MadsenLab

OK. For the last five years, I’ve used Typepad as a blogging platform. Largely out of laziness. I just transitioned Extended Phenotype to WordPress, and started this blog, and couldn’t be happier. Jeez Louise, this is easier and with much richer functionality. On Typepad, I tried a bunch of CSS-based hacks to get decent footnotes [...]

…even though it’s really tough. And studying the full spatial behavior of stochastic processes (including evolutionary theory, in its many guises), especially when interaction and fitness are relative to a complex network of contacts or relationships, is hard. Usually so hard, that we don’t have analytic models for the full behavior of sets of stochastic [...]

I’ve been studying statistical physics pretty hard lately, learning how to deal with many-body systems with a bunch of contributing factors to the dynamical evolution of a system. To a lesser extent, I’ve been studying the serious probability theory (interacting particle systems, stochastic processes) that go along with statistical physics. It’s caused me to ask [...]

In my previous post, I argued that cultural transmission models in archaeology [1] need to get away from being “mean-field” theories, in order to make predictions about how cultural variation is distributed in space, as well as spatiotemporally. In this post, I describe what a “mean-field” theory is, and how mean-field theories relate to a [...]

Check it out…the apple drops and falls due to gravity.  Probably won’t be there forever, so view it soon and say Happy Birthday to Sir Issac!

I’ve temporarily removed the nice typography from MadsenLab, provided through TypeKit.  The selected typefaces were not rendering well on Windows.  This isn’t a Typekit bug, you get the same result if you manually work with the @font-face attribute in CSS and the same typefaces.  But I need to look at some alternative typefaces, and check [...]

To study cultural transmission is to study patterns in the way people share information, become socialized with a specific body of cultural knowledge as children, and pass on what they know. Within cultural transmission research, some folks study the underlying psychological and cognitive mechanisms, while others study the population-level consequences of those mechanisms. I study [...]