Reporting for WGBH, Tori Bedford examines a new study by MIT researchers that shows evictions disproportionately impact communities of color. The researchers found that, “tenants living in market-rate apartments in Roxbury, which is 90% people of color, are evicted seven times more than tenants in Allston/Brighton, which is 62% white.”
A new report co-authored by MIT researchers finds that evictions tend to hit Black communities hardest in the City of Boston, reports Zoe Greenberg and Tim Logan for The Boston Globe. “The share of Black renters in a neighborhood is a better predictor of market rate eviction filings than income, rental burden, or other economic factors,” says graduate student David Robinson.
AP reporter Michael Casey writes that a report co-authored by MIT researchers finds people of color are disproportionately affected by evictions in the City of Boston. “The results are very troubling,” says Prof. Justin Steil. “We see white supremacy and anti-blackness functioning in the housing markets as well as other areas of social life.”
NPR’s Scott Simon remembers former MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Simon notes that Hawley’s “Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow projects prophesied so much of the ways in which our world would become digitally connected.”
Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Charles Stewart III underscores the importance of developing strategies that allow Americans to safely vote in-person. “The current trajectory in many states suggests that the demand for in-person voting will hugely outstrip the supply of poll workers and polling places,” writes Stewart. “This imbalance erects barriers to voter participation and needlessly jeopardizes the health of poll workers and voters.”
Quartz reporter Anne Quito spotlights The Future of Work Grand Challenge, a competition aimed at bridging the gap between education and employment. Quito notes that as part of the challenge, MIT Solve is hosting a “six-month competition to crowdsource innovative programs to assist unemployed or underemployed workers to land better careers.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Lee Hotz explores Prof. Markus Buehler’s work transforming the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus into music. In the coronavirus’s spike protein, “the structural complexity translates into musical complexity,” says Buehler. “There are many, many melodies layered into each other. It has a balance of order and disorder.”
A new report co-authored by MIT researchers finds that genomic information from sewer systems combined with cell phone data could be used to help prevent another global pandemic, reports Kim Tunnicliffe for WBZ Radio.
WBUR’s Lisa Mullins spotlights the life and work of former Prof. Michael Hawley, whose “accomplishments seemed too vast for one life.”
Former MIT Professor Michael Hawley, “whose accomplishments had reached into the upper echelons of computer science and piano performance,” has died at age 58, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. “Mike was consistently way, way out ahead, showing all of us what could be — in fact, would be,” said Prof. Tod Machover,
New York Times reporter Steven Kurutz memorializes the life and work of Dennis Nagle, a workshop manager and instructor at MIT’s D-Lab. Amy Smith, senior lecturer and founding director of D-Lab, reminisced that Nagle was, “a fiercely loyal mentor to many students over the years and was a staunch supporter of the need to balance creativity and order, fun and work and anarchy and kindness.”
Popular Mechanics reporter Courtney Linder writes that MIT researchers have developed a surgical tape that can be detached without harming tissue. “The team created a liquid solution that surgeons can apply to the medical-grade tape to help dissolve it, peeling it off in a slippery gel, reminiscent of aloe vera,” writes Linder.
Forbes contributor Rahul Razdan highlights how researchers from MIT and Toyota have introduced a new dataset aimed at enabling AI research focused on movement. “In sharing this dataset, we hope to encourage researchers, the industry, and other innovators to develop new insight and direction into temporal AI modeling that enables the next generation of assisted driving and automotive safety technologies,” explains research engineer Bryan Reimer.
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that the economic recovery in the U.S. is most likely to be “U-shaped,” reports Yun Li for CNBC. “A ‘U’-shaped recovery is one where the economy stays longer at the bottom of the recession in its path to recovery, which typically takes up to two years,” Li explains.
Prof. Lawrence Schmidt speaks with Nova Safo of Marketplace about the impact of the Paycheck Protection Program. “It might be a little more advantageous to put into place a more targeted approach,” says Schmidt. “Because then you could send larger checks or send checks for longer periods of time to these types of sectors that are severely disrupted.”