8 research idea notes tagged “technology”. Read them as Markdown, JSON or an Atom feed.
Social media appears on 402 recent papers across the tracked journals, mostly as text data in AI and management research; only 18 carry a mental-health, adolescent, well-being or children keyword. Several countries are banning social media for under-16s. What does the evidence actually show, and what will the bans reveal?
Papers in the last 30 days — social media use: 1
Policing, law enforcement and crime appear on 63 recent papers, with 18 in the last quarter against about 15 per quarter before, but only 12 carry a technology, surveillance, camera or algorithm keyword, and "predictive policing" on 3. Cameras, licence plate readers and risk scores are spreading fast. Do they cut crime, and at what cost to whom?
Papers in the last 30 days — policing: 1 · crime: 4
Open-source software appears on 13 recent papers and open-source language models on 6, while named open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Llama and Qwen appear on dozens of AI papers as tools; 78 of 126 open-source papers involve language models. Firms give away models worth hundreds of millions to train. Who adopts them, and what do the givers get?
Virtual reality, the metaverse, augmented reality and immersive technologies appear on 123 recent papers, but the topic is fading, with 21 papers in the last quarter against about 33 per quarter before; 23 of the papers concern retail or consumers. Which immersive applications survived the hype cycle, and what do their users actually buy?
Papers in the last 30 days — metaverse: 1
Digital twins appear on 87 recent papers, 64 of them in AI journals and 22 in operations research, almost all about building them. Digital twin adoption appears on 2 papers. Firms are buying twins of plants, ports and cities. Which of them changed a decision, and what did they cost relative to what they saved?
Papers in the last 30 days — digital twin: 5
E-government appears on 28 recent papers and digital identity on 4, while India's identity, payment and data-sharing systems have become a model that dozens of countries are copying. What have the systems changed for welfare delivery, tax collection and the firms built on top of them, and who is left out?
Papers in the last 30 days — e-government: 3
Code generation, program synthesis, vulnerability detection and software development appear on 75 recent papers, mostly in AI journals, and 35 of them touch productivity, quality or security. Coding assistants are the most widely adopted generative AI tool at work. What happened to developer output, code quality and the junior developer's job?
Algorithmic management and algorithmic control appear on 21 recent papers, mostly in management, and the topic is fading, with 2 papers in the last quarter against about 6 per quarter before. Yet software now sets schedules, rates and tasks for warehouse, delivery and call-centre workers. What does it do to effort, health and the manager's job?
Papers in the last 30 days — algorithmic control: 1