Jacob G Foster
Biographic Data
| ID | 187872 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jacob G Foster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jacob G |
| FAMILY NAME | Foster |
| SIGNATURE | FOSTER J G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2724-5134 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 134 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Care of the Dead
Humans stand apart from other animals in OUR care for children and elders. We are most distinctive, however, in our care for the dead. Such care is fraught in a modern episteme marked by disenchantment. Beginning with an analysis of exemplary individual relationships with the dead, we develop a theory of the complex links that bind present to past. Through the traces they leave, the traditions they transmit, and the institutions they build, the d…
A Primer on Deep Learning for Causal Inference
This primer systematizes the emerging literature on causal inference using deep neural networks under the potential outcomes framework. It provides an intuitive introduction to building and optimizing custom deep learning models and shows how to adapt them to estimate/predict heterogeneous treatment effects. It also discusses ongoing work to extend causal inference to settings where confounding is nonlinear, time-varying, or encoded in text, netw…
Talk of Family
We develop a novel application of machine learning and apply it to the interview transcripts from the American Voices Project (N = 1,396), using discourse atom topic modeling to explore social class variation in the centrality of family in adults' lives. We take a two-phase approach, first analyzing transcripts at the person level and then at the line level. Our findings suggest that family, as represented by talk, is more central in the lives of…
Gendered Patterns in Manifest and Latent Mental Health Indicators Among Suicide Decedents
Objectives. To investigate differences in the documentation of mental health symptomology between male and female suicide decedents in the 2003–2020 US National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Methods. Using information on 271 998 suicides in the 2003–2020 NVDRS, we evaluated precoded mental health–related variables and topic model–derived latent mental health themes in the law enforcement and coroner or medical examiner death narratives …
Algorithmic Abduction
From Thin to Thick
This article argues that contemporary research practices in artificial intelligence will produce AI technologies incompatible with human flourishing, social complexity, or vibrant politics. Adopting James Scott's anarchist squint, it instead proposes a vision of AI that embraces local vernaculars, the multiplicity of objectives, the responsibilities that come with producing persons, and the potential of instigating rather than circumventing polit…
Machine Learning as a Model for Cultural Learning
Public culture is a powerful source of cognitive socialization; for example, media language is full of meanings about body weight. Yet it remains unclear how individuals process meanings in public culture. We suggest that schema learning is a core mechanism by which public culture becomes personal culture. We propose that a burgeoning approach in computational text analysis - neural word embeddings - can be interpreted as a formal model for cultu…
What Makes Inventions Become Traditions
Although anthropology was the first academic discipline to investigate cultural change, many other disciplines have made noteworthy contributions to understanding what influences the adoption of new behaviors. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary literature covering both humans and nonhumans, we examine ( a) which features of behavioral traits make them more transmissible, ( b) which individual characteristics of inventors promote copying of the…
Aggression, Escalation, and Other Latent Themes in Legal Intervention Deaths of Non-Hispanic Black and White Men
Objectives. To investigate racial/ethnic differences in legal intervention‒related deaths using state-of-the-art topic modeling of law enforcement and coroner text summaries drawn from the 2003–2017 US National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Methods. Employing advanced topic modeling, we identified 8 topics consistent with dangerousness in death incidents in the NVDRS death narratives written by public health workers (PHWs). Using logist…
Businesses, Places, and Homicide
This paper empirically examines the relations between homicide rates by age (adults 18 to 24 and adults 25 or older), the tattoo shop density, on-site and off-site alcohol outlets, and disadvantage. It offers an additional explanation for the relation between alcohol outlets and homicide besides alcohol availability and consumption being facilitators of such lethal violence, suggesting that these businesses are a proxy for attracting those most p…
Promiscuous Inventions
Culture and computation
Weaving the fabric of science
Science is a complex system. Building on Latour's actor network theory, we model published science as a dynamic hypergraph and explore how this fabric provides a substrate for future scientific discovery. Using millions of abstracts from MEDLINE, we show that the network distance between biomedical things (i.e., people, methods, diseases, chemicals) is surprisingly small. We then show how science moves from questions answered in one year to probl…
Tradition and Innovation in Scientists' Research Strategies
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history and sociology of science suggests that this choice is patterned by an "essential tension" between productive tradition and risky innovation. We examine this tension through Bourdieu's field theory of science, and we explore it empirically by analyzing millions of biomedical abstracts from MEDLINE. We represent the evolving state of chemical knowledge…
Finding Cultural Holes
Daril A. Vilhena, Jacob G. Foster, Martin Rosvall, Jevin D. West, James Evans, Carl T. Bergstrom Sociological Science, June 9, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a15 Abstract Divergent interests, expertise, and language form cultural barriers to communication
Tradition and Innovation in Scientists' Research Strategies
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history and sociology of science suggests that this choice is patterned by an "essential tension" between productive tradition and risky innovation. We examine this tension through Bourdieu's field theory of science, and we explore it empirically by analyzing millions of biomedical abstracts from MEDLINE. We represent the evolving state of chemical knowledge…
Finding Cultural Holes
Daril A. Vilhena, Jacob G. Foster, Martin Rosvall, Jevin D. West, James Evans, Carl T. Bergstrom Sociological Science, June 9, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a15 Abstract Divergent interests, expertise, and language form cultural barriers to communication
Machine Learning as a Model for Cultural Learning
Public culture is a powerful source of cognitive socialization; for example, media language is full of meanings about body weight. Yet it remains unclear how individuals process meanings in public culture. We suggest that schema learning is a core mechanism by which public culture becomes personal culture. We propose that a burgeoning approach in computational text analysis - neural word embeddings - can be interpreted as a formal model for cultu…
Culture and computation
Talk of Family
We develop a novel application of machine learning and apply it to the interview transcripts from the American Voices Project (N = 1,396), using discourse atom topic modeling to explore social class variation in the centrality of family in adults' lives. We take a two-phase approach, first analyzing transcripts at the person level and then at the line level. Our findings suggest that family, as represented by talk, is more central in the lives of…
Algorithmic Abduction
Aggression, Escalation, and Other Latent Themes in Legal Intervention Deaths of Non-Hispanic Black and White Men
Objectives. To investigate racial/ethnic differences in legal intervention‒related deaths using state-of-the-art topic modeling of law enforcement and coroner text summaries drawn from the 2003–2017 US National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Methods. Employing advanced topic modeling, we identified 8 topics consistent with dangerousness in death incidents in the NVDRS death narratives written by public health workers (PHWs). Using logist…
From Thin to Thick
This article argues that contemporary research practices in artificial intelligence will produce AI technologies incompatible with human flourishing, social complexity, or vibrant politics. Adopting James Scott's anarchist squint, it instead proposes a vision of AI that embraces local vernaculars, the multiplicity of objectives, the responsibilities that come with producing persons, and the potential of instigating rather than circumventing polit…
Care of the Dead
Humans stand apart from other animals in OUR care for children and elders. We are most distinctive, however, in our care for the dead. Such care is fraught in a modern episteme marked by disenchantment. Beginning with an analysis of exemplary individual relationships with the dead, we develop a theory of the complex links that bind present to past. Through the traces they leave, the traditions they transmit, and the institutions they build, the d…
A Primer on Deep Learning for Causal Inference
This primer systematizes the emerging literature on causal inference using deep neural networks under the potential outcomes framework. It provides an intuitive introduction to building and optimizing custom deep learning models and shows how to adapt them to estimate/predict heterogeneous treatment effects. It also discusses ongoing work to extend causal inference to settings where confounding is nonlinear, time-varying, or encoded in text, netw…
Gendered Patterns in Manifest and Latent Mental Health Indicators Among Suicide Decedents
Objectives. To investigate differences in the documentation of mental health symptomology between male and female suicide decedents in the 2003–2020 US National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Methods. Using information on 271 998 suicides in the 2003–2020 NVDRS, we evaluated precoded mental health–related variables and topic model–derived latent mental health themes in the law enforcement and coroner or medical examiner death narratives …
Finding Cultural Holes
Daril A. Vilhena, Jacob G. Foster, Martin Rosvall, Jevin D. West, James Evans, Carl T. Bergstrom Sociological Science, June 9, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a15 Abstract Divergent interests, expertise, and language form cultural barriers to communication
Weaving the fabric of science
Science is a complex system. Building on Latour's actor network theory, we model published science as a dynamic hypergraph and explore how this fabric provides a substrate for future scientific discovery. Using millions of abstracts from MEDLINE, we show that the network distance between biomedical things (i.e., people, methods, diseases, chemicals) is surprisingly small. We then show how science moves from questions answered in one year to probl…
Tradition and Innovation in Scientists' Research Strategies
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history and sociology of science suggests that this choice is patterned by an "essential tension" between productive tradition and risky innovation. We examine this tension through Bourdieu's field theory of science, and we explore it empirically by analyzing millions of biomedical abstracts from MEDLINE. We represent the evolving state of chemical knowledge…
Culture and computation
Promiscuous Inventions
Businesses, Places, and Homicide
This paper empirically examines the relations between homicide rates by age (adults 18 to 24 and adults 25 or older), the tattoo shop density, on-site and off-site alcohol outlets, and disadvantage. It offers an additional explanation for the relation between alcohol outlets and homicide besides alcohol availability and consumption being facilitators of such lethal violence, suggesting that these businesses are a proxy for attracting those most p…
Aggression, Escalation, and Other Latent Themes in Legal Intervention Deaths of Non-Hispanic Black and White Men
Objectives. To investigate racial/ethnic differences in legal intervention‒related deaths using state-of-the-art topic modeling of law enforcement and coroner text summaries drawn from the 2003–2017 US National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Methods. Employing advanced topic modeling, we identified 8 topics consistent with dangerousness in death incidents in the NVDRS death narratives written by public health workers (PHWs). Using logist…
Machine Learning as a Model for Cultural Learning
Public culture is a powerful source of cognitive socialization; for example, media language is full of meanings about body weight. Yet it remains unclear how individuals process meanings in public culture. We suggest that schema learning is a core mechanism by which public culture becomes personal culture. We propose that a burgeoning approach in computational text analysis - neural word embeddings - can be interpreted as a formal model for cultu…
What Makes Inventions Become Traditions
Although anthropology was the first academic discipline to investigate cultural change, many other disciplines have made noteworthy contributions to understanding what influences the adoption of new behaviors. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary literature covering both humans and nonhumans, we examine ( a) which features of behavioral traits make them more transmissible, ( b) which individual characteristics of inventors promote copying of the…
From Thin to Thick
This article argues that contemporary research practices in artificial intelligence will produce AI technologies incompatible with human flourishing, social complexity, or vibrant politics. Adopting James Scott's anarchist squint, it instead proposes a vision of AI that embraces local vernaculars, the multiplicity of objectives, the responsibilities that come with producing persons, and the potential of instigating rather than circumventing polit…
Talk of Family
We develop a novel application of machine learning and apply it to the interview transcripts from the American Voices Project (N = 1,396), using discourse atom topic modeling to explore social class variation in the centrality of family in adults' lives. We take a two-phase approach, first analyzing transcripts at the person level and then at the line level. Our findings suggest that family, as represented by talk, is more central in the lives of…
Gendered Patterns in Manifest and Latent Mental Health Indicators Among Suicide Decedents
Objectives. To investigate differences in the documentation of mental health symptomology between male and female suicide decedents in the 2003–2020 US National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). Methods. Using information on 271 998 suicides in the 2003–2020 NVDRS, we evaluated precoded mental health–related variables and topic model–derived latent mental health themes in the law enforcement and coroner or medical examiner death narratives …
Algorithmic Abduction
Care of the Dead
Humans stand apart from other animals in OUR care for children and elders. We are most distinctive, however, in our care for the dead. Such care is fraught in a modern episteme marked by disenchantment. Beginning with an analysis of exemplary individual relationships with the dead, we develop a theory of the complex links that bind present to past. Through the traces they leave, the traditions they transmit, and the institutions they build, the d…
A Primer on Deep Learning for Causal Inference
This primer systematizes the emerging literature on causal inference using deep neural networks under the potential outcomes framework. It provides an intuitive introduction to building and optimizing custom deep learning models and shows how to adapt them to estimate/predict heterogeneous treatment effects. It also discusses ongoing work to extend causal inference to settings where confounding is nonlinear, time-varying, or encoded in text, netw…
Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (4 works) · Medicine (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Engineering (3 works) · Mathematics (3 works)