Aaron Clauset

A new discovery provides rare evidence of symbolic behavior in Neanderthal communities and extends the record further geographically and temporally across Europe. Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al. analyzed recently unearthed Spanish imperial eagle phalanges, which were found along the Iberian Peninsula, and inferred that Neanderthal communities used these talons for symbolic purposes...

Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson arrival process and their severity followed a simple power-law distribution. Although his methods and data in...

Real-world networks are often claimed to be scale free, meaning that the fraction of nodes with degree k follows a power law k − α , a pattern with broad implications for the structure and dynamics of complex systems. However, the universality of scale-free networks remains controversial. Here, we organize...

Most real-world networks are incompletely observed. Algorithms that can accurately predict which links are missing can dramatically speedup the collection of network data and improve the validity of network models. Many algorithms now exist for predicting missing links, given a partially observed network, but it has remained unknown whether a...

A 2015 study found that “social inequality” across a range of disciplines was so bad that just 25 percent of Ph.D. institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenured and tenure-track professors, depending on field. The effect was more extreme the farther up the chain the researchers looked, based on...

What matters more to a scientist’s career success: where they currently work, or where they got their Ph.D.? It’s a question a team of researchers teases apart in a new paper published in PNAS . Their analysis calls into question a common assumption underlying academia: that a researcher’s productivity reflects...

As Benjamin Franklin once joked, death and taxes are universal. Scale-free networks may not be, at least according to a new study from CU Boulder. The research challenges a popular two-decade-old theory that networks of all kinds, from Facebook and Twitter to the interactions of genes in yeast cells, follow...

Allison C. Morgan, Dimitrios J. Economou, Samuel F. Way and Aaron Clauset are all scholars in the department of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. They have just published an important new article about how ideas spread within the academy. I asked them a series of questions...

Adapted from The Daily Progress article . The University of Virginia on Tuesday announced expanded paid leave benefits for new parents — a move that goes beyond a state executive order and one that could help the school remain competitive with its peers. In June, Gov. Ralph Northam issued an...

Since the end of World War II, few violent conflicts have erupted between major powers. Scholars have come to call this 73-year period “the long peace.” But is this stretch of relative calm truly unusual in modern human history – and evidence that peace-keeping efforts are working? Or is it...