Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
About the speaker
Dr Charles Driver is a researcher at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. He focuses on improving methods for mapping theories of change to data and applying these to different problems across the broad domain of human development. One of his projects included writing the statistical software package “ctsem” in R, which can be used to model dynamic systems.
About the talk
Most phenomena of scientific interest can be loosely thought of as ‘dynamic systems’, in the sense that they usually change in different ways depending on different inputs. In the social sciences, phenomena are usually highly complex and dependent on many features of the world, such that any formal model is inherently a vast simplification. In order for our modelling simplifications to provide useful insight, they need to adequately represent the core aspects we are interested in, and cope with the many aspects we are not. In this talk I will discuss some of the basic ideas of modelling dynamic systems, demonstrate how simulating such systems can yield important insight and questions, and outline the ctsem software for estimating dynamic systems models in social science contexts.
About the RIOT science club
The RIOT Science Club gives talks/workshops on Reproducible, Interpretable, Open & Transparent Science. This talk was hosted by RIOT Science Club in Rotterdam: riotscienceNL.com (Website); @riotscienceNL (Twitter). For information on the global team and events of the RIOT science club please find us on Twitter at @riotscienceclub.
Slides of all past and future RIOTS Clubs are stored on our Open Science Framework Page: osf.io/8y7h2/. You can also subscribe to our mailing list, to receive regular information on upcoming talks and workshops, any local events and vacancies for positions in open and reproducible research.
If you would like to give a talk or workshop for The RIOTS Club, please email riotscienceclub@kcl.ac.uk.
About the speaker
Dr Charles Driver is a researcher at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. He focuses on improving methods for mapping theories of change to data and applying these to different problems across the broad domain of human development. One of his projects included writing the statistical software package “ctsem” in R, which can be used to model dynamic systems.
About the talk
Most phenomena of scientific interest can be loosely thought of as ‘dynamic systems’, in the sense that they usually change in different ways depending on different inputs. In the social sciences, phenomena are usually highly complex and dependent on many features of the world, such that any formal model is inherently a vast simplification. In order for our modelling simplifications to provide useful insight, they need to adequately represent the core aspects we are interested in, and cope with the many aspects we are not. In this talk I will discuss some of the basic ideas of modelling dynamic systems, demonstrate how simulating such systems can yield important insight and questions, and outline the ctsem software for estimating dynamic systems models in social science contexts.
About the RIOT science club
The RIOT Science Club gives talks/workshops on Reproducible, Interpretable, Open & Transparent Science. This talk was hosted by RIOT Science Club in Rotterdam: riotscienceNL.com (Website); @riotscienceNL (Twitter). For information on the global team and events of the RIOT science club please find us on Twitter at @riotscienceclub.
Slides of all past and future RIOTS Clubs are stored on our Open Science Framework Page: osf.io/8y7h2/. You can also subscribe to our mailing list, to receive regular information on upcoming talks and workshops, any local events and vacancies for positions in open and reproducible research.
If you would like to give a talk or workshop for The RIOTS Club, please email riotscienceclub@kcl.ac.uk.
