The library

📈 Economics Undergraduate

Behavioural Economics and the Limits of Nudge Policy

Nudge policy promised large welfare gains from small, cheap interventions. A decade of replication work has narrowed that promise considerably. This essay reviews the evidence on default effects, framing and salience interventions, and argues that nudges work best precisely where they matter least — and that the political appeal of nudging lies in its avoidance of distributive conflict.

708 words · 3 min read 🔒 1,200 tokens to unlock

💻 Computer Science Master's

Ethical Frameworks for Algorithmic Decision-Making in Public Services

When a public body delegates a decision to an algorithm, it does not thereby escape the obligation to justify that decision. This paper examines three competing frameworks for algorithmic accountability — procedural, outcome-based and contestability-centred — and argues that only the third adequately preserves the administrative-law principle that affected parties can demand reasons.

703 words · 3 min read 🔒 1,200 tokens to unlock

💻 Computer Science Master's

The Impact of Transformer Architectures on Machine Translation

Transformer architectures displaced recurrent models as the dominant paradigm in neural machine translation within three years of their introduction. This paper traces that displacement, arguing that the decisive advantage was not raw accuracy but parallelisability during training, which converted translation quality into a problem of available compute. It evaluates the empirical record across high- and low-resource language pairs and considers where the architecture's assumptions still break down.

724 words · 3 min read 🔒 1,200 tokens to unlock