Meet YINS Seminar: Ed Kaplan & Laurie Santos
Weekly Seminar
Event time:
Wednesday, March 4, 2015 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location:
Yale Institute for Network Science
17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd Floor
New Haven, CT
06511
Event description:
First Speaker: Edward Kaplan
William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations ResearchProfessor of Public Health, Professor of Engineering, Yale School of Management, Yale University
“March Madness and the Office Pool”
Abstract: March brings March Madness, the annual single elimination basketball tournament showcasing the best college teams in the country. Almost as mad are office pools. We describe the structure of single elimination tournaments, and show how to “fill in the brackets” to maximize the expected number of points in a pool. (Joint work with Stan Garstka, Yale School of Management)
Second Speaker: Laurie Santos
Associate Professor of Psychology, Yale University
“The Psychology of Social Network Transmission: Which Kinds of Contagion Are Unique to Humans?”
Abstract: I’ll discuss what recent work in comparative cognition suggests about the kinds of social transmission mechanism that might be uniquely human. I’ll focus on recent studies examining belief transmission, making the case that humans might have a special mechanism to take on the beliefs of others.