Christopher X J. Jensen
Professor, Pratt Institute

Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images

Posted 15 Mar 2012 / 0

UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. To complete the set of Evolutionary Games Infographic images that Greg Riestenberg and I have been working on, we created a set of “conceptual” matrices for the Ultimatum Game (UG). These are meant to complement the conceptual images we Read More

Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design

Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images

Posted 05 Mar 2012 / 0

UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. This semester I have been working with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program, to come up with a new series of images designed to explain some common evolutionary games. Our first images for the Read More

Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design

Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images

Posted 06 Feb 2012 / 0

UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. For the past two semesters I have been working with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program, to come up with a new series of images designed to explain some common evolutionary games (I am Read More

Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design

What kind of in-group does Facebook represent?

Posted 05 Feb 2012 / 0

On the Media “Life in Facebookistan” I am fascinated by the idea that we all belong to many overlapping social groups, and I wonder how these groups might be subject to multilevel selection. “Facebookistan” is an interesting conceptualization of a large international group: Facebook users. With characteristic incisive questioning, On The Media suggests that this might Read More

A Minor Post, Multilevel Selection, Psychology, Radio & Podcasts

Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”

Posted 29 Jan 2012 / 0

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s classic 1996 book Into the Wild. The book chronicles the adventures and eventual demise of Christopher McCandless, a young man who reinvented himself as “Alexander Supertramp” and spent two years wandering the United States before embarking on a final trip into the Alaskan wilderness. McCandless was experimenting with dropping Read More

Books, Cultural Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Subsistence, Survival, Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm offer new introduction to the process of agent- and individual-based modeling

Posted 27 Jan 2012 / 0

Princeton University Press “Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling: A Practical Introduction” by Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm

A Minor Post, Ecological Modeling, Individual-based Models, Spatially Explicit Modeling

Is the European Union going rogue or playing altruist on airline emissions?

Posted 07 Jan 2012 / 0

Contrails captured by NASA scientist Louis Ngyyen Global carbon emissions continue to increase, threatening future generations with catastrophic climate change. And while most of the world agrees that something needs to be done to curb our carbon emissions, several decades of international talks have provided little progress at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Most famously, the Read More

Altruism, Articles, Climate Change, Cooperation, Economics, Environmental Justice, Ethics, Pollution, Public Policy, Punishment, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, Web

Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices

Posted 21 Nov 2011 / 1

UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. To complement the “conceptual” images we created to depict the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Hawk-Dove, and Stag Hunt games, Greg Riestenberg and I have been developing a series of “example” images showing how the payoffs of these games are produced Read More

A Major Post, Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design

Joel E. Cohen on the 7 billion human mark

Posted 04 Nov 2011 / 0

WNYC The Brian Lehrer Show “7 Billion and Counting“

A Minor Post, Carrying Capacity, Population Growth, Population Pressure

Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”

Posted 03 Nov 2011 / 0

Martin Nowak has accomplished a lot for a mid-career scientist. His theoretical work exploring how cooperation evolves has illuminated the importance of a great number of evolutionary mechanisms. He has also been unafraid to tackle real-life problems of cooperation, including questions like “why do we get cancer?” and “how did language evolve?”. Nowak likes to Read More

Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Kin Selection, Language Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Religion, Superorganisms, Sustainability