CT Models Incorporating Artifacts and the Record Via Tuple Spaces
The basic idea here: we cannot model cultural transmission, as it is really implemented in humans, by acting like traits are alleles at genetic loci. Such models were important, because they gave us a...
View ArticleRenormalization Theory and Cultural Transmission in Archaeology
In general, my topic concerns the “renormalization” of cultural transmission models. This terminology will probably be unfamiliar to anthropologists and social scientists, so I’m not going to...
View ArticleCoarse-Graining, History, and CT Models
By coarse-graining (CG) our CT models, we hope to construct models which can be used to extract observable predictions and thus testable hypotheses at particular scales.
View ArticleWhen are Darwinian and Populational Models Useful?
(Godfrey-Smith 2009) uses a specific distinction between “Darwinian” explanations, and merely “populational” explanations, that is different than I’d always thought about (R. Lewontin 1974; R. C....
View ArticleNotes on Gabora 2013 -- Selectionism versus communal exchange
This is a working draft, and sections may be incomplete. 6/15/13
View ArticleMaking the Case for "Medium" Data
Chris Stucchio’s recent post “Don’t use Hadoop - your data isn’t that big” is a valuable read for many of us in the sciences, whose data are “large,” but not “big data” in the current industry...
View ArticleBlogging Archaeology Carnival for SAA 2014
In the lead-up to the 2014 Society for American Archaeology meetings and the session on “blogging archaeology,” a “blogging carnival” has been organized by Doug. Everyone is associating their posts...
View ArticleWhy I Support the OPALCO Board and the OPALCO Broadband Initiative
by Mark Madsen, San Juan Island
View ArticleA Personal History of Personal Computing, 2014 Update
Back in 2003 on my “original” blog, and then in 2005 on Extended Phenotype, I started a serial essay called “A Personal History of Personal Computing.” My first blog is long gone in the transition...
View ArticleContinuous Integration and Testing for Simulation Codes
This week I added all of my simulation projects to the Travis CI continuous integration system. Travis is a hosted service, running a Ruby-based project which will check out your code from Github, run...
View ArticleExperiment Template for Reproducible Simulation Models
What is an “Experiment Template”?
View ArticleEight Years on San Juan Island
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
View ArticleAbstracts for the 2015 SAA Conference
Abstracts are in for the Society for American Archaeology meetings next year in San Francisco. Carl Lipo and I are collaborating on two papers, one on our continuing work mating cultural transmission...
View ArticleMy Evolutionary Narrative, Part 1
Over the last few days, I have been reading my way through a stack of literature on “Approximate Bayesian Computation,” to sharpen my approach on a numerical and simulation analysis of cultural...
View ArticleResearch Priorities for 2015
I don’t really do “resolutions” at New Year’s, but I think it’s worthwhile thinking about some of the things I want to know, and want to do. Here I’m going to focus on the former, because I don’t think...
View ArticlePresentations for the 2015 SAA Conference
Abstracts are in for the Society for American Archaeology meetings next year in San Francisco. Carl Lipo and I are collaborating on two papers, one on our continuing work mating cultural transmission...
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