@BeTongLen we map highways using OpenStreetMap's "motorways" (
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dmotorway). In the paper's supplementary information you can find experiments with streets of different traffic capacity (tldr; the effect diminishes for narrower, less trafficked streets, as one would expect)
Tag:highway=motorway - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Great collaboration with
@anavybor @mszll @sandorjuhasz and and Eszter Bokányi.
Cover image credit Karo Berghuber (Insta: @kariot.lines)
Reducing social connectivity ultimately harms economic opportunities of lower socioeconomic classes. Therefore, it is important to promote urban restorative initiatives such as the Reconnecting Communities Program by the US DoT (
https://www.transportation.gov/reconnecting), recently discontinued by Trump.
The effect is especially strong at short distances (<5km), persists after controlling for sociodemographic factors and other barriers (e.g., rivers), and is consistent with historical cases of highways that were built to purposefully disrupt or isolate Black neighborhoods.
"Urban Highways Are Barriers to Social Ties" out on PNAS!
The 1st large-scale measure of how highways weaken social connections between the communities they separate.
This barrier effect is strong in the 50 largest US cities and especially for low-income Black communities.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408937122Most tests for LLM biases use questionnaires, asking the model to generate a stance towards a given topic. Sadly, biases can re-emerge when the model is used in the application context. We show that apparently unbiased LLMs exhibit strong biases in conversations.
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.14844
NERDS
Michael Szell
Lucio La Cava