Dean Eckles

@deaneckles

networks, contagion, causality. @MIT professor
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deaneckles, eckles & eckles.bsky.social elsewhere

Cambridge deaneckles.com Joined February 2007

1.8K Following 16K Followers 28K Posts

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Dean Eckles @deaneckles Jul 6, 2023

People in some places in the US have more long ties — ties between people without mutual contacts.

This is a map from our newly published paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Why does this matter? How do people end up with these different network structures? 🧵

$Fraction of long ties, measured across counties in the United States, after controlling for average degree. The adjusted (residualized) fraction of long ties across administrative units in each country is binned into 10 deciles, with lower values shown in purple and higher values shown in green. Administrative units with less than 200 Facebook users sufficiently active over the measurement period or with less than 500 individuals are shown in white.$

Dean Eckles @deaneckles Aug 6, 2025

We're recruiting a tenure-track faculty member to @MITSloan!
apply.interfolio.com/170116

We're looking for a researcher working in quantitative marketing, broadly considered. Our existing faculty include experts on privacy, mathematical psych, networks, and applications of ML & AI.

Dean Eckles @deaneckles Dec 30, 2024

Remembering a peanut farmer, interrupted

Dean Eckles @deaneckles Sep 13, 2018

I designed a t-shirt commenting on changing political norms — featuring a frequent tweet by @BrendanNyhan and a smiling peanut from Jimmy Carter's campaign
zazzle.com/peanut_farm_bl…

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Dean Eckles @deaneckles Nov 20, 2024

Why doesn't Boston have any Michelin star restaurants, but Atlanta does?

youtu.be/-ccVaNWow6E?si…

www.youtube.com Boston and Michelin stars: what took so long? This story was originally published in November of 2024 ... just mo...

Dean Eckles @deaneckles Nov 2, 2024

A good example of why it can make sense to report both (a) your best estimate, making a bias–variance tradeoff, and (b) a hopefully very-low-bias estimate, for use in subsequent analysis.

Nick Gourevitch @nickgourevitch Nov 2, 2024

But this debate is about public polling. What is the role of a public pollster? Is it to produce a pure, random draw for the aggregators? Or is it OK to use legitimate methods to reduce variance to inform readers of the most likely outcome? Not sure the answer is 100% clear.
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