of the Day

I uttered an unintended doozy today, and it's actually a quote that is not offensive in any way. (Many of my doozies that get past my filters --- which are very weak filters, for those of haven't experienced me enough yet --- have a tendency to offend somebody, or occasionally several people. Though some of them are also funny, at least in my opinion.)

I was trying to explain to some of my students that the subjects of asymptotics and perturbation theory required a lot of art. (To borrow a phrase from Michael Berry, I called it "witchcraft" at some point --- though to be honest, I was also thinking that I really would like be watching some episodes of Buffy and Angel.) I wanted to make the point that it wasn't just a matter of being mechanical and grinding a crank. So I said something along the lines of "Asymptotics is the Terminator 3 of mathematics; it's only partially mechanical." (I should say that almost none of mathematics is purely mechanical, though many of the things my students have seen up to this point in their careers have largely been mechanical. I was trying to assert how much creativity, thinking, and experience is required in asymptotics compared to most of the stuff they had seen previously. As you can see, I came up with a resoundingly-successful analogy. For that matter, I'm even wondering if the T3 part of my analogy was inaccurate. I never even saw the movie.)

I'll try to be more poetic during my next class.

Interesting new paper (on topics near and dear to my heart)

Here is a really interesting new paper that just got posted to the arxiv.

It discusses a very interest way of constructing datasets for social networks that is very appealing and I would like to use in future research. (In fact, even though I haven't had the chance to read it closely yet --- I started rectifying that earlier this evening, though I don't plan to finish reading it until tomorrow --- this paper has already given me some new ideas for undergraduate and/or Masters research projects for this summer.) Moreover, the working examples in this paper cover three of my favorite groups of people: physicists, U.S. Senators, and baseball players. (It's like the authors are trying to steal my heart: not only did they do something really interesting with real-world networks, but look at the examples they chose! And they even cited one of my papers. If I ever decide to deal with children, I think I'll simply have to adopt some of the authors of this paper.) Also, I very much appreciate the use of the word "googling" in the paper's title. I use the word a lot (and I know others among my crowd at least use it occasionally), but I had never previously seen it in the title of a scientific paper.

Here is the paper's abstract:

Recently, massive digital records have made it possible to analyze a huge amount of data in social sciences such as social network theory. We investigate social networks between people by extracting information on the World Wide Web. Using famous search engines such as Google, we quantify relatedness between two people as the number of Web pages including both of their names and construct weighted social relatedness networks. The weight and strength distributions are found to be quite broad. A class of measure called the R{\'e}nyi disparity, characterizing the homogeneity of weight distribution for each node, is presented. We introduce the maximum relatedness subnetwork, which extracts the most essential relation for each individual. We analyze the members of the 109th United States Senate as an example and demonstrate that the methods of construction and analysis are applicable to various other social groups and weighted networks.


Their idea for gathering data is awesome! Because I haven't read the paper closely yet, I'll reserve comments as to the analysis they do with that data. However, their choice of methodoly has already inspired several ideas in my head, so that alone makes this paper's existence extremely worthwhile in my book.

The most straightforward of my ideas is simply to use their method of data collection to construct other networks that interest me (such as collaborations among mathematicians and various kinds of collaborative connections in the U.K. parliament). However, I'm also wondering if I can come up with some sort of variant involving Google Battle. (For the record, Oxford beats Cambridge according to this index. Sadly, Caltech doesn't fair nearly as well against MIT. In fact, this latter battle was downright embarrassing for the home team.)

T-shirt of the day

Take a look at this t-shirt, which (in a highly amusing fashion!) makes a nice statement about the fact that mascots like Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians simply have to go.

"Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives"

One of my papers, Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives just came out in Physica A. (My coauthors on this paper are Peter Mucha, Mark Newman, and A. J. Friend.) Here is the abstract for the paper:

We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st–108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ‘‘interlocks’’ or common membership. We examine the community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than 40 years. We also combine our network approach with the analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.


I am currently very active in continuing this work, with a current focus on Congress that includes not just committee assignment networks but also legislation cosponsorship networks and roll call voting networks. I also have datasets for US Supreme Court case citations, and I am planning to find some UK political datasets to help entice some of the locals to work with me on this stuff.

If you are interested in this stuff, the paper that just came out is an archival (i.e., very long) sequel to this paper that appeared in 2005 in PNAS. (For those who participated in a certain discussion last Thursday, this 2005 PNAS paper is currently my favorite among all the research papers I've written.)

I will be talking about some of my work on US Congressional and American college football networks on October 30th in Oxford's complex systems seminar series. If nothing else, you can use this as a good excuse to go inside the business school and see how the other half lives.