Face-to-face or face-to-screen: A quantitative comparison of conferences modalities.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a societal shift from in-person to virtual activities, including scientific conferences. As society navigates a "new normal," the question arises as to the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative modalities. We introduce two new comprehensive datasets enabling direct comparison between virtual and in-person conferences: the first, from a series of nine small conferences, encompasses over 12,000 pairs of potential scientific collaborators across five virtual and four in-person meetings on a range of scientific topics; the expressed goal of these conferences is to create novel collaborations.

Dynamics of social group competition: modeling the decline of religious affiliation.

When social groups compete for members, the resulting dynamics may be understandable with mathematical models. We demonstrate that a simple ordinary differential equation (ODE) model is a good fit for religious shift by comparing it to a new international data set tracking religious nonaffiliation. We then generalize the model to include the possibility of nontrivial social interaction networks and examine the limiting case of a continuous system.

Localized transverse bursts in inclined layer convection.

We investigate a novel bursting state in inclined layer thermal convection in which convection rolls exhibit intermittent, localized, transverse bursts. With increasing temperature difference, the bursts increase in duration and number while exhibiting a characteristic wave number, magnitude, and size. We propose a mechanism which describes the duration of the observed bursting intervals and compare our results to bursting processes in other systems.