Pushing "reset" on sustainable development

This repository item contains a single issue of Sustainable Development Insights, a series of short policy essays that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The series seeks to promote a broad interdisciplinary dialogue on how to accelerate sustainable development at all levels.This issue explores how to continue accelerating sustainable development in an era of financial collapse and if sustainable development requires a “reset”. The paper concludes, “Perhaps the word ‘reset’ – a return to an original state, in this case the origins of our understanding of sustainable development, in terms of both systems science and social change – is the right metaphor after all.

Coaxial capacitor used to determine fluid density

Sensing device measures directly the density of compressible fluid existing simultaneously in both liquid and gaseous phases. The device is comprised of a capacitor connected as one leg of a bridge circuit, a power source, and an indicator calibrated to indicate density as a direct measurement

Apparatus having coaxial capacitor structure for measuring fluid density Patent

Capacitor for measuring density of compressible fluid in liquid, gas, or liquid and gas phase

A dynamic over games drives selfish agents to win-win outcomes

Understanding the evolution of human social systems requires flexible formalisms for the emergence of institutions. Although game theory is normally used to model interactions individually, larger spaces of games can be helpful for modeling how interactions change. We introduce a framework for modeling "institutional evolution," how individuals change the games they are placed in. We contrast this with the more familiar within-game "behavioral evolution". Starting from an initial game, agents trace trajectories through game space by repeatedly navigating to more preferable games until they converge on attractor games that are preferred to all others. Agents choose between games on the basis of their "institutional preferences," which define between-game comparisons in terms of game-level features such as stability, fairness, and efficiency. Computing institutional change trajectories over the two-player space, we find that the attractors of self-interested economic agents over-represent fairness by 100% relative to baseline, even though those agents are indifferent to fairness. This seems to occur because fairness, as a game feature, co-occurs with the self-serving features these agents do prefer. We thus present institutional evolution as a mechanism for encouraging the spontaneous emergence of cooperation among inherently selfish agents. We then extend these findings beyond two players, and to two other types of evolutionary agent: the relative fitness maximizing agent of evolutionary game theory (who maximizes inequality), and the relative group fitness maximizing agent of multi-level/group selection theory (who minimizes inequality). This work provides a flexible, testable formalism for modeling the interdependencies of behavioral and institutional evolutionary processes.Comment: 4500 words, 4 figures, 1 supplementary figur

Adult Learners in a Novel Environment Use Prestige-Biased Social Learning

Social learning (learning from others) is evolutionarily adaptive under a wide range of conditions and is a long-standing area of interest across the social and biological sciences. One social-learning mechanism derived from cultural evolutionary theory is prestige bias, which allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively gather information as to the potentially best teachers, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavior. Learners provide deference to high-status individuals in order to ingratiate themselves with, and gain extended exposure to, that individual. We examined prestige-biased social transmission in a laboratory experiment in which participants designed arrowheads and attempted to maximize hunting success, measured in caloric return. Our main findings are that (1) participants preferentially learned from prestigious models (defined as those models at whom others spent longer times looking), and (2) prestige information and success-related information were used to the same degree, even though the former was less useful in this experiment than the latter. We also found that (3) participants were most likely to use social learning over individual (asocial) learning when they were performing poorly, in line with previous experiments, and (4) prestige information was not used more often following environmental shifts, contrary to predictions. These results support previous discussions of the key role that prestige-biased transmission plays in social learning

Do We Run How We Say We Run? Formalization and Practice of Governance in OSS Communities

Open Source Software (OSS) communities often resist regulation typical of traditional organizations. Yet formal governance systems are being increasingly adopted among communities, particularly through non-profit mentor foundations. Our study looks at the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program and 208 projects it supports. We assemble a scalable, semantic pipeline to discover and analyze the governance behavior of projects from their mailing lists. We then investigate the reception of formal policies among communities, through their own governance priorities and internalization of the policies. Our findings indicate that while communities observe formal requirements and policies as extensively as they are defined, their day-to-day governance focus does not dwell on topics that see most formal policy-making. Moreover formalization, be it dedicating governance focus or adopting policy, has limited association with project sustenance

Focus on the success of others leads to selfish behavior

It has often been argued that the spectacular cognitive capacities of humans are the result of selection for the ability to gather, process, and use information about other people. Recent studies show that humans strongly and consistently differ in what type of social information they are interested in. Although some individuals mainly attend to what the majority is doing (frequency-based learning), others focus on the success that their peers achieve with their behavior (success-based learning). Here, we show that such differences in social learning have important consequences for the outcome of social interactions. We report on a decision-making experiment in which individuals were first classified as frequency and success-based learners and subsequently grouped according to their learning strategy. When confronted with a social dilemma situation, groups of frequency-based learners cooperated considerably more than groups of success-based learners. A detailed analysis of the decision-making process reveals that these differences in cooperation are a direct result of the differences in information use. Our results show that individual differences in social learning strategies are crucial for understanding social behavior

The Relationship between Therapeutic Alliance and Service User Satisfaction in Mental Health Inpatient Wards and Crisis House Alternatives: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Poor service user experiences are often reported on mental health inpatient wards. Crisis houses are an alternative, but evidence is limited. This paper investigates therapeutic alliances in acute wards and crisis houses, exploring how far stronger therapeutic alliance may underlie greater client satisfaction in crisis houses. Methods and Findings Mixed methods were used. In the quantitative component, 108 crisis house and 247 acute ward service users responded to measures of satisfaction, therapeutic relationships, informal peer support, recovery and negative events experienced during the admission. Linear regressions were conducted to estimate the association between service setting and measures, and to model the factors associated with satisfaction. Qualitative interviews exploring therapeutic alliances were conducted with service users and staff in each setting and analysed thematically. Results We found that therapeutic alliances, service user satisfaction and informal peer support were greater in crisis houses than on acute wards, whilst self-rated recovery and numbers of negative events were lower. Adjusted multivariable analyses suggest that therapeutic relationships, informal peer support and negative experiences related to staff may be important factors in accounting for greater satisfaction in crisis houses. Qualitative results suggest factors that influence therapeutic alliances include service user perceptions of basic human qualities such as kindness and empathy in staff and, at service level, the extent of loss of liberty and autonomy. Conclusions and Implications We found that service users experience better therapeutic relationships and higher satisfaction in crisis houses compared to acute wards, although we cannot exclude the possibility that differences in service user characteristics contribute to this. This finding provides some support for the expansion of crisis house provision. Further research is needed to investigate why acute ward service users experience a lack of compassion and humanity from ward staff and how this could be changed