Re: introduction -- follow-up

dear all:

[ ]

i just had a really stimulating late-night meeting with barnaby and -- for which my thanks.

?d welcome the chance to have a conversation with you, jeff. james and i have been collaborators of martin nowak's for some time. our own work is focused on the deep mathematical and biological/genetic rules governing how human assemble themselves into social networks -- and what our embeddedness in these networks means for our lives, how it affects everything from our propensity to cooperate to our risk of epidemic diseases to our ability to innovate.

it's hard to communicate how exciting (we think) and relevant this work is via email (linda or barnaby could weigh in since they know your interests better than i do), but here is an 18 minute TED talk on one idea james and i have been pursuing: http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks_predict_epidemics.html

and here is a link to a recent Nature paper of ours: http://humannaturelab.net/wp-content/themes/human-nature-lab/media/pdf/publications/articles/127.pdf

best,

nicholas

look forward to a face to face, lets shoot for may 3rd if you are in cambridge I will come up

Dear Jeff:

The editor wrote the provocative title, but this NYT Op-Ed from last week captures some of my thoughts about how the social sciences are evolving, and must evolve, given developments in the natural sciences. I thought I would share it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/lets-shake-up-the-social-sciences.html?

I don't want to swamp you with links because I know you are terribly busy, but if you want more nuance than 800 words allows, I make the argument at greater length here (in the first 8 minutes): http://www.edge.org/conversation/21st-century-change-to-social-science

Also, as I mentioned in the piece, various labs, including my own, have continued to spearhead the move to use Amazon Mechanical Turk workers as a pool of research subjects in diverse projects; for example, here is a recent PNAS paper that shows how the topology of interactions between members of a group can be affirmatively manipulated to elicit desirable properties (such as workers cooperation): http://humannaturelab.net/wp-content/themes/human-nature-lab/media/pdf/publications/articles/126.pdf

I'd still welcome the chance to meet with you (and Linda?) to discuss some of our ideas, if you have the time and interest, and I can easily come into NYC since I have now moved to New Haven.

Best,

Nicholas

P.S. This is my new email address.