A good couple of weeks for mathematical sociology, at least in terms of visibility. Scientific American has an interview with “mathematical sociologist” Duncan Watts about his new book. He also has a couple of interesting things to say about the differences in prestige between social science and the natural sciences.
In addition, Nature News has a nice piece about computational social science (mostly social network analysis actually), and its usefulness in predicting violent conflict. It includes Kathleen Carley, who was the keynote speaker at this year’s Sunbelt conference, talking about her work for the Pentagon. But not even Nature gets everything right: they explain betweenness centrality as having “lots of direct connections to other people within the network.” Oh well…
By the way: interestingly, both articles are in a way about the limits to prediction in social science. A fascinating topic; I hope to be able to come back to it in the future.