New papers on Technology & society
36 new papers on technology & society in the last 7 days, within Economy & society. These are the 36 Pipette rates most worth reading, with the main result in the authors' own words.
The best of the week
Why Does Misinformation Propagate Faster? An Algorithmic Perspective on X
Our diagnosis, therefore, yields a simple and deployable fix, a reflective-threshold gate that withholds amplification until a tweet is predicted to draw thoughtful engagement, which we find to reallocate exposure away from low-credibility content at no cost to mainstream exposure and with no loss of engagement.
PreprintBold claims, read criticallyClaims a big stepReal-world useAI-written admissions essays are widespread but penalized
These improvements, however, came with an apparent AI penalty: Applicants submitting AI-written essays were admitted less often than comparable non-users.
PreprintBroad interestEasy to readAI-Enabled Human Memory Manipulation: Misleading AI-Generated Summaries Distort Human Memory
People who read a misleading AI summary were significantly less likely to accurately recall the original event, compared to people who read an accurate AI summary.
PreprintBroad interestReal-world useEasy to readTwo Fault Lines: Latent Polarity Geometry in X Community Notes
The space is at least two-dimensional.
PreprintReal-world useScience still has expertise; what it’s lost is authority
A new idea in philosophy called the "unicontext" suggests that the advance of technology, along with basic human desires, has been leading to this point for the past century.
Peer-reviewed journalBroad interestEasy to readImproving Today, Narrowing Tomorrow: Collective Learning, Diversity, and Generativity
Generative AI makes a paradox newly visible: learning from a common source can improve what each firm does today while narrowing the variety available for tomorrow's discoveries.
PreprintLarge Language Models in the UK: Public Use, Trust, and Attitudes
We also find that trust in LLM-generated information is relatively high, but that public attitudes towards LLMs are characterised by both optimism and concern.
Preprint with a published versionBroad interestEasy to readQuantifying AI impact in energy transitions: The Energy Justice Impact Assessment (EJIA) framework
We therefore introduce the Energy Justice Impact Assessment (EJIA) framework.
PreprintReal-world useTowards a Platform for Mastering Personal Sovereignty
We argue for a fundamental rethinking of this situation and propose a virtual, trustworthy platform, called "MyVirtualME" that acts on behalf of the human individual towards companies, administrations, and other actors.
PreprintBold claims, read criticallyReal-world useEasy to readShopping by algorithm: How agentic AI deploys human heuristics as a surrogate consumer
This research demonstrates that marketing heuristics in delegated AI shopping are governed by storefront information architecture, not necessarily immutable LLM flaws.
PreprintReal-world useWatching What We Eat: Information Quality and Body Image in Diet-Related YouTube Videos
Surprisingly, we find that videos around personal storytelling and mindset & motivation are associated with higher-quality content, whereas supplement reviews (arguably more medically sensitive ones) are not.
Preprint with a published versionReal-world useUnused power surge compromises U.S. road vehicles sustainability
By introducing the usage factor as a metric linking structure to activity, we quantify decoupling mechanisms such as engine oversizing and fleet redundancy, which drive up material immobilization.
PreprintReal-world useArtificial Intelligence as an Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, and Social Transformation
Such an approach is insufficient because AI is also transforming the allocation of capital, energy, natural resources, labour, and political power.
PreprintReal-world useWhen AI Enters the Workplace, Who Faces Greater Risks? A Gendered Analysis
A triangulation of these results with existing literature suggests that women, particularly those in the most vulnerable positions (lower-skilled and lower-paid female-dominated occupations), may face greater exposure to forms of AI associated with task automation, job restructuring, reduction of wages and limited career progression.
PreprintFair Feed Ranking for Participatory Budgeting
In this simulation, FairFeed broadens proposal discovery, distributes visibility more evenly across the eligible pool, increases cross-cutting support, and improves resistance to manipulation relative to comment-based ranking.
Preprint with a published versionReal-world useYour Programming Students' Cognition with ChatGPT: Higher Performance, Lower Retention, and Reduced Ownership
These findings reveal a gap between assisted task performance and subsequent recall and sense of ownership in this setting.
PreprintAnticipatory Human Oversight of Agentic AI: A Philosophical Account
This paper argues that reactive oversight must be complemented by an anticipatory mode: oversight exercised before the agent acts, by specifying the normative agenda that structures the space of permissible action and refining it iteratively through specification, runtime, and inspection.
PreprintAI-Moderated Interviews for Market Research and Digital Twins Calibration
AI moderation matches human moderation in depth, covers more themes, and, holding budget constant, recovers significantly more customer needs than human moderation or static interviews.
PreprintReal-world use"We'll Fix It Later": Education, AI, and the Deferral of Privacy in EdTech
Our interviews reveal a recurring organizational pattern in which privacy is recognized as important but deferred across the product lifecycle as organizations prioritize product functionality, growth, funding, and immediate educational outcomes.
PreprintReal-world useFrom Pattern Recognizers to Personalized Companions: A Survey of Large Language Models in Mental Health
We trace this trajectory from Phase I, in which LLMs act primarily as passive Information Tools and Pattern Recognizers for assessment; through Phase II, where they function as Empathetic Conversationalists for in-the-moment, stateless interactions; to the current frontier, Phase III, which seeks Longitudinal, Personalized Companions implemented as stateful cognitive agents.
PreprintReal-world useCode availableInitial Evaluation of Potential Bias in Coverage of Humans in Wikidata
Ethnicity and sexual orientation were the most critically under-documented (missing statements) while rural birthplaces and non-WENA citizenship were the most underrepresented.
PreprintQuantifying the Occult: A Comparative Study of Hindu and Buddhist Deities Using Machine Learning Methods
Cross-tradition spatial analysis establishes that the highest esoteric manifestations, such as the Hindu Chinnamasta and the Buddhist Chinnamunda, share a near-identical mathematical coordinate across both visual () and semantic () boundaries, indicating a 1:1 esoteric transfer.
PreprintBold claims, read criticallyMining Meaning: Measurement Error in AI-Assisted Literature Reviews
Measurement error in LLM-generated data is thus most consequential at precisely the level of detail that constitutes an LLM's principal value added over human reviewers.
PreprintDigital Medicines Information at National Scale: Search Behaviour and System Performance of MediVerify Across 1.5 Million Queries
MediVerify demonstrates that a national digital health platform can achieve high utilisation at low computational and environmental cost.
Preprint with a published versionReal-world useMulti-Lab Testing of Early Preclinical Discoveries Identifies Promising Treatments
In summary, multi-laboratory studies proved highly informative and served as an effective filter for promising treatments.
PreprintReal-world useStudent Use of LLMs and the Limits of AI-Generated Question Difficulty in Data Science Courses
However, neither metric predicted empirical item difficulty (difficulty label ; Bloom level ).
PreprintAutomating Constructive Assessment with Large Language Models: Toward Scalable and Repeated Evaluation of Practical Competence
Hence, we proposed and empirically validated the automatic (1) generation of case problems containing errors aligned with educational intentions, (2) scoring of descriptive answers, and (3) generation of structured feedback based on incorrect answers, achieved solely through prompt design without fine-tuning.
PreprintBold claims, read criticallyWho Acts, Who Knows, Who Answers? A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Agency, Epistemic Responsibility, and Accountability in Generative AI Higher Education Research
The findings reveal a persistent gap between giving AI functional agency and assigning normative accountability.
PreprintTechnology-enhanced learning in undergraduate neuroscience education: tractography-based virtual dissection in psychology
Students who perceived the activity as more useful also reported higher perceived learning outcomes, with perceived utility emerging as the strongest predictor of perceived learning.
PreprintReciprocal Collaboration: how lessons from convergence in GLAMs can enhance interdisciplinary AI research
Drawing from the history of convergence in GLAM studies, we propose five key practices to form a framework for greater understanding across this divide.
PreprintAdvancing the Physical Internet with GraphRAG: A New Way to Review and Integrate Existing Research
Furthermore, we demonstrate that GraphRAG improves accessibility by structuring complex information into interconnected graphs and provides a deeper understanding of underlying research dynamics.
Preprint with a published versionBold claims, read criticallyA Dosage Precision Framework for Instructional Effectiveness: Propositions, Boundary Conditions, and an Illustrative Case from Solid-State Physics
We propose that instructional effectiveness may depend on an interaction between two design dimensions: dosage---the total duration of student-centered active learning allocated to a topic---and precision---the degree to which an intervention targets a specific, documented cognitive bottleneck with a mechanism-matched representational tool.
PreprintBringing Chip Tapeout Into University Education
The approach combines aligned learning outcomes, local Master's implementations, and a shared design-to-silicon framework across five European universities.
PreprintTowards Supporting Quantum Grassroots Organizations in ASEAN
We propose providing mentors with specialized knowledge to assist in the refinement of technical content and organizational management, building connections between grassroots and key stakeholders in the quantum space, and creating opportunities to obtain stable funding.
PreprintEasy to readCritical Data Studies in the Anthropocene
To illustrate this, this chapter brings two case studies from Spain and Chile and explores how the infrastructure of contemporary datafication intersects with existing power structures, influencing which social and environmental consequences are recognized, addressed, and neglected.
Preprint with a published versionPositive weight Hermite and Legendre quadrature rules
This paper contains new 80-digit positive-weight Gauss-Hermite and positive-weight interior-node Gauss-Legendre quadrature rules for up to five dimensions and varying polynomial degree accuracy (depending on quadrature type and dimension).
PreprintCode available