Ned Kock

Who is Ned Kock?

Nereu Florencio "Ned" Kock is a Brazilian-American philosopher. He is best known for employing biological evolution ideas to the understanding of human behavior toward technologies, particularly information technologies. He developed media naturalness theory, an evolutionary communication media theory. Kock is the writer of a popular blog on the intersection of evolution, statistics, and health.

He developed WarpPLS, a nonlinear variance-based structural equation modeling software tool. The underlying mathematics employed in WarpPLS builds on the method of path analysis, developed by the evolutionary biologist Sewall Wright. WarpPLS has been used to study a variety of topics, including nursing education, password security risks, software testing, customer satisfaction, accounting education, and web-based homework.

He has conducted research and written on the topic of academic plagiarism. His research and writings in this area have been discussed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and contributed to considerable debate on the topic within the Association for Computing Machinery, and to the establishment of an ethics committee within the Association for Information Systems.