Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history.
Drawing on the ideas of the ‘slow movement’, Slow Computing sets out numerous practical and political means to take back control and counter the more pernicious effects of living digital lives.
Artificial Intelligence is permeating a wide range of areas and it is bound to transform work and society. This dossier asks what needs to be done politically in order to shape this transformation for the sake of the common good.
The social sciences don’t produce much in the way of patentable widgets or, indeed, life-saving vaccines. However, the analysis and insights they generate can and do underpin better-evidenced decisions and help guide and target insights from the ‘natural’ sciences.
Research has gradually revealed the extent to which online manipulation has been weaponised to affect societies in almost every important way that society works.
Yet while almost everyone is touched in one way or another by online manipulation, only a tiny part of society has generally been involved in confronting it.
Almost every aspect of society will change after the pandemic, but if we learn lessons then life can be better. Featuring expert authors from across academia and civil society, this book offers ideas that might put us on alternative paths for positive social change.
Vitra, the German manufacturing company, published this week a “set of hypotheses” on the future of the home, as living spaces are pushed to the limits.
The Milan-based consumer and health research center EngageMinds HUB of the Università Cattolica has done some timely research on how Covid-19 has influenced the behavior of Italians.
The reports are all in Italian, so you should use a translation engine if you want to read them in full. Meanwhile here is a summary.
Drawing from an incredibly rich trove of global data, this groundbreaking book reveals that human progress has been slowing down since the early 1970s. Danny Dorling uses compelling visualizations to illustrate how fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, and even the frequency of new social movements have all steadily declined over the last few generations.
