Dan Larremore

Experiments suggest that cerebral cortex gains several functional advantages by operating in a dynamical regime near the critical point of a phase transition. However, a long-standing criticism of this hypothesis is that critical dynamics are rather noisy, which might be detrimental to aspects of brain function that require precision. If...

Pathogens can spread epidemically through populations. Beneficial contagions, such as viruses that enhance host survival or technological innovations that improve quality of life, also have the potential to spread epidemically. How do the dynamics of beneficial biological and social epidemics differ from those of detrimental epidemics? We investigate this question...

Measuring the overlap between two populations is, in principle, straightforward. Upon fully sampling both populations, the number of shared objects—species, taxonomical units, or gene variants, depending on the context—can be directly counted. In practice, however, only a fraction of each population’s objects are likely to be sampled due to stochastic...

webweb is a package for creating interactive and portable visualizations of complex networks in the web browser that can be easily shared. With webweb, users of MATLAB, pure Python, and Python’s networkX (Aric A. Hagberg & Pieter J. Swart, 2008) are able to write complex network data directly to 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...

The Department of Defense continued its history of strong support for fundamental research by selecting 12 faculty investigators for awards through the FY2018 Minerva Research Initiative. This initiative supports basic research that focuses on topics of particular relevance to U.S. national security. Through its network of faculty investigators, the Minerva...

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...