Posts

Review Tracking

In this post I keep track of Journals I have reviewed for, and how often. I’ve started this a bit late, so there are probably some reviews that I have forgotten about, but…

Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories

I lead a new paper published at Nature Communications titled “Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories”. This paper utilizes data…

Understanding Ordinal models

In my role at ANU and within ECDI I have started a weekly drop-in session for quantitative and computer programming questions. If you are a student or staff member at ANU…

Journal Impact Factor & Google Scholar

I am currently writing a grant, and grant agencies are very interested in Journal Impact Factors (IF). Sometimes this might be explicit, but in this case I just want to flag…

Talks in Shandong and Korea

I recently gave two talks in Shandong, China and in Seoul, Korea (via Zoom).

Kinbank: A database of Kinship terminology media watch

I recently published the main output from my PhD - Kinbank. Kinbank is a database of more than 1,200 kinship terminology from languages around the world. This post is a…

Cultural Evolution Society ACE ECR Awards

I recently applied to the Cultural Evolution Society’s Advancing Cultural Evolution (ACE) grant scheme. I narrowly missed out on the funding, but was listed as an honourable…

Data Analysis Plan (DAP) Workshop 2023

Recently I assisted running the Statistics Bootcamp at the Australian National University. The workshop was organised by the Researcher Development Team and led by A/Prof…

ABC Canberra: Language Diversity and Endangerment

On Monday, I gave a short interview on the ABC Canberra Drive show, with Anna Vidot, to talk about language diversity and endangerment on the back of the release of Grambank.

SYNAPSE seminar

I gave a talk in the Evolution of Cultural Diversity seminar series “SYNAPSE”. The talk is about my research on kinship terminology. I talk about the relationship of kinship…

Ancestral state reconstruction with INLA

A common task in phylogenetics is ancestral state reconstruction. There are a number of tools to do this inside and outside R. Some noteable R examples are: using ape (which…

To make a reference group, or to not make a reference group, that is the question this blog deals with.

When modelling a single categorical variable in linear regression, there are two possibilities. Most commonly, and the default in R, is to estimate the difference between…

Phylogenetic Signal in INLA

Recently, my research has been focused on quantifying the patterns of similarity we observe within a particular linguistic or cultural trait, also known as autocorrelation.…

The Global Jukebox

Recently, I was a co-author on the release paper for the Global Jukebox dataset (GJB). The GJB is a collection of 5,000+ songs from over 1,000 societies - all available to…

Funding in Australia and New Zealand

To keep track of the various funding opportunities available to me and that I am interested in, I have created this blog page. I am primarily using it for my own purposes…

Phylogenetic Signal in INLA

Recently, my research has been focused on quantifying the patterns of similarity we observe within a particular linguistic or cultural trait, also known as autocorrelation.…

The problem with Galton’s problem

Opinion

We need to talk about “Galton’s Problem”.

bayestraitr

Software

I’ve been using BayesTraits for the last year or so, and had developed a package to make it easy to create data for BayesTraits and to read the output into R - called…

Cultured Scene

Research coverage in Cultured Scene

Sookias, Passmore, and Atkinson (2018) - News coverage

News coverage of the Sookias, Passmore, and Atkinson paper