Our last article in Nature Human Behaviour shows that the temporal dimension of the attention received by cultural products, including scientific papers, patents, songs, movies, and biographies, decays following a universal bi-exponential function that uncovers the communicative and cultural nature of collective memory.

This paper is in part the product of my asking the right question at just the right time in my academic journey. The question so timely for both research and utilities was that of how to roll out demand-side response measures on a grand scale.

Deciding whether someone accused of a crime is guilty may be a more serious decision than choosing a new apartment or a new car, but the decisions share some essential features. It took a mid-career shift, a fascination with computational methods, and a coincidental choice of lunch spot for us to see the connection. By Pate Skene, John Pearson, and McKell Carter