Michele Coscia

A quick and unusual post for this blog to keep you up to date with what happened in my summer.

First, I’m happy to report that my paper on the effect of business travels on economic growth — which I describe here — is generating a fair amount of buzz. You can read the excellent summary written by Ricardo on Project Syndicate, or my own “Behind the paper” version. If podcasts are your thing, we got you covered. And I’ll present it at the Copenhagen Fintech on September 16th.

Second, I’m teaming up with the most excellent prof. Morgan Frank from the University of Pittsburgh to edit a special issue for the journal Frontiers in Big Data Networks. We called the special issue “Complex Networks and Economics” and we intend it to be a safe haven for all of you advancing our understanding of the complex systems that compose our global, regional, and local economy. You can read more at the official page of the journal (linked above), or in this post I wrote for my NERDS research group. Consider submitting!

And, finally, one last bit of shameless self-celebration. Something new happened on the header of this blog:

Yai me! I’m a real associate grownup now! (Actually, effective on October 1st. So I still have time to mess this up)

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Another quick pause this month from my written blabbering about my research. Because it is time for some spoken blabbering about my research!

First and foremost: I was invited to register a 100-seconds audio segment for the Academic Minute. The Academic Minute is a radio program of the WAMC Northeast Public Radio that gives to scholars around the world a chance for a very brief presentation of their work. My segment is going to air tomorrow at 7:34 AM (Eastern time) and, if you do not want to get up early, also at 3:56 PM. The segment is going to be about my work on memetics. If you do not have a radio (duh) you can live stream from their website. The live stream might work also if you are not in the US. but I haven’t really checked. However, once it’s done, you can probably download the podcast (although I am not really sure why somebody would get into so much trouble just to listen to my delirious thoughts for 100 seconds). A big thanks to Matthew Pryce, who organizes the program and was so kind to invite me for a segment.

That is not the only way to hear about my work on memes. The paper that I recently published in Scientific Reports was also the subject of a lighting talk I gave at the Digital Umanities Forum at Kansas University (I talked about the Forum a couple of weeks ago). Brian Rosenblum was kind enough to upload a video of my talk to Youtube. So here it is:

One speaker had to cancel her presentation, and people were invited to fill the gap. So excuse my lack of fluency, but I didn’t know I was going to present until the day itself! This is it for now, I promise that I’ll write something more about this paper in the future.

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