A new report co-authored by Lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley has found that tenants in predominately nonwhite neighborhoods are nearly twice as likely to face eviction than renters in mostly white areas, reports Chris Lisinski for WBUR. “Our takeaway here is that we really have to act now,” says Huntley. “Ensuring an equitable recovery is a critical first step toward securing safe and stable homes for all.”
Lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley has found that eviction rates for communities of color in Massachusetts were nearly twice as high as eviction rates for predominately white neighborhoods, reports Katie Johnson for The Boston Globe. “In neighborhoods made up predominately of people of color, landlords filed 30 evictions for every 1,000 renters, while majority-white neighborhoods had 18.5 evictions filed for every 1,000 renters,” writes Johnson.
A new analysis by lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley finds that communities of color were hit harder by new eviction filings than white residents after Massachusetts’s eviction moratorium ended in October 2020, reports Adam Reilly for GBH. “Huntley also found that there were nearly twice as many eviction filings per renter in predominately nonwhite communities as in predominantly white ones – and, in certain municipalities, the disparity was even greater,” writes Reilly.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Edward Scolnick and La Jolla Institute for Immunology Prof. Erica Ollmann Saphire share their insights on the future and potential challenges in developing a universal Covid-19 vaccine. “Success will require two principles that the world has not yet sufficiently grasped in fighting this virus: a focus on the long term over the short term, and a sustainable structure and support for collaboration,” write Scolnick and Saphire.
Institute Prof. Robert Langer, whose “innovations have helped create more than 100 products from artificial skin to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines,” speaks with Guardian reporter Zoë Corbyn. “I think it’s important to stress how much engineers can and have changed the world for the better,” says Langer. “It’s a thrill for me to see engineering and biology improving people’s lives; that’s been my dream from the beginning.”
Axios reporter Erin Broadwin spotlights Dimagi, a digital tool for health workers in remote areas that was started by researchers from the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.
OPT Industries, an MIT spinoff, has created InstaSwab, a nasal swab “up to 20 times more effective in bacterial sample elution,” reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “With the ability to print around the clock, the firm also believes it can play a pivotal role in addressing supply chain concerns — a long-time goal for additive manufacturing,” writes Heater.
Steven Goldman, a senior lecturer for MIT Professional Education, and business strategy consultant Asha Rivers write about the impact and importance of digital communication for Black churches in the age of the pandemic, in an article for Black Enterprise Magazine.
On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti speaks with Prof. David Autor about his research investigating the success and failures of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). “If there's one thing I would change, is that I would rebuild our unemployment insurance program, so use modern data systems integrated nationally,” says Autor of how he would alter the PPP.
The Tyee reporter Andrew Nikiforuk spotlights research conducted by Alex Siegenfeld SB ‘15, PhD ‘22, Yaneer Bar-Yam SB ’78, PhD ’84, and their colleagues to better understand the hesitancy behind accepting the efficacy of mask wearing. “There weren’t any studies that conclusively showed masks were not effective, yet common sense just got undervalued,” says Siegenfeld.
Prof. David Rand and Prof. Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina in Canada found that people improved the accuracy of their social media posts when asked to rate the accuracy of the headline first, reports Faye Flam for Bloomberg. “It’s not necessarily that [users] don’t care about accuracy. But instead, it’s that the social media context just distracts them, and they forget to think about whether it’s accurate or not before they decide to share it,” says Rand.
Boston Globe Magazine reporter Courtney Humphries spotlights MIT startup Biobot Analytics, co-founded by Mariana Matus ’18 and Newsha Ghaeli ’17, for using their wastewater and sewage tracking technology to identify Covid -19 in communities across the United States. “Because people shed the virus in their stool before they test positive, Biobot’s data are often a leading indicator of where the infection is heading, arriving ahead of case counts by a few days,” writes Humphries.
MIT researchers have found a way to use wastewater testing surveillance as a public health tool to identify infectious diseases, reports Marie Szaniszlo for the Boston Herald. “Wastewater testing first started with a discovery by MIT researchers is being used nationwide as an early warning sign,” writes Szaniszlo.
A new study by Prof. David Autor examining the effectiveness of the Paycheck Protection Program found that the program ended up subsidizing business owners and shareholders more than workers, reports Stacy Cowley for The New York Times. “Jobs and businesses are two separate things,” says Autor. “We tried to figure out, ‘Where did the money go?’ — and it turns out it didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs. It went to business owners and their shareholders and their creditors.”
Fortune reporter Tristan Bove spotlights a study led by economists from MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Mexico’s ITAM on how workers are spending their time while working from home. “Pandemic habits give Americans around 70 minutes of extra free time a day,” writes Bove. “The lion’s share of this, around 60 minutes, comes from getting rid of commuting, but workers have also spent around nine minutes less on average doing daily activities such as grooming or picking out fresh clothes.”