Machine learning algorithms pervade modern life. They shape decisions about who gets a mortgage, who gets a job, and who gets bail, and have become so enmeshed in our political and economic processes that some scientists ...
Social Sciences
Oct 4, 2021
0
5
Archeologists have long had a dating problem. The radiocarbon analysis typically used to reconstruct past human demographic changes relies on a method easily skewed by radiocarbon calibration curves and measurement uncertainty. ...
Archaeology
Sep 15, 2021
1
1168
The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a tree. If you're reading this in English, you're on a branch that traces back to a common ancestor with Scots, which traces back to a more distant ancestor that ...
Social Sciences
Sep 10, 2021
3
1939
From small committees to national elections, group decision-making can be complicated—and it may not always settle on the best choice. That's partly because some members of the group do research on their own, and others ...
Social Sciences
Aug 26, 2021
1
192
Cities are hubs of human activity, supercharging the exchange of ideas and interactions. Scaling theory has established that, as cities grow larger, they tend to produce more of pretty much everything from pollution and crime ...
Social Sciences
Aug 17, 2021
2
591
The history of life on Earth has often been likened to a four-billion-year-old torch relay. One flame, lit at the beginning of the chain, continues to pass on life in the same form all the way down. But what if life is better ...
Evolution
Aug 16, 2021
0
834
A single molecule contains a wealth of information. It includes not only the number of each kind of constituent atom, but also how they're arranged and how they attach to each other. And during chemical reactions, that information ...
Materials Science
Aug 3, 2021
1
436
The more we learn about the past, the more we come to understand that ancient societies share some striking similarities to our own. From the first waves of migration out of Africa to the Ancestral Pueblo, the peoples of ...
Archaeology
Aug 3, 2021
0
1
Does the universe follow patterns, or do we humans just see them wherever we look? In a new paper for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Tyler Millhouse proposes a criterion evaluating ...
Social Sciences
Jul 28, 2021
0
78
A team of economists and scientists including SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer (INET at Oxford) have published a new study illustrating how tools from ecology can help us better understand financial markets.
Economics & Business
Jul 13, 2021
0
7
