How to Identify ‘Hot Topics’ in Various Fields of Study

April 6, 2018

Ever wonder what the biggest topics are in academic Artificial Intelligence research, or Gender Studies, or Decision Science, or Dental Hygiene research? Want to figure out whether an academic discipline is actually valuable to society, or see some of the most important insights a field has generated in the last five years? Here's my (relatively) easy method for getting a sense of what an academic discipline has been "thinking about" by quickly examining the top two most cited papers from fi...

Nature Versus Nurture – Can We Know For Certain?

August 15, 2017

People often want to know the extent to which a trait is genetic versus environmentally determined (e.g., "nature" versus "nurture"). This distinction is not nearly as clear cut as is usually assumed. Let's consider the obvious example of height in a population, a trait that's well known to be purely hereditary. Many causes of a population's height distribution are not hereditary. For example, a population's height is also determined by economic factors, like whether there was malnourishment...