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Bowling Alone Down Under
Andrew Leigh, former economics professor at the Australian National University and recently elected as a Labor Member of Parliament, has published Disconnected. He finds that Australians, like...
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Companies using social capital data for betting on people’s lives
Flickr photo by idletype The Wall Street Journal recently noted how insurance companies (Aviva PLC, Prudential Financial, AIG) bet on whom to insure at what rates through data mining. Much of the...
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Other thin-slicing volunteering examples: Phylo, FoldIt, EterRNA and Galaxy Zoo
We wrote earlier about efforts to capture short amounts of volunteering help from individuals (thin-slice volunteering). The latest entry is Phylo, which turns comparative genomics and pattern...
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Designing games to save the world
WoW game screenshot - Flickr photo by wynter Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, notes that the amount of time that young people spend gaming is...
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Kids vying to be seen as social influencers
Social butterfly; Flickr photo by massdistracton Excerpt of WSJ piece on what PeerIndex calls the S&P rating of kids’ online social presence: When Katie Miller went to Las Vegas this Thanksgiving,...
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Interesting upcoming Harvard lunchtime talk on Internet & Social Capital
Flickr photo by www_ukberri_net On Sept. 8, 2011 at the Harvard Kennedy School at lunchtime from 12-1:30, Ludget Woessmann from Munich, Germany is speaking about his research on “The Internet and...
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OurCommonPlace/Nextdoor using technology to connect neighbors
Peter Davis, Harvard University senior, got motivated to launch OurCommonPlace in 2009 after taking Bob Putnam’s course on social capital. He co-launched OurCommonPlace with Max Novendstern confident...
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Only you can stamp out gerrymandering (UPDATED 7/30/13)
Gerrymandered 4th District Frustrated by a closed process that results in gerrymandered districts, Michael McDonald (George Mason Univ. turnout expert) and Micah Altman (Harvard) together with thinkers...
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Skepticism about “on-line community”?
For those skeptical about whether on-line communities offer the same level of social capital as in person friendships, this cartoon is for you. Source: tedmccagg.typepad.com
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Nextdoor and NYC team up to enhance neighboring
Flickr/kiki99 I’ve written in the past about efforts to use 21st century technological tools to enhance neighbors’ connections with each other, the sort that are far less common today than in the 1960s...
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