SFI's 2014 Annual Report is now available online. Here are some of the surprising tidbits you will find between its covers:

  • Occasionally we find that an invited SFI guest is insane, which generally cheers us all up (Cormac McCarthy's take on SFI, inside front cover) 
  • Scoring in professional basketball games follows no underlying patterns. In other words, an athlete’s or team’s hot streak exists only in our minds (page 3)
  • SFI's human languages research offers a statistically rigorous method of tracing words and languages thousands of years further into prehistory than has previously been possible…and might even shore up what we know about ancient human migration patterns (page 7)
  • Studies of the behaviors of Western Bluebirds are providing one SFI Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow insights about human cooperation, cohabitation, and monogamy (page 10)
  • In some ways, SFI researchers approach science like former world chess champion Mikhail Tal approached chess…by reexamining first principles (page 19) 

Read SFI's 2014 Annual Report