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Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.

The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.

you said: “Especially given the by-now-clichéd recognition that we’ve decisively become an urban species”

It is indeed very interesting to think about urban systems design given there was a major move toward cities. That said I have the feeling that this move comes with, at least, three issues:

1. access to the “thought” urban environment,

2. the space left where 50% of the population is still living,

3. the space of this growth

There are many areas in the world where the growth of the cities is made by people without access or a limited access to the thought urban environment. Poor people living in slums or just in a space which is not part of the work of urban planner per say. In a recent exhibition about slums I went, it was very interesting to see that the organic structure of the slums was making possible for the individuals to create a rich and meaningful space, driving sometimes to less criminality than more traditional areas of the city. The slum is a forced collective creative space for survival.

The rest of the population, the 50% living in deserted areas are the forgotten of this story. It’s indeed more “fun”, interesting for researchers, sociologists to observe and think about the density in urban space (richness of interactions) more than the low level of activities in the “countryside”. Though there are equal challenges there in terms of design and space organization, access to services, etc.

Finally, is it really cities which are growing? What we call urban space often relates to the city center, but I have the feeling that the growth is happening in the in-between space (suburbs), which is again a complete disaster in terms of design, even more so in rich countries. The private space is becoming a space of non-creativity, dead areas of non activities. Someone, who wants to start a small business in between two buildings on the grass of a random suburb of a rich city, will not last for very long. Complete different dynamic than the slum where unregulated areas give the opportunity of creative solutions for surviving or living.

Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects. The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”.

Founded in 1999, the Rhizome ArtBase is an online archive of new media art containing some 2503 art works, and growing. The ArtBase encompasses a vast range of projects by artists all over the world that employ materials such as software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers to aesthetic and critical ends. We welcome submissions to the ArtBase; they are reviewed by our curatorial staff on a monthly basis.

Dr. Arrold has been growing mushrooms in the Mittagong tunnel for more than twenty years, starting with ordinary soil-based white button mushrooms and Cremini, before switching to focus on higher maintenance (and more profitable) exotics such as Shimeji, Wood-ear, Shiitake, and Oyster mushrooms.

There are also no such things as “digital natives.” Just because many of today’s youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don’t. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning.

The good news is that the eco-friendly trend seems to be growing. Chinese factories produce a third of the world’s solar cells and China will soon lead the world in wind turbines.

OpenStreetMap.org’s RESTful API allows anyone to access data on their continually growing collaborative map of the world… in XML. This is great for most applications, but if you’re working in JavaScript (as we are), XML might as well be greek. We need JSON.