New book by Benyamin Lichtenstein: “Culminating more than 30 years of research into evolution, complexity science, organizing and entrepreneurship, this book provides insights to scholars who are increasingly using emergence to explain social phenomena. In addition to providing the first comprehensive definition and framework for understanding emergence, it is the first publication of data from a year-long experimental study of emergence in high-potential ventures—a week-by-week longitudinal analysis of their processes based on over 750 interviews and 1000 hours of on-site observation. These data, combined with reports from over a dozen other studies, confirm the dynamics of the five phase... (More >)
Privacy-Invading Technologies and Privacy by Design
New book by Demetrius Klitou: “Challenged by rapidly developing privacy-invading technologies (PITs), this book provides a convincing set of potential policy recommendations and practical solutions for safeguarding both privacy and security. It shows that benefits such as public security do not necessarily come at the expense of privacy and liberty overall. Backed up by comprehensive study of four specific PITs – Body scanners; Public space CCTV microphones; Public space CCTV loudspeakers; and Human-implantable microchips (RFID implants/GPS implants) – the author shows how laws that regulate the design and development of PITs may more effectively protect privacy than laws that... (More >)
Crowd-Sourced Augmented Realities: Social Media and the Power of Digital Representation
Pre-publication version of a chapter by Matthew Zook, Mark Graham and Andrew Boulton in S. Mains, J. Cupples, and C. Lukinbeal. Mediated Geographies/Geographies of Media. Springer Science International Handbooks in Human Geography, (Forthcoming): “A key and distinguishing feature of society today is that its increasingly documented by crowd-sourced social media discourse about public experiences. Much of this social media content is geo-referenced and exists in layers of information draped over the physical world, invisible to the naked eye but accessible to range of digital (and often) mobile devices. When we access these information layers, they mediate the mundane practices... (More >)
The People’s Platform
Book Review by Tim Wu in the New York Times: “Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the Internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she’s not impressed: “We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great... (More >)
The Skeleton Crew
Book Review by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal: “…Even in an age when we are tracked electronically by our phone companies at every single moment, about 4,000 unidentified corpses turn up in the U.S. every year, of which about half have been murdered. In 2007 no fewer than 13,500 sets of unidentified human remains were languishing in the evidence rooms of medical examiners, according to an analysis published in the National Institute of Justice Journal. In her brilliant book “The Skeleton Crew,” Deborah Halber explains why local law enforcement often fails to investigate such deaths:”Unidentified corpses... (More >)
Neuroeconomics, Judgment, and Decision Making
New edited book by Evan A. Wilhelms, and Valerie F. Reyna: “This volume explores how and why people make judgments and decisions that have economic consequences, and what the implications are for human well-being. It provides an integrated review of the latest research from many different disciplines, including social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; neuroscience and neurobiology; and economics and business. The book has six areas of focus: historical foundations; cognitive consistency and inconsistency; heuristics and biases; neuroeconomics and neurobiology; developmental and individual differences; and improving decisions. Throughout, the contributors draw out implications from traditional behavioral research as well as... (More >)
The Quiet Movement to Make Government Fail Less Often
David Leonhardt in The New York Times: “If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of “most successful organization in modern history,” you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States. In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat totalitarianism (more than once), established the world’s currency of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the world’s largest economy, financed medical research that saved millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the world. Of course, most... (More >)
Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Expertise
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of crowdsourcing was originally published in 2014. Crowdsourcing enables leaders and citizens to work together to solve public problems in new and innovative ways. New tools and platforms enable citizens with differing levels of knowledge, expertise, experience and abilities to collaborate and solve problems together. Identifying experts, or individuals with specialized skills, knowledge or abilities with regard to a specific topic, and incentivizing their participation... (More >)
Diffusers of Useful Knowledge
Book review of Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (By James A Secord): “For a moment in time, just before Victoria became queen, popular science seemed to offer answers to everything. Around 1830, revolutionary information technology – steam-powered presses and paper-making machines – made possible the dissemination of ‘useful knowledge’ to a mass public. At that point professional scientists scarcely existed as a class, but there were genteel amateur researchers who, with literary panache, wrote for a fascinated lay audience. The term ‘scientist’ was invented only in 1833, by the polymath William... (More >)
Urban Analytics (Updated and Expanded)
As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Urban Analytics. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email biblio@thegovlab.org. Urban Analytics places better information in the hands of citizens as well as government officials to empower people to make more informed choices. Today, we are able to gather real-time information about traffic, pollution,... (More >)
