Wikipedia “Elinor Ostrom” The Huffington Post David Sloan Wilson blog “Farewell, Lin Ostrom” CHANS-Net blog “Elinor Ostrom leaves inspiring legacy“
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Cultural Anthropology, Obituary, Political Science, Social ScienceBreakthrough Journal “Love Your Monsters” Interesting concept here of “political ecology”. I have never heard of this term, but it provides a pretty nice distinction between the science of ecology and those social and political movements that seek to make us more respectful of the ecological systems on which we depend. What is a little Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Ecology, Political Science, SustainabilityYale University Press “Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation“
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Cooperation, Political ScienceThe Brian Lehrer Show “Inequality and Stability” As I have suggested in previous posts, debt has the potential to destabilize societies.
A Minor Post, Ethics, Political Science, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, System Stability, System StabilityA downed tree in East River Park in Manhattan’s East Village after Hurricane Irene. Photo and caption text by David Shankbone. The east coast of the United States woke up this Monday morning to begin cleanup following the passing of Hurricane Irene. In preparation for the hurricane, over half a million New York and New Read More
Belief, Climate Change, Ethics, Political Science, Prediction, Sociology, StochasticityOne of the ways that I keep up with my field these days (inasmuch as that is even possible given the pace of innovation and activity) is by using Google Alerts. For those of you who are not familiar with the service, it allows you to receive updates via e-mail every time that a new Read More
Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Human Evolution, Memetic Fitness, Political Science, Punishment, Reciprocity, Sociology, WebBill McKibben has a feature article in this month’s National Geographic entitled “Can China go green?“.The article discusses how the rapid growth of the Chinese economy presents both great environmental risks and great environmental opportunities. Although McKibben is a well-known environmental activist, he writes an informative, fair assessment of the ‘Chinese problem’. China is, arguably, Read More
Articles, Economics, Environmental Justice, Political Science, Population Pressure, Public Policy, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Sustainable EnergyAfter a full semester of development, including a round of in-classroom testing with real live Pratt undergraduates, I am proud to announce the release of the Easy Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (Easy-IPD) interface, a free web-based teaching tool that allows students to experiment with this influential model of behavior. You can check out a slideshow of Read More
Cooperation, Easy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Economics, Evolution Education, Game Theory, Lesson Ideas, Political Science, Reciprocity, Sociology, Teaching ToolsI just finished reading Robert Axelrod’s seminal book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation. Although I had read a lot about Axelrod’s work and am quite familiar with the body of literature that it inspired, I had never actually read his book cover to cover. Going in, my expectation was of finding a rather primitive treatment Read More
Altruism, Behavioral Ecology, Books, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Human Evolution, Individual-based Models, Interdisciplinarity, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Political Science, Public Policy, Reciprocity, Sociology, Spatially Explicit Modeling