Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Yahoo! Finance Live host Julie Hyman about President Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence regulation. “This is big, it's bold, it's broad,” says Aral. “It has a number of provisions. It has provisions for safety, for privacy, for equity, for workers, for competition and innovation, and leadership abroad. And it really targets those foundation models, the big AI companies in terms of their safety and security standards.”
A study co-authored by Prof. Anna Stansbury finds that “as the share of graduates in the UK workforce has expanded over the past 25 years, the wage premium they command relative to non-graduates has fallen,” reports John Burn-Murdoch for Financial Times. “We can thus infer that in the aggregate, Britain’s supply of skilled workers is outstripping demand in the form of skilled jobs,” writes Burn-Murdoch.
Prof. Fiona Murray and her colleagues have found that female STEM PhD students are less likely than their male counterparts to receive mentorship from top inventor advisors, reports Women We Admire. The researchers “emphasize the importance of early intervention and encouragement for female PhD students aspiring to become inventors. Programs that actively support female professors in their patenting endeavors can indirectly lead to a surge in female inventor PhDs, thereby plugging the leaky pipeline.”
Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Catherine Wolfram write for The Washington Post about how to prevent petrostates from benefitting from war. “We need to break the cycle of petrostates benefitting from fomenting violence,” write Johnson and Wolfram. “And when we punish one petrostate, we need to be careful not to reward another.”
MIT researchers have found that users of a tool developed to fight misinformation on X were “much more likely to fact-check posts expressing political views that differ from their own,” reports Victoria Elliott and David Gilbert for Wired. Prof. David Rand explains, “while around 80 percent of the tweets that users chose to annotate were, in fact, misleading, users overwhelmingly tended to priorities political content.”
In an article for The Hill, Prof. Arnold Barnett and Arnaud Sarfati MBA ‘21 examine whether Americans can trust the polling system in the U.S. “To put it simply, believe the polls, and pay particular attention to the local polls in toss-up states,” they write. “Pollsters that were broadly successful in the last presidential election are unlikely to fail colossally in the next one.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have published a study examining how extended “silence and a deliberative mindset create value in negotiation,” reports MSNBC reporter Selena Rezvani. “Our research suggests that pausing silently can be a simple yet very effective tool to help negotiators shift from fixed-pie thinking to a more reflective state of mind," says Prof. Jared Curhan. "This, in turn, leads to the recognition of golden opportunities to expand the proverbial pie and create value for both sides.”
Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Catherine Wolfram write for The Los Angeles Times about the impact of high oil prices on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Russia is earning fistfuls of money from its oil sales, and using the revenues to buy tanks, pay soldiers and keep the war out of the minds of ordinary Russian citizens,” explain Johnson and Wolfram. “High oil prices enable Putin to test Western democracies’ resolve, and the dysfunction on Capitol Hill plays into his hands. That makes maintaining the oil price cap, with added protections, all the more important for reducing Putin’s ability to continue fighting.”
Prof. Thomas Kochan and Prof. Thomas Malone speak with Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about the recent deal between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which will “protect movie screenwriters from losing their jobs to computers that could use artificial intelligence to generate screenplays.” Kochan notes that when it comes to AI, “where workers don’t have a voice through a union, most companies are not engaging their workers on these issues, and the workers have no rights, no redress.”
MIT has been named to Times Higher Education’s 2024 World’s Best Universities list, reports Cecilia Rodriguez for Forbes. “The largest edition of the World University Rankings 2024 includes 1,904 universities—up from 1,799 last year—from 108 countries and regions, assessing research-intensive universities across 18 performance indicators covering their core missions of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and internationalization,” writes Rodriguez.
In an article for Forbes, Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota SB '08, SM '16, MBA '16 explores the “strategies to enhance supply chain visibility in biopharma.” “As the biopharmaceutical industry continues to grow and evolve, the supply chain's role becomes ever more critical,” writes Hayes-Mota. “Investing in these detailed strategies ensures resilience and positions companies for growth and innovation in a rapidly changing landscape.”
William Pounds, the former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management who was “famous for being willing to approach and talk to anybody,” has died at age 95. “As an administrator, he wanted to guide business school graduates to become able leaders of corporations like the ones where he had worked," writes Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe.
MIT was named to the number two spot in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of the top universities, reports WBZ.
MIT has been ranked one of the top universities in the world by U.S. News & World Report, writes Emily Sweeney for The Boston Globe. Sweeney writes that the ranking “looked at approximately 1,500 colleges and universities and evaluated them on 19 measures of academic quality — this year changing its methodology to put more emphasis on social mobility and the outcomes of graduating students.”
Forbes contributor Michael Nietzel spotlights how MIT was named among the top universities in the U.S. for the economic value it returns to its students, according to a new ranking by Degreechoices. “At MIT, students earn $111,222 on average ten years after attending, and it takes those receiving federal aid under a year, on average, to pay back their total cost of attendance,” writes Nietzel. “Those numbers are consistent with MIT’s reputation for producing a large number of STEM graduates with very strong earning power.”