S-STEM/TRAIN Scholar Alicia Fritz's Blog

  I spent this week doing more data collection and trying to find all the information necessary to take the next steps with my project. I also spent a significant amount of time learning about Netlogo and Gini coefficients from modern economics. I want to spend spring break organizing my sources in a more efficient and easily accessible way, as well as further understanding the interdisciplinary techniques I will be using.  A past archaeology professor of mine was kind enough to provide me one of her past papers on the study of emerging inequality on the island of Cyprus during the Bronze age (2400 -1700 Cal BCE). That has been really interesting and helpful in considering my own research and how I want to modify what I’m doing. I’m looking forward to taking the time to organize and work out the kinks in what I have compiled so far. ( https://www.britannica.com/place/Cyprus)

Things are looking good this week guys! I’m finally able to start picking out classes at ASU after many many distressing emails, and I’m very excited to be moving forward. I did fall a tad bit behind on my project after dealing with that situation, but I’ll be back on track in no time. I had the pleasure of speaking to one of my previous professors about the kinds of research that have been done for archaeology in conjunction with Netlogo. She discussed how after compiling archaeological data, it can be statistically analyzed in the same fashion as the random, small world, and scale-free models are on Netlogo. Once that has been done, you can look for patterns between the two sets of data and conclude what kind of model the archaeological data follows. This gives insight into what kind of society the information that was collected is from, based on what model it aligns with. A random network is most closely related to an egalitarian society, a society where everyone is relatively equal...