Author: Matthew Salganik
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Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?
Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things. One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.” Based in part on this kind of…
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What our students found when they tried to break their bubbles
This is the second part of a two-part series about a class project on online filter bubbles. In this post, where we focus on the results. You can read more about our pedagogical approach and how we carried out the project here. By Janet Xu and Matthew J. Salganik This past spring, we taught an…
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Breaking your bubble
This is the first part of a two-part series about a class project on online filter bubbles. In this post, we talk about our pedagogical approach and how we carried out the project. To read more about the results of the project, go to Part Two. By Janet Xu and Matthew J. Salganik The 2016…
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Announcing the Open Review Toolkit
I’m happy to announce the release of the Open Review Toolkit, open source software that enables you to convert your book manuscript into a website that can be used for Open Review. During the Open Review process everyone can read and annotate your manuscript, and you can collect valuable data to help launch your book.…
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Open Review leads to better books
My book manuscript, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, is now in Open Review. That means that while the book manuscript goes through traditional peer review, I also posted it online for a parallel Open Review. During the Open Review everyone—not just traditional peer reviewers—can read the manuscript and help make it…
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After the Facebook emotional contagion experiment: A proposal for a positive path forward
Now that some of the furor over the Facebook emotional contagion experiment has passed, it is time for us to decide what should happen next. The public backlash has the potential to drive a wedge between the tech industry and the social science research community. This would be a loss for everyone: tech companies, academia,…
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Wikipedia Banner Challenge
As you can tell from the banners appearing all over Wikipedia, their fundraiser is in full swing. Despite Wikipedia’s importance as a global resource, only about one in a thousand Wikipedia readers donate. One way to improve that would be better banners, and that’s why my research group is launching the Wikipedia Banner Challenge, a…
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Governor Genro tops President Obama on Citizen Feedback: "The Governer Asks" vs. "Open for Questions"
Something neat is happening in Porto Alegre, Brazil today. Governor Tarso Genro, of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is meeting with some of his constituents. Of course, that’s pretty normal; governors meet with constituents all the time. What is neat is how those constituents were selected. They are not the ones with the…
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Finding the best ideas in the world
Policy-makers often strive to solicit ideas from the public, but making this process effective is very, very hard. Americans need only think back to the health-reform town hall meetings last summer, many of which devolved into chaos. Online approaches, such as President Obama’s virtual town hall meeting, have also ran into problems. So, how can…