News

George Whitesides: Simple Solutions

December 30, 2016

Professor George Whitesides talks about his revolutionary design for a diagnostic test to be used in the developing world.

Bias in Criminal Risk Scores Is Mathematically Inevitable, Researchers Say

Bias in Criminal Risk Scores Is Mathematically Inevitable, Researchers Say

December 30, 2016

Pro Publica | Is it possible to create a criminal risk score formula "that is equally predictive for all races without disparities in who suffers the harm of incorrect predictions?" Pro Publica explains why "four groups of scholars, working separately and using different methodologies, all reached the same conclusion. It's not."

Discusses work on this problem by Jon Kleinberg (Cornell), Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard), and Manish Raghavan (Cornell), "Inherent Tradeoffs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores."
View the research

When telling the truth is actually dishonest

When telling the truth is actually dishonest

December 29, 2016

Washington Post | Interview with behavioral scientist Todd Rogers, Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others." The study is co-authored by Richard Zeckhauser (HKS), Francesca Gino (HBS), Michael I. Norton (HBS), and Maurice E. Schweitzer (University of Pennsylvania).
View the research

The best books of 2016, according to two best-selling authors

The best books of 2016, according to two best-selling authors

December 27, 2016

PBS NewsHour |Jeffrey Brown sat down recently with best-selling authors Jacqueline Woodson, a 2016 National Book Award finalist for fiction, and Daniel Pink, at Politics and Prose, a popular bookstore in Washington, D.C. First up: Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.

The Lists Told Us Otherwise

The Lists Told Us Otherwise

December 26, 2016

n+ 1 | The Democratic collapse and the ascent of Trumpism. By Daniel Schlozman (Ph.D. '11), Assistant Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University.

Schlozman is the author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton University Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, conferred by the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.

Wired: "Distant black hole may disprove Einstein's theory of relativity"

December 24, 2016

"More than 26,000 light years away, deep within the heart of our galaxy, lies Sagittarius A* - four millions Suns' worth of unseen mass concentrated into an area just nine times the size.

Sheperd Doeleman, assistant director of the MIT Haystack Observatory, believes this mysterious entity is a supermassive black hole - and he's building a telescope the size of the Earth to prove it."

"...

Read more about Wired: "Distant black hole may disprove Einstein's theory of relativity"

Gun Sales Are on Pace to Smash All-Time Record in 2016

December 23, 2016

The Trace | Cites David Hureau (Ph.D. '16), Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at SUNY Albany and an affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab:

What criminals want is “not significantly different from what the average gun owner interested wants,” according to David Hureau, a criminologist at SUNY-Albany, who has interviewed people seeking guns on the black market. Like the majority of gun owners interviewed in the Harvard/Northeastern survey, Hureau’s research subjects choose to carry guns because “they’re fundamentally engaged in self-protection.”

Best of 2016: Part 1

Best of 2016: Part 1

December 23, 2016

TalkPoverty Radio | TalkPoverty Radio revisits some of its favorite interviews from 2016, beginning with Matthew Desmond, "whose 2016 book Evicted brings to center stage how eviction is both a cause and a consequence of poverty." Desmond is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.