Timothy from Creative Commons writes, “A few weeks ago Diego Gómez, the former Colombian student who’s been prosecuted for sharing a research paper online, was acquitted of criminal charges.
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scholarship
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A comic that profiles Columbia University's first-ever comics curator
Nick Sousanis is the comics creator who broke ground in 2015 by being the first doctoral candidate to submit a dissertation in comics form and ever since, he’s been doing wonderful nonfiction work in the form, on subjects ranging from entropy to climate change to elections.
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Blockers will win the ad-blocking arms race
Piketty: the poorest half of Americans saw a “total collapse” in their share of the country's wealth
In a new analysis of the World Income Database published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Thomas Piketty and colleagues from the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley, describe a “collapse” of the share of US national wealth claimed by the bottom 50% of the country — down to 12% from 20% in 1978 — along with an (unsurprising) drop in income for the poorest half of America.
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You know who else invested in infrastructure? Autobahn spending was key to Hitler's consolidation of power
In Highway to Hitler, Nico Voigtländer (UCLA) and Hans‐Joachim Voth (University of Zurich)’s 2014 paper analyzing the impact of the massive infrastructure investment in creating the Autobahn, the authors conclude that the major spending project was key to Hitler’s consolidation of power.
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The secret to success in local politics: steal from the people, but not too much
In a new paper in Progress, Oxford economist Vuk Vukovic argues that the key to re-election in local politics is to be just corrupt enough: giving lucrative contracts and other benefits to special interests who’ll fund your next campaign, but not so much that the people refuse to vote for you.
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The first-ever close analysis of leaked astroturf comments from China's “50c party” reveal Beijing's cybercontrol strategy
The Harvard Institute for Quantitative Science team that published 2016’s analysis of the Chinese government’s ’50c Party’, who flood social media with government-approved comments has published a new paper, How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument, in which they reveal their painstaking analysis of a huge trove of leaked emails between 50c Party members and their government handlers.
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Around the world, old, rural voters count more than young people in cities
In The Value of a Vote: Malapportionment in
Comparative Perspective, published in the British Journal of Political Science, two scholars from the University of Minnesota Department of Political Science document more than 20 industrial democracies where the votes of rural citizens — who skew older and more conservative than their urban counterparts — carry more weight than city-dwellers’ votes.
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