This paper looks at how social diversity influences cooperation in public goods games.
This article discusses the concept of “materials” in software interfaces and how they differ from “features.” It suggests that materials are more flexible and adaptable, allowing users to create and manipulate their own content rather than simply access pre-defined features.
This article discusses Twitter’s experimental fact-checking project, Community Notes, and how it aims to add context to tweets.
This article, relatedly, discusses vTaiwan, an online platform that allows Taiwanese citizens to participate in the legislative process by proposing and voting on solutions to policy issues. It discusses how pol.is, a system that vTaiwan uses, enables citizen deliberation and consultation at scale.
This book explores the “smart city,” the ethical questions it begets, and its lineage as an idea.
This article argues that pleasure and pain should be thought of as having a long-tail distribution.
This paper suggests that the complexity of a language should be measured by a vector of different measurements, rather than a single value. The authors conduct a meta-analysis of 28 complexity metrics applied to texts written in 80 languages and find that there is support for the idea that different measures of complexity can trade off against each other.
This interview with Alain Bertaud discusses the challenges and risks of building new cities.
This paper argues that a city’s economic success depends on its labour market. (The interview with Bertaud got me interested in his work more broadly.)
This article concisely summarises Georgism, an ideology that proposes a tax on land value as the main source of government revenue.
This article discusses the trend of increased interest in local government and the potential for using blockchain technology to create more transparent and verifiable processes and implement new forms of ownership and governance. Really interesting stuff!
This grant round facilitated by Gitcoin is part of UNICEF’s “explorations into blockchain technology as a mechanism to test new resource allocation tools and provide greater efficiencies in public bureaucracies.”
This article introduces a paper with a new approach to measuring well-being that accounts for both positive and negative affect. Country rankings are included for those of us seduced, painfully easily in my case, by ordered lists. I would love to see the component variables for negative and positive affect mapped!
This article discusses Archigram, a group of architects from the 1960s and 70s, and the significance of their work today.