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Artistic interventions in the public domain are often legitimized as opportunities for the empowerment of local communities. However, the nature of such interventions is complex and cannot be inferred from stated intentions. The interaction between agents of cultural and artistic interventions and local communities is shaped by power relationships that are seldom made explicit, let alone negotiated. Here, we analyze The Gramsci Monument, a site-specific project by Thomas Hirschhorn that took place in the Forest House neighborhood (Bronx, New York) in 2013. The project has been celebrated as an example of an emancipatory practice that involved a disenfranchised local community. We show that it could be rather taken as an example of how art-driven space domestication may lead to forms of alienation and paternalism without actual sharing of creative responsibility and negotiation with the local community. We analyze the implications of this practice through a conceptual framework of artist positionality and deontological responsibility of artistic agency.

A participação cultural mediada digitalmente é muitas vezes considerada mais inclusiva do que a tradicional participação pré-digital. Entretanto, existe uma expectativa superotimista com relação à capacidade das ferramentas e plataformas digitais de ampliar o pool de produção de conteúdo cultural. A mídia digital atual, incluindo as redes sociais mais voltadas para a criação de conteúdo plug-and-play[1], reflete uma lógica pré-digital de transmissão de conteúdo por uma elite de criadores. Precisamos considerar novas formas de participação digital fundamentadas na criação coletiva como paradigmas transformacionais de mudança comportamental e social.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic shock, the global landscape of cultural and creative production was showing clear signs of a new cycle of globalization, in which the consolidated centrality of US, and more generally Western, cultural and creative production gradually gave way to a more geographically and culturally varied geography, with the emergence of new global players. This chapter considers in particular four main trends: the shifting geography of cultural production; the emergence of participatory, decentralized content creation; the evolution of digital mega-platforms; and the tension between democratic and authoritarian forces at the global scale. The red thread behind this rapidly evolving global scenario is an increasing agency given to, or appropriated from, what was previously the passive public of mass culture, also thanks to the new possibilities opened by digital production of cultural contents that dramatically favors a democratization of content production. These bottom-up forms of production prove to be especially relevant in the post-pandemic scenario, where culture will likely connect to crucial policy topics such as rebuilding social cohesion, addressing post-pandemic mental health issues, and favoring active citizenship and inclusion. This chapter analyzes the global context, presents some emerging practices, and discusses possible future scenarios.

In this brief report we followed the evolution of the COVID-19 Infodemic Risk Index during 2020 and clarified its connection with the epidemic waves, focusing specifically on their co-evolution in Europe, South America, and South-eastern Asia. Using 640 million tweets collected by the Infodemic Observatory and the open access dataset published by Our World in Data regarding COVID-19 worldwide reported cases, we analyze the COVID-19 infodemic vs. pandemic co-evolution from January 2020 to December 2020. We find that a characteristic pattern emerges at the global scale: a decrease in misinformation on Twitter as the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases increases. Similar local variations highlight how this pattern could be influenced both by the strong content moderation policy enforced by Twitter after the first pandemic wave and by the phenomenon of selective exposure that drives users to pick the most visible and reliable news sources available.

With hindsight, the main weakness behind the ineffective response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in some countries has been the failure to understand, and take account of, the multilayered systemic interdependencies that spread the effects of the pandemic across social, technological, economic and health-care dimensions. For example, to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, all people were required to rapidly adjust to social distancing and travel restrictions. Such a complex behavioural response entails adaptation to achieve a full recovery from the systemic shock. To capitalize on the positive effects of disruption to the status quo, much more complex socioeconomic modelling needs to be considered when designing and evaluating possible public health interventions that have major behavioural implications. We provide a simple example of how this reasoning may highlight generally unacknowledged connections and interdependencies and guide the construction of scenarios that can inform policy decisions to enhance the resilience of society and tackle existing societal challenges.Avec le recul, le principal motif d'inefficacité dans la lutte contre la pandémie de maladie à coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) dans certains pays trouve son origine dans l'incapacité à comprendre les interdépendances systémiques à de multiples niveaux et à en tenir compte. Ces dernières répercutent les effets de la pandémie sur plusieurs dimensions: sociale, technologique, économique et sanitaire. Pour tenter de contenir la pandémie de COVID-19, la population a notamment été contrainte de se conformer rapidement aux mesures de distanciation physique et aux restrictions de voyage. Un changement de comportement aussi abrupt requiert un temps d'adaptation afin de se remettre totalement d'un tel choc structurel. Si l'on souhaite profiter de l'impact positif qu'exerce ce bouleversement de situation, des modèles socio-économiques bien plus complexes doivent être envisagés au moment de concevoir et d'évaluer les interventions de santé publique potentielles ayant des conséquences majeures sur le comportement. Dans le présent document, nous citons un exemple simple qui montre comment ce raisonnement pourrait mettre en lumière des connexions et interdépendances souvent méconnues, mais aussi guider l'élaboration de scénarios qui serviront à étayer les décisions politiques, accroître la résilience de la société et aborder les enjeux sociétaux actuels.En retrospectiva, el principal punto débil de la ineficacia de la respuesta a la pandemia de la enfermedad por coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) en algunos países ha sido la incapacidad de comprender y tener en cuenta las interdependencias sistémicas de varios niveles que difundieron los efectos de la pandemia en las dimensiones social, tecnológica, económica y sanitaria. Por ejemplo, para responder a la pandemia de la COVID-19, todas las personas tuvieron que adaptarse rápidamente al distanciamiento social y a las restricciones de movilidad. Una respuesta conductual tan compleja conlleva la adaptación para lograr una recuperación total del choque sistémico. Para aprovechar los efectos positivos de la alteración delهناك إدراك متأخر بأن نقطة الضعف الرئيسية التي أدت إلى عدم فعالية الاستجابة لجائحة مرض فيروس كورونا في عام 2019 (كوفيد 19) في بعض البلدان هي عدم فهم الاعتمادات المنهجية المتبادلة متعددة الطبقات ووضعها في الحسبان، وهي التي تؤدي إلى نشر آثار الجائحة عبر الأبعاد الاجتماعية والتقنية والاقتصادية والبُعد الخاص بالرعاية الصحية. للاستجابة مثلاً لجائحة كوفيد 19، كان مطلوبًا من كل الناس أن يتكيفوا سريعًا مع قيود التباعد الاجتماعي والقيود على السفر. إن مثل هذه الاستجابة السلوكية المعقدة تتطلب التكيف لتحقيق التعافي الكامل من الصدمة النظامية. للاعتماد على الآثار الإيجابية لتوقف الوضع القائم، مطلوب التفكير في وضع نماذج اجتماعية اقتصادية أكثر تعقيدًا بكثير عند تصميم وتقييم التدخلات المحتملة الخاصة بالصحة العامة والتي لها تبعات سلوكية كبيرة. نقدم مثالاً بسيطًا على أن طريقة التفكير هذه قد تلقي الضوء على علاقات واعتمادات متبادلة غير معروفة عمومًا وتقدم إرشادات لوضع سيناريوهات يمكن الاعتماد عليها في القرارات المتعلقة بالسياسة لتحسين مرونة المجتمع والتعامل مع التحديات المجتمعية القائمة.事后看来，在 2019 冠状病毒病（新型冠状病毒肺炎）疫情出现时，某些国家/地区的应对方案效果不佳，其主要原因在于未能理解和考虑到将疫情影响扩散到社会、技术、经济和医疗层面的多层系统相互依赖性。例如，为了应对新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情，要求所有人立即保持社交距离并限制出行。这种复杂的行为反应需要时间适应，才能保证整个系统从冲击中完全缓过来。为了充分利用打破现状的积极影响，在设计和评估具有重大行为影响的潜在公共卫生干预措施时，需要考虑复杂得多的社会经济模型。我们提供了一个简单的例子，来说明这种论证如何突出通常未确认的联系和相互依赖关系，并指导构建能够传达政策决定，以增强社会适应力并应对现有社会挑战的场景。.Оглядываясь назад, можно отметить, что реакция на пандемию коронавирусной инфекции 2019 года (COVID-19) в некоторых странах оказалась неэффективной, и основной причиной этого стала неспособность понять и принять во внимание многослойные системные взаимозависимости, из-за которых последствия пандемии затронули одновременно социальные, технологические, экономические и медицинские аспекты. Например, для реагирования на пандемию COVID-19 все люди должны были быстро адаптироваться к социальному дистанцированию и ограничениям на поездки. Такая сложная поведенческая реакция влечет за собой адаптацию для полного восстановления после системного шока. Чтобы извлечь выгоду из положительных последствий нарушения статус-кво, при разработке и оценке возможных мероприятий в области общественного здравоохранения, имеющих серьезные поведенческие последствия, необходимо учитывать гораздо более сложное социально-экономическое моделирование. Авторами приведен простой пример того, как это рассуждение может выявить в целом непризнанные связи и взаимозависимости и повлиять на создание сценариев, которые могут служить основой для принятия политических решений с целью повышения устойчивости общества к сложным ситуациям и увеличения возможностей решения существующих социальных проблем.

Background: Mental health problems among youth in low-resource countries are compounded by the limitations of societal stigma and the inaccessibility of traditional treatments. Therefore, there is a need to develop scalable, accessible, and stigma-free mental health interventions. We developed and tested Pre-Texts, an arts-literacy intervention that targets adolescent depression and anxiety in Kenya. Method: This was a universal RCT where high school students (N=235, ages 13-to-19, 53.19% female) were randomized to either Pre-Texts or a study skills control intervention. Pre-Texts consists of art-making exercises that interpret a literary text, like those required in school. Moments of creative expression are followed by collective reflection on the process of interpretation through art-making. Participants met daily for a week in groups of 6-12 youths (average size = 8) for one-hour sessions. Groups were facilitated by high school graduates (ages 18 - 22) trained as lay-providers. The groups met concurrently as after-school activities. Results: Compared to the control, participants in Pre-Texts reported a greater reduction in depression (d = .53, 95% CI [.22, .84]) and anxiety symptoms from baseline to 1-month follow - up (d = .57, 95% CI [.26, .87]). When we looked at a subset of youths with moderate-to-severe depression and anxiety symptoms, Pre-Texts produced a greater reduction in depression symptoms (d = .76, 95% C [.27, .1.26]) but not in anxiety symptoms (d = -.14, 95% CI [-.64, .35]). Conclusion: This report suggests that an arts-literacy intervention with challenging school material in a group setting, implemented as an afterschool program, can reduce depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa. Replication trials with larger sample sizes and extended follow-ups will help test the strength and sustainability of these effects.

Cultural and creative sectors (CCS) are increasingly recognized as a driving economic force. In addition to their undisputed soft power, creative jobs are expected to prove more resilient to automation, and may therefore play an important role in the future growth cycles of advanced global economies. But how is Brexit going to affect the UK’s flourishing creative economy at an urban level? Pre-Brexit evidence from the European Commission’s Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor (CCCM) clearly shows that UK cultural and creative cities excel in Europe in their capacity to attract and integrate foreign creative professionals. Creative non-nationals represent a diverse, crucial human capital pool for CCS, as 22% of CCS employers hire at least one non-UK worker. The effect of Brexit on the cultural and creative potential of UK cities can be devastating for CCS competitiveness if not properly addressed. As CCSs are widely regarded as leading sectors of the UK economy and major drivers of innovation and growth in the UK’s long-term developmental vision, suitable policy measures should be taken to prevent this possibility.

We conduct a field experiment involving 143, 9-years old children in their classrooms. Children are requested to flip a coin in private and receive a big or a small prize depending on the outcome they report. Comparing the actual and theoretical distribution of reported wins, we find evidence of cheating at the aggregate level. By using behavioral data gathered on previous and subsequent meetings with the same children, we are able to explore the relationship between cheating behavior, other regarding preferences, and the tendency to appeal to social norms in judging unfair behaviors. Children who are classified as concerned about inequality are less likely to cheat. Similarly, children who are more likely to appeal to social norms in judging unfair behaviors are also less likely to cheat. We find no significant relationship between inequality concern and social norms sensitivity, suggesting that these mechanisms work differently interacting with children moral behavior. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The issue of Student Evaluation of Teaching has been explored by a large literature across many decades. However, the role of social influence factors in determining teachers’ responses to a given incentive and evaluation framework has been left basically unexplored. This paper makes a first attempt in this vein by considering an evolutionary game-theoretic context where teachers face a two-stage process in which their rating depends on both students’ evaluation of their course and on retrospective students’ evaluation of their teaching output in view of students’ performance in a related follow-up course. We find that both high effort (difficult course offered) and low effort (easy course offered) outcomes may emerge, leading either to a socially optimal outcome for teachers or not, according to cases. Moreover, there may be a potential conflict between the optimal outcome for students and for teachers. We also consider possible ways to generalize our model in future research.

We study a simple opinion dynamic model where a number of influencers have the possibility of conditioning it by supporting one of two alternative narratives. Influencers choose the narrative to support in order to optimize their return. They can therefore choose to support a narrative that is socially dysfunctional with which they need not agree with, insofar as the environmental conditions make it convenient. We show in particular under what conditions the dynamic leads to social polarization, that is, eventual takeover of one narrative over the other. The critical factors in this regard are the persuasion strength of the narratives and the number of influencers who are active. Stronger persuasion and a larger number of influencers both favor the takeover of one narrative over the other. In particular, simulation results suggest that even small changes in persuasion strength may cause major changes in the social dynamic and sudden regime shifts. We discuss the policy implications of these results, with an eye to current trends in online media in reinforcement of persuasion strength, e.g. by deploying artificial bots that reverberate one narrative at the expense of the others.

In this paper, we perform a text analysis of Adam Smith’s two books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, to better characterize their highly disputed differences in terms of moral cognition. In particular, given that Smith’s ideas are still very cited and influential in the current scholarly debate on moral cognition, we are interested in understanding whether a text analysis would unveil a semantic structure that is in line with a dual process theory interpretation or, alternatively, with a neuro-emergent cognition one. We find that, despite that the intellectual koine in which Smith’s thought was originally embedded would be more in line with a dual process theory approach, the analysis reveals a better consonance with the neuro-emergent cognition approach. This opens new and interesting perspectives in future research on the moral cognition of market interactions in a Smithian tradition of thought.

The vaccine equity crisis has an extra element that makes it crucial for our capacity to tackle future major societal challenges. Unlike most of these, including the climate one, the current pandemic causes major damage that is directly observable in the very short term, that is, within the political cycle of the incumbent policymakers. If not even this kind of crisis with directly observable damage is able to influence the incentive structure of policymakers and lead to the adoption of timely and effective measures, there is no reason to expect that this would ever happen for crises whose effects largely materialize in future political cycles. As a consequence, if we fail to tackle this particular crisis effectively now, we are creating an enormous credibility problem for future crises that could seriously undermine our capacity to reach binding agreements in the future.

The infection caused by SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is characterized by an infectious period with either asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic phases, leading to a rapid surge of mild and severe cases putting national health systems under serious stress. To avoid their collapse, and in the absence of pharmacological treatments, during the early pandemic phase countries worldwide were forced to adopt strategies, from elimination to mitigation, based on non-pharmacological interventions which, in turn, overloaded social, educational and economic systems. To date, the heterogeneity and incompleteness of data sources does not allow to quantify the multifaceted impact of the pandemic at country level and, consequently, to compare the effectiveness of country responses. Here, we tackle this challenge from a complex systems perspective, proposing a model to evaluate the impact of systemic failures in response to the pandemic shock. We use health, behavioral and economic indicators for 44 countries to build a shock index quantifying responses in terms of robustness and resilience, highlighting the crucial advantage of proactive policy and decision making styles over reactive ones, which can be game-changing during the emerging of a new variant of concern.

Data availability statement: The data analyzed in the current study are from the publicly accessible English Google Books online repository, https://books.google.com/ngrams. This is a pre-copyedited preprint made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License at OSF Preprints (https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/xgqt5). It has not been certified by peer review. Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Within the conceptual framework of the Tightness-Looseness (TL) paradigm, we study the dynamics of the social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations across the 20th century on the basis of the English Google Books corpus, by means of the construction of specific lexica of which we track their relative frequency. We find that whereas the trend of self-control displays a steady increase throughout, that of self-restraint is U-shaped, so that following a decline along the most part of the century, starting from the late 70s-early 80s we observe a reversal of the trend that signals an increasing salience of self-control. Such result seems to reflect the consumerist turn that has characterized the post-industrial cycle from the 80s onwards. The coexistence of growing trends for mutually antagonizing orientations calls for further analysis of their social interplay. We also perform a parallel analysis on semantically related lexica that confirm the robustness of our findings. No funding was received for conducting this study. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/xgqt5

The purpose of this paper is to take part in the debate about power relationships in contemporary cities between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities, as mediated by cultural and artistic interventions and projects. Our study proposes a new conceptual frame, focused on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the interpretation of cities as social and participatory spaces. The notions we consider may be traced to two key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and lay the foundation for alternative analytical paradigms of the contemporary urban condition, in relation to artistic and cultural practices in the public space. We draw upon these two alternative readings of heterotopia to explore the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space as a contested terrain from the viewpoint of power relationships. In our analysis, we find that Foucault's notion of heterotopia is potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification. Lefebvre's notion is instead possibly more suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city.

This article examines the implicit space grammar of the cultural vibrancy of the region of Halland in Southwest Sweden. By using a new computational approach, we implement for the first time a methodology that allows us, on the one side, to extrapolate the complex dynamic evolution of the region’s cultural geography and, on the other side, to diagnose the structural causes of its eventual decay. The results provide a basis for a more systematic approach to evidence-based policy design at the regional scale, and for a more participatory, bottom-up public decision-making in the cultural and other policy spheres.

In a recent paper by Valensise et al [1], the authors present an analysis of social media data – from Facebook and Twitter – and vaccine hesitancy data – from Facebook – to provide evidence that the overabundance of potentially unreliable information, known as infodemic, does not affect vaccine acceptance. If confirmed, this result could have a dramatic impact on public health policies across the world, suggesting that current actions taken in place to contain and prevent the spreading of disinformation and misinformation might be useless to significantly hinder vaccine hesitancy. We disagree with this conclusion on the basis of existing literature that the authors fail to consider,of methodological concerns that suggest that their approach might have crucial flaws, and of an alternative empirical analysis unraveling a broader and richer picture to interpret.Simplistic analyses are not enough to assess the complex interplay between two complex social and behavioral phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy and infodemic: more sophisticated analyses are needed to account for the different intervening socio-cultural, behavioral, environmental and epidemiological factors. Under these conditions, we conclude that the authors’ main claim is conceptually and empirically unsupported. We are sincerely concerned that, if measures disregarding the circulating disinformation around the COVID19 vaccines were endorsed by policy makers in the design of future public health policies, it might lead to serious negative consequences by dangerously overlooking a major potential driver of dysfunctional behavioral responses to public health policies and goals.

Despite the prominent role played by bibliometric indicators for evaluating research, progress in pinning down the determinants of citation flows has so far been hindered by endogeneity issues. Based on 30 years of bibliometric data, we exploit a Regression Discontinuity Design to causally identify the effects that an article featured on the cover of the journal Nature has on citations to all articles by its authors. We confirm that, over time, cover articles are cited significantly more than non-cover articles, with this difference being long-lasting. However, when considering all articles by Nature authors, we find evidence of a crowding-out effect: the publication of a cover article causes citations to previous articles by its authors to decline sharply relative to citations to articles by non-cover authors.

Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting rules affect the way users interact and information spreads. Acknowledging the relation between network connectivity and functionality, we compare the robustness of two different online social platforms, Twitter and Gab, with respect to banning, or dismantling, strategies based on the recursive censor of users characterized by social prominence (degree) or intensity of inflammatory content (sentiment). We find that the moderated (Twitter) vs. unmoderated (Gab) character of the network is not a discriminating factor for intervention effectiveness. We find, however, that more complex strategies based upon the combination of topological and content features may be effective for network dismantling. Our results provide useful indications to design better strategies for countervailing the production and dissemination of anti-social content in online social platforms.

BACKGROUND An infodemic is an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. OBJECTIVE A World Health Organization (WHO) technical consultation on responding to the infodemic related to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic was held, entirely online, to crowdsource suggested actions for a framework for infodemic management. METHODS A group of policy makers, public health professionals, researchers, students, and other concerned stakeholders was joined by representatives of the media, social media platforms, various private sector organizations, and civil society to suggest and discuss actions for all parts of society, and multiple related professional and scientific disciplines, methods, and technologies. A total of 594 ideas for actions were crowdsourced online during the discussions and consolidated into suggestions for an infodemic management framework. RESULTS The analysis team distilled the suggestions into a set of 50 proposed actions for a framework for managing infodemics in health emergencies. The consultation revealed six policy implications to consider. First, interventions and messages must be based on science and evidence, and must reach citizens and enable them to make informed decisions on how to protect themselves and their communities in a health emergency. Second, knowledge should be translated into actionable behavior-change messages, presented in ways that are understood by and accessible to all individuals in all parts of all societies. Third, governments should reach out to key communities to ensure their concerns and information needs are understood, tailoring advice and messages to address the audiences they represent. Fourth, to strengthen the analysis and amplification of information impact, strategic partnerships should be formed across all sectors, including but not limited to the social media and technology sectors, academia, and civil society. Fifth, health authorities should ensure that these actions are informed by reliable information that helps them understand the circulating narratives and changes in the flow of information, questions, and misinformation in communities. Sixth, following experiences to date in responding to the COVID-19 infodemic and the lessons from other disease outbreaks, infodemic management approaches should be further developed to support preparedness and response, and to inform risk mitigation, and be enhanced through data science and sociobehavioral and other research. CONCLUSIONS The first version of this framework proposes five action areas in which WHO Member States and actors within society can apply, according to their mandate, an infodemic management approach adapted to national contexts and practices. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the related infodemic require swift, regular, systematic, and coordinated action from multiple sectors of society and government. It remains crucial that we promote trusted information and fight misinformation, thereby helping save lives.

Overtourism is an increasingly relevant problem for tourist destinations, and some cities are starting to take extreme measures to counter it. In this paper, we introduce a simple mathematical model that analyzes the dynamics of the populations of residents and tourists when there is a competition for the access to local services and resources, since the needs of the two populations are partly mutually incompatible. We study under what conditions a stable equilibrium where residents and tourists coexist is reached, and what are the conditions for tourists to take over the city and to expel residents, among others. Even small changes in key parameters may bring about very different outcomes. Policymakers should be aware that a sound knowledge of the structural properties of the dynamics is important when taking measures, whose effect could otherwise be different than expected and even counterproductive.

In this paper, we investigate, by means of a Spatial Markov Chains approach, the existence of proximity effects at State level for US data on obesity rates in the period 1990-2011. We find that proximity effects do play an important role in the spatial diffusion of obesity (the obesity 'epidemics'), and that the actual health geography of nearby States in terms of high vs. low obesity rates makes an important difference as to the future evolution of the State's own obesity rate over time. This means, in particular, that clusters of States characterized by uniformly high levels of obesity rates, as it happens for instance in the US Southern macro-region, may suffer from a perverse 'geographical lock-in' effect that calls for coordinated action across States to implement effective countervailing policies.

Our society is built on a complex web of interdependencies whose effects become manifest during extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with shocks in one system propagating to the others to an exceptional extent. We analyzed more than 100 millions Twitter messages posted worldwide in 64 languages during the epidemic emergency due to SARS-CoV-2 and classified the reliability of news diffused. We found that waves of unreliable and low-quality information anticipate the epidemic ones, exposing entire countries to irrational social behavior and serious threats for public health. When the epidemics hit the same area, reliable information is quickly inoculated, like antibodies, and the system shifts focus towards certified informational sources. Contrary to mainstream beliefs, we show that human response to falsehood exhibits early-warning signals that might be mitigated with adequate communication strategies., Comment: The dataset analyzed in this paper can be interactively visualized and accessed at https://covid19obs.fbk.eu/

Understanding reciprocal relationships between specific arenas in life and at work is critical for designing interventions to improve workplace health and safety. Most studies about the links between dimensions of well-being in life and at work have been cross-sectional and usually narrowly focused on one of the dimensions of the work-life well-being link. The issues of causality and feedback between life and work well-being have often not been addressed. We overcome these issues by measuring six aspects of well-being for both the work arena and life in general, using longitudinal data with a clear temporal sequence of cause and effect, and by explicitly accounting for feedback with potential effects in both directions. Nine hundred and fifty-four Mexican apparel factory workers at a major global brand participated in two waves of the Worker Well-Being Survey. Data on life satisfaction and job satisfaction, happiness and positive affect, meaning and purpose, health, and social relationships in life and at work were used. Lagged regression controlling for confounders and prior outcomes was employed. Sensitivity analysis was used to assess the robustness of the results to potential unmeasured confounding. For the relationships between life satisfaction and job satisfaction and between happiness in life and happiness at work effects in both directions were found. Nevertheless, indication of a larger effect of life satisfaction on job satisfaction than the reverse was obtained. For depression and meaning in life, there was evidence for an effect of life well-being on work-related well-being, but not for the reverse. For social relationships and purpose, there was evidence for an effect of work-related well-being on life well-being, but not the reverse. Relationships based on the longitudinal data were considerably weaker than their respective cross-sectional associations. This study contributes to our understanding of the nature of the relationship between aspects of well-being in the arenas of life and work. Findings from this study may facilitate the development of novel workplace programs promoting working conditions that enable lifelong flourishing in life and at work.

We analyze different scenarios of defensive medicine in a unique game theoretic framework, representing a healing relationship between a physician and a patient. The physician should choose between providing the optimal treatment or an inferior one, which can amount to practicing defensive medicine. The patient should choose whether to litigate or not, if an adverse event occurs. When both agents have no dominant strategy, we obtain four scenarios representing the positive and negative forms of defensive medicine, with or without physician's moral hazard. We find that certain legal parameters can have opposite effects on the probabilities that physicians practice defensive medicine and that patients litigate, depending respectively on the form of defensive medicine and on the presence of moral hazard. This result can explain the ambiguous results, reported in empirical literature, of legal reforms aimed at discouraging defensive medicine and medical malpractice litigation.

In this paper, we critically examine the role of artistic locational choices and practices in the context of gentrification processes in urban renewal contexts. We characterize gentrification as a ...

There is ample literature on residents' perceptions of the costs and benefits of tourism activities. Much less attention has been provided to residents' perceptions of transformational cultural events redefining local identity and tourism demand. We examine one such case study, the Lucca Comics and Games (LCAG), whose interest also derives from the fact that Lucca is an established Italian heritage city, with relevant attraction capacity for traditional heritage tourism. We have administered a questionnaire to a sample of the local population (411 interviews), with high educational and cultural access levels. We find that LCAG-related tourism is perceived to have differential impact with respect to tourism in general on several dimensions of interest, both in terms of perceived costs and benefits, also as an effect of cognitive biases. Our results provide interesting implications in terms of the role of transformational cultural events such as LCAG in driving change in heritage cities.

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to the analysis and prediction of the spatial pattern of terrorist attacks. Our analysis makes use of a new methodology that is based upon a topological rather than geometric approach. It exploits the space grammar of the observed events to derive complex inferences which relate to the deep structural layers of the data generating process, and to the organizational architecture of its spatial distribution. We test our methodology on two of the currently most important and virulent theaters of terrorist activity, Libya and Syria, and we find that our methodology provides a rich array of insights which cannot be expected to be generated by more traditional geographical profiling methods.

This paper presents an innovative operationalization of world-system analysis through attributional data, and makes use of an innovative Artificial Neural Network computational tool, the Auto-Contractive Map (AutoCM), to analyze the core-periphery structure of a database including five well-known, publicly available indicators that can jointly be considered an empirical proxy of an open society formulation of Western governmentality: World Competitiveness Index; Freedom of Press Index; Economic Freedom Index; Corruption Perception Index; and UNDP Human Development Index. We find clear evidence of a core-periphery structure in the data, which is largely coherent with a benchmark version obtained through an alternative computational method, the Self-Organizing Map (SOM). Moreover, we find that the resulting meta-geography of the world-system is still shaped by the colonialist geopolitics of the British Commonwealth as the key organizational backbone.

In this paper, we generalize a model by Enquist and Ghirlanda [12] to analyze the “macro” dynamics of cumulative culture in a context where there is a coexistence of adaptive and maladaptive cultural traits. In particular, we introduce a different, nonlinear specification of the main processes at work in the cumulative culture dynamics: imperfect transmission of traits, generation of new traits, and switches from adaptive to maladaptive and vice-versa. We find that the system exhibits a variety of dynamic behaviors where the crucial force is the switching between the adaptive and maladaptive nature of a certain trait, with the other processes playing a modulating role. We identify in particular a number of dynamic regimes with distinctive characteristics.

The paper presents the case study of the so called Halland Model, a pioneering example of strategic inter-sector coordination focused upon cultural heritage conservation, which has solved a major s ...

In this paper, we present an innovative data processing architecture, the Activation & Competition System (ACS), and show how this methodology allows us to reconstruct in detail some aspects of the fine grained structure of global relationships in the world order perspective, on the basis of a minimal dataset only consisting of the values of five publicly available indicators for 2007 for the 118 countries for which they are jointly available. ACS seems in particular to qualify as a valuable tool for the analysis of inter-country patterns of conflict and alliances, which may prove of special interest in the current situation of global strategic uncertainty in international relations.

This paper examines Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as a unique literary canvas to reformulate the relationship between narratives and planning practices. It does so from the vantage point of the Frame, namely, the dialogues between the Khan (the planner) and Marco Polo (the resident/traveler) punctuating the imaginary cities described in the book. Read through with the aid of narratological concepts, the Frame functions a mini-treatise on urban complexity, structured along nine dyads of oppositional concepts (e.g., chaos vs. meaning; reality vs. possibility), which call into question as many planning milestones (e.g., control, purpose, model, balance), fostering an original reflection on the limitations and potentials of planning practices.

We develop an ANN-based approach to the analysis of country and top corporate brands.We find that Germany is the hub in the global MST positioning of country brands.We find that the USA is marginally positioned in the same global MST.We reconstruct the global topology of MST country positioning. Working on the top 100 Interbrand world corporate brands dataset over the 10-years period 2001-10, we analyze the relative positioning of country brands as derived from the structural characteristics of the corresponding portfolios of top corporate brands. We find that the structural complexity of both sector and country variables are not correlated with brand equity. Moreover, we apply an innovative ANN methodology, AutoCM, to build the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) of the multi-dimensional similarities among the top corporate brands structures at country level, and carry out a further related analysis in terms of the so called Maximum Regular Graph (MRG). We find that while the USA dominates the ranking of top brands at a global level, it does not have a central positioning in the MST and MRG, whereas Germany and other European and Far-Eastern countries do. We show how these results may have significant implications for the strategic intelligence analysis of country and corporate brands, and of their inter-relatedness. Moreover, we illustrate how AutoCM qualifies as a new computational approach that usefully expands the toolbox of scholars and analysts in corporate and country branding in a relevant, as yet unexplored direction.

This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel (Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan, Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis, we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents through inclusive cultural participat...

In this paper, we introduce a new methodology for the evaluation of alternative algorithms in capturing the deep statistical structure of datasets of different types and nature, called MST Fitness, and based on the notion of Minimum Spanning Tree (MST). We test this methodology on six different databases, some of which artificial and widely used in similar experimentations, and some related to real world phenomena. Our test set consists of eight different algorithms, including some widely known and used, such as Principal Component Analysis, Linear Correlation, or Euclidean Distance. We moreover consider more sophisticated Artificial Neural Network based algorithms, such as the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and a relatively new algorithm called Auto-Contractive Map (AutoCM). We find that, for our benchmark of datasets, AutoCM performs consistently better than all other algorithms for all of the datasets, and that its global performance is superior to that of the others of several orders of magnitude. It is to be checked in future research if AutoCM can be considered a truly general-purpose algorithm for the analysis of heterogeneous categories of datasets.

This paper investigates the relationship between neighborhood effects and pro-environmental behavior. Working on 1999–2012 data on separate waste collection in Italian provinces, a spatial econometric analysis is carried out. While a substantial stream of research focuses on recycling behavior determinants, spatial dependence among different inter-regional geographical areas has been less studied. Here, empirical support is provided to the existence of spatial effects and heterogeneous behavior in the Italian context. It is found that waste collecting habits tend to be strongly influenced by proximity effects, either in a positive or negative way. Moreover, the paper tests the nature of such influence in terms of time effects, by evaluating non-contemporary spatial dependence. “Good” (or “bad”) pro-environmental behavior as a persistent dynamic effect is found, with the possibility of both self-sustaining virtuous socio-spatial dynamics and perverse lock in. These results call for a rethinking of environmental policies, and in particular for a stronger focus upon the social dimension of spatial diffusion phenomena in pro-environmental behaviors.

We introduce a taxonomy of museum environments, based upon three dimensions: the auratic/non-auratic character of the environment, visitors’ cultural attendance, and level of cultural attendance of the social context. We consider a case study of a museum environment characterized by the least favourable socio-cognitive conditions, and conduct a study on 102 museum visitors about their cognitive performance in terms of attention and recall, cultural habits, evaluation of museum services, and psychological well-being. In spite of a fair cognitive performance in terms of attention and recall and a general satisfaction with the museum environment features, a weak relationship between performance and cultural habits, and between cultural habits and psychological well-being, is found. We conclude that museum policies for low-attendance museum environments should be carefully reconsidered in order to stimulate visitors to develop more culturally oriented habits, with possible positive impacts also in ter...

We carry out a critical analysis of current participation practices in urban regeneration processes. Many concrete examples suffer from major flaws in terms of instrumental or ineffective involvement of parts of the community, and especially of the weakest and most deprived constituencies, at the advantage of more affluent and experienced ones, which are familiar enough with institutionalized public decision making to surf and manipulate the deliberation dynamics at their own advantage. Below a superficial rhetoric of inclusion, cosmetic forms of participation are therefore at risk of perpetuating and even exacerbating existing inequalities. We then explore new possibilities for more effective and sustainable forms of participation, most notably social storytelling, community informatics, and relational public art and culture projects. A new, interesting frontier of future experimentation in participation practices can be found in innovative forms of coalescence among these three streams of activity, as testified by a few state of the art pilot projects and experiences.

In 2018, Valletta will be the European Capital of Culture. A series of four international conferences has been organized along the path to the ECoC year, dealing with some of its key topics, one for each year from 2014 to 2017. This special issue presents a small selection of papers from the 2015 conference on cultural mapping and its relation with culture-led development.