Daniel J. Hicks, PhD

Why is the climate change debate so interminable? From the perspective of many scientists, we’ve had compelling data since the 1970s and more than enough reason to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since the 1980s. Today the IPCC will release the first part of their fifth Assessment Report. But no one... [Read More]

Following up on my last post and a semi-related conversation with a new officemate, it seems to me that a lot of people might react something like this: [Read More]

I spent most of Monday working on some “deep literature analysis” for my research on genetically modified organisms for food, or GMOf. This meant, in practice, that I spent about two hours looking up the citations for a single article. It was quite dull work, but the results were very... [Read More]

As I discussed in a post last month, I recently took a Coursera class on network theory and analysis. I did this in part because I wanted to evaluate the MOOC format from a student’s perspective. But I also did it because network theory is very hot right now and... [Read More]

In this post, I’m going to discuss MOOCs, based on my recent experience in a Coursera course on Social and Economic Networks. I’m going to start with a brief explanation of my reasons for taking the course, give a quick overview of the structure of the course, then explain my... [Read More]