Tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to
build better tools.
This study measures the entropy (or disordered-ness) of street bearings in each street network, along with each city’s typical street segment length, average circuity, average node degree, and the network’s proportions of four-way intersections and dead-ends. It also develops a new indicator of orientation-order that quantifies how a city’s street network follows the geometric ordering logic of a single grid. These indicators, taken in concert, reveal the extent and nuance of the grid.
Joyous Exploration. This is the prototype of curiosity—the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.
Deprivation Sensitivity. This dimension has a distinct emotional tone, with anxiety and tension being more prominent than joy—pondering abstract or complex ideas, trying to solve problems, and seeking to reduce gaps in knowledge.
Stress Tolerance. This dimension is about the willingness to embrace the doubt, confusion, anxiety, and other forms of distress that arise from exploring new, unexpected, complex, mysterious, or obscure events.
Social Curiosity. Wanting to know what other people are thinking and doing by observing, talking, or listening in to conversations.
Thrill Seeking. The willingness to take physical, social, and financial risks to acquire varied, complex, and intense experiences.