Browsing by Subject "political economy"
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Item Gaming the Systems: Non-Fungible Tokens and the Blurring of Gambling and Finance in Play-to-Earn Games(2022-11) Zaucha, TrevorNon-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a form of digital asset that functions as a receipt or other representation of ownership. In more technical language, NFTs are a string of characters logged on a blockchain. NFTs’ relationship to artworks, gaming items and avatars, music, films, digital trading cards, and more suggests a direct relationship to media artifacts while broadening the parameters of what might be considered media through a process of digitization and further mediation. Applied to gaming software, NFTs act as a new form of monetization and further gambling’s role in the design of interactive media. This study examines two different NFT projects, developer Sky Mavis’ “Axie Infinity” and developer Virtually Human Studio’s “ZED Run”, to better understand the nature of NFT applications and their users. This study analyzes user activity in the applications’ associated Discord servers, public-facing platform documentation, and the applications themselves. This work examines the increasingly complex, marketized, commodified, ambiguous, volatile, and gamified reality of NFT applications. This work is less concerned with what users do or will do next and instead considers the experiences, feelings, and beliefs that inform user actions and reflect contextualizing factors explored in the literature review. Although gaming, gambling, and financial investment share similar motivations, they do exist as different topics of interest, necessitating the inquiry into users’ feelings and motivations with attention towards the extent with which those feelings align with the expressed purposes of the applications central to this study. Additionally, this work posits that the interests of capital (private property, accumulation, consumption, etc.) act as a form of external pressure or contextualizing factor that informs the actions of users of NFT games and applications. This study’s findings indicate a cultural climate defined by characteristics such as distrust, uncertainty, inequalities of power, exploitation, educational interest, financial desire, and the intertwined nature of systems and communities that may entertain, enrich, or extort.Item Lorrie Faith Cranor Oral History(Charles Babbage Institute, 2023-09) Charles Babbage Institute, Univ. of MinnesotaThis oral history interview is sponsored by and a part of NSF 2202484 “Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy,” at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. At the start of the interview, Professor Lorrie Faith Cranor discusses early interests and studies in computer science and engineering & public policy at Washington University in St. Louis. This includes her dissertation, a pioneering work on computer voting systems. She then relates her work on privacy, security, and policy at AT&T laboratories following her D.Sc. for about a half dozen years and then transitioning to leave the lab to become a professor of Computer Science and of Engineering & Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Cranor talks about launching an event and co-editing an influential edited volume, that led to her founding and early General Chair leadership of Symposium on User Privacy and Security (SOUPS). With a focus on this area, she also launched a research lab, the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Laboratory and educational program with NSF support. This unique focus is not matched anywhere globally and Cranor and her team’s work have been central to bringing together researchers and understanding at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer security and privacy. She also discusses her evolving research in many areas including but not limited to phishing, cyber trust indicators, passwords, etc., as well as her year as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission. Cranor, a master quilter, also relates how engineering quilts involve overlapping engineering principles with her design work in computer science.Item Why Cities Fail: Local Political Institutions and the Fates of Metropolitan Economies(2015-09) Lucius, AndrewWhat differentiates economically successful urban areas from those that fall into decline? This dissertation attempts to improve upon existing answers to this question by examining the relationship between metropolitan political institutions and local economic performance. The impetus for this focus is the significant role that political institutions have come to play in explaining the structure and long-term performance of national economies. To apply this line of reasoning to the urban level, I examine three metropolitan institutions with plausible links to the local economy's structure and performance. Rather than focusing on variation in local decision-making rules (the most common approach to studying political institutions), I focus on variation in the organizational avenues available for achieving policy outcomes. The three institutional avenues I analyze are: 1) the degree of territorial–or Tiebout–competition (representing the ability to obtain policy outcomes by leveraging intergovernmental competition); 2) the revenue capacity of the primary city government (representing the ability to obtain policy outcomes by lobbying a large-scale government); and 3) the prevalence of special district governments (representing the ability to obtain policy outcomes by creating independent, specialized governments). To examine the economic effects of these institutions, I consider their characteristics in light of a three-stage theory of urban economic development. Using this framework, I derive hypotheses linking the prevalence of each institution to the structure and performance of the metropolitan economy in each stage. Testing these hypotheses via panel regression analysis, I find that both a higher capacity primary city government and an increased prevalence of special districts consistently boost metropolitan economic performance across the stages (as measured by the metropolitan income level). In contrast, a higher degree of territorial competition has a more limited impact, improving a metropolitan area's international competitiveness (but not its income level) and doing so only during the second stage of development. I finish the dissertation by applying these insights to the decline of metropolitan Detroit, demonstrating how they improve a prominent explanation found in neoclassical urban economics.