MadsenLab

…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 [...]

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 [...]

As of today, my open-source framework project for cultural transmission (TransmissionLab), is moving from Google Code to GitHub.  Please look for the project at its new home.  The Google Code repository is being removed, and is currently only visible to registered commiters. This change corresponds to a switch from Subversion to Git as the revision control [...]