In the Media

In a new working paper, researchers at MIT and UCLA examined a group of newly hired data entry workers in India and found that “workers randomly assigned to work from home full-time are 18% less productive than those in the office,” reports Jo Constantz for Bloomberg. As Constantz notes, “The new research underscores the challenges inherent in productivity research. Since the workers in the trial were newly hired, their outcomes may differ from employees who switch to fully remote only after first spending significant time on-site.”

Prof. Jon Gruber speaks with NPR hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about the idea of a ‘soft landing’ for the U.S. economy. “All economies are cyclical,” says Gruber.  “They go through good times and bad times. And we define good times and bad times based on two variables: inflation and unemployment.”

Prof. Manish Raghavan speaks with The Washington Post reporter Danielle Abril about the risk of AI bias in employers’ recruitment behavior. “For example, AI could appear to be biased in matching mostly Harvard graduates to some jobs when those graduates may just have a higher likelihood to match certain requirements,” explains Abril. “Humans already struggle with implicit biases, often favoring people like themselves, and that could get replicated through AI.”

An analysis by the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and Climate Interactive has found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.27 degrees of warming by 2100, reports Maxine Joselow for The Washington Post. “Trees are great. I personally love to be out in the forests as much as I possibly can,” says Prof. John Sterman. “But the reality is very simple: You can plant a trillion trees, and even if they all survived, which wouldn’t happen, it just wouldn’t make that much difference to the climate.”

Professor Alex Pentland and Alex Lipton, a Connection Science Fellow at MIT, write for Scientific American about how social media can impact financial systems. “Before Twitter and Facebook, a spooked investor or customer would have to call, personally visit or even e-mail and text colleagues to urge them to withdraw funds from a troubled bank,” explain Pentland and Lipton. “Nowadays sophisticated clients can act as soon as they read a Tweet. Social media alerts everyone all at once, and a few clicks on a computer screen can wipe an account clean.”

Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan writes for The Hill about the need for a new social contract that reflects the expectations of today’s workforce, including sizable wage increases due to inflation and a voice in the use of AI and generative technology. “Either labor and management negotiate a new social contract that is more responsive to what workers want and need today, or we will experience intensified conflicts that further divide our country,” writes Kochan.

Jeff Heglie ’85 co-founded For Bitter For Worse, a zero-proof spirits company focused on bringing non-alcoholic cocktails to market, reports Ann Trieger Kurland for The Boston Globe. “They have won medals for their drinks, which are crafted like spirits,” writes Kurland. “Herbs and botanicals are first macerated in alcohol to extract their flavors, then they use a still to remove the alcohol in a process Heglie, an MIT graduate, calls ‘reverse bootlegging.’ Natural ingredients — organic roots and juices, fruit peels, spices, and more — are blended into the robust base to add layers of flavor.”

Fast Company reporter Adele Peters writes that MIT researchers have developed a new type of concrete that can store energy, potentially enabling roads to be transformed into EV chargers and home foundations into sources of energy. “All of a sudden, you have a material which can not only carry load, but it can also store energy,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm.

MIT engineers have uncovered a new way of creating an energy supercapacitor by combining cement, carbon black and water  that could one day be used to power homes or electric vehicles, reports Jeremy Hsu for New Scientist. “The materials are available for everyone all over the place, all over the world,” explains Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “Which means we don’t have the same restriction as with batteries.”

MIT researchers have discovered that when combined with water, carbon black and cement can produce a low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later use, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging,” writes Paul.

Boston.com reporter Ross Cristantiello spotlights the MIT Guild of Bellringers, “a dedicated group [of volunteers] who practice every weekend to master the complex and historic practice known as change ringing.” The group rings the bells inside the Old North Church in Boston, which are “believed to be the oldest set of change ringing bells in North America,” writes Cristantiello. 

Researchers at MIT have found that cement and carbon black can be combined with water to create a battery alternative, reports Robert Service for Science. Professor Franz-Josef Ulm and his colleagues “mixed a small percent of carbon black with cement powder and added water,” explains Service. “The water readily combines with the cement. But because the particles of carbon black repel water, they tend to clump together, forming long interconnected tendrils within the hardening cement that act like a network of wires.”

The Boston Globe spotlights a new book from the MIT Press called “More Voices from the Radium Age,” a collection that shines a spotlight on obscure proto-science fiction stories and novels. “I’ve spent the past few years, on behalf of the MIT Press, working to rescue neglected ‘proto-science fiction’ novels and stories – first published during the genre’s nascent 1900 – 1935 era – from obscurity,” explains Joshua Glenn, who edited and produced the book.

Prof. Lonnie Petersen speaks with Boston Globe reporter Kay Lazar about the need to prepare doctors to provide medical care in space. “As we have more commercial space flight, we will have a different composition of crew members, we will see more preexisting conditions, the age range will expand, and obviously the way we do medicine is evolving,” Petersen said.

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Prof. Simon Johnson and Oleg Ustenko, economic advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, emphasize that “the governments of poorer countries need to demand that Ukrainian grain be allowed to flow freely. The Black Sea corridor must be reopened and kept open as a top priority for all parties working to defeat Putin.”