Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Dundee x Mexico City: A Tale of Two Cities
For the last five years, the Small Society Lab has brought together Dundee academics, creatives and members of the public around various topics affecting the small city of the future. It was born of a feeling that small cities and large towns don’t get the attention they deserve, despite a large chunk of the UK…
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Four Makerspaces and a Shed
Over the past three months, I’ve been doing site visits to maker and hacker spaces across Scotland. For the first phase of In the Making, we’re surveying existing facilities in the UK to identify what opportunities and challenges they might present to disabled users. Two Types of Space It quickly became clear that makerspaces fell…
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Unveiling Sagacity at Edinburgh Science Festival
For the past year or so I’ve been working with Aidan Moseby, Clive Gilman from DCA and my colleague Jon Rogers on a small project for New Media Scotland Alt-w fund. We were one of a number of projects comissioned to complement Ginsberg, a newly-launched app designed to improve health and wellbeing through mood-tracking and self-reflection.…
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TICTeC 2015: Revisiting the Myth of Digital Democracy
I recently read Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy [1], in which he tears down the notion that the Internet has significantly democratised participation in the political sphere. I particularly enjoyed his data driven, economics approach to the issue, which reminded me of the methods used in Freakonomics [2] and my very favourite example of counter-intuitive cause…
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TICTeC 2015: Take-Home Thoughts on Civic Tech
At the end of March I attended the first TICTeC conference, run by mySociety in London. If you haven’t come across mySociety yet, you will almost certainly have come across one of their websites, including TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and YourNextMP. They now have a research programme aimed at understanding how effective these tools are, part of which includes running an…
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