Does Success Breed Success?
The age old question of whether one successful endeavor will lead to more in the future is about to be answered thanks to Arnout van de Rijt, associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and the Institute for Advanced Computational Sciences. Thanks to a $275,000 grant from the National Science Foundation van de Rijt can continue research on the success-breeds-success dynamics.
Van de Rijt seeks to discover if successes achieved by an individual can be attributed to previous success rather than actual merit or quality.
“My goal is to grow this new area of sociological research, get more graduate students interested, attract more government and industry funding for it, and expand the community of scholars on campus engaged in this new, exciting field of computational social science,” said van de Rijt.
A computational interface which will automatically allocate successes to arbitrary persons and then record how successful they are following that initial success will be used in the study.
Stony Brook Southampton Celebrates Opening of State-Of-The-Art Marine Science Center
Stony Brook’s School of Marine and Atmospheric sciences celebrated the opening of a new Marine Sciences Center at the Southampton campus.
The new center, which is LEED certified boasts two wet labs, an analytical lab, classrooms, a conference room and other lab and support spaces, including an outdoor tank area that will expand the lab resources outside of the building.
“The new Marine Sciences Center will play a key role in augmenting SoMAS’ ability to perform groundbreaking studies in a variety of issues facing Long Island and the world today,” said President Stanley in a press release put out by the university. “It will also enable us to offer more classes with rich experiential components. There will be cutting-edge research with important implications for Long Island’s coastal ecosystems, including studies of harmful algal blooms, shellfish, eelgrass, fisheries, ocean acidification and aquaculture.”
The new Marine Sciences Center, which is 15,000-square-feet, was built using money secured in the NYS budget by Senator Kenneth LaValle and Senator Kenneth P. LaValle and Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, according to the press release.
