Matrix Research Teams

In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly recognized a human right to water and sanitation, acknowledging that everyone, without discrimination, is entitled to adequate, safe, accessible, and affordable water. But what, in practice, does the human right to water entail? How should human rights influence the allocation of water among agriculture, industry, households, and the […]

In Spring 2014, UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix sponsored a seminar on “Imperial Declines,” looking at how and why empires reach a peak before inevitably diminishing in power and shrinking in reach. Coordinated by Carlos Norena, Professor, and Daniel Sargent, Assistant Professor, both from the UC Berkeley Department of History, this seminar sought to examine […]

In recent years, our understanding the biology behind human decision-making has expanded, as neuroscientists have made discoveries that shed light on disorders related to decision-making deficits, such as addiction, obesity, and neurological and psychiatric disorders. The use of brain-measurement technologies has meanwhile crept into the public sphere in other ways; for example, marketers and political […]

In Spring 2014, Social Science Matrix sponsored a working group of researchers from the fields of descriptive and historical linguistics, computational phylogenetics, and lowland South American archaeology and ethnography. Their goal: to develop insights into the linguistic and social history of the indigenous Tupí-Guaraní-speaking peoples, who live across much of lowland South America. English words […]

Ask Californians whether they think immigrants should have a path to citizenship, and the answer you get back will depend heavily on how the question is framed. This important finding—described in recent research by a team of UC Berkeley sociologists—was at the heart of “Framing Rights and Immigration,” a Social Science Matrix seminar sponsored in […]

The past decades have witnessed a series of transformative shifts in the computational and statistical techniques that scientists use to collect, analyze, and share data. As early as 2008, pop media outlets such as Wired were predicting “the end of theory,” based on the provocative claim that “the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete.” […]

Ask most English speakers to say the word “orangutan” and they are likely to say, “orangutang”. This switch is not a fluke, according to Sharon Inkelas, Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Rather, it is an example of a phenomenon called “agreement by correspondence,” or ABC. A similar pattern emerges with the word “smorgasbord,” which […]