Ash Carter, a member of the MIT Corporation and innovation fellow, has died at the at the age of 68, reports Tara Copp for Associated Press. Carter – who opened combat jobs to women and ended the ban on transgender people serving in the military – was known “as a defensive thinker and strategist,” writes Copp.
Atlantic reporter David Graham spotlights a new study co-authored by MIT researchers explored 25 different methods for reducing partisan animosity, support for antidemocratic values and tolerance for political violence. The researchers found that “partisan animosity seemed to have little relation to antidemocratic attitudes, and interventions that reduced animosity didn’t always do much to reduce those antidemocratic views,” writes Graham.
Researchers from the Sloan School of Management have found that toxic work culture is the driving force behind many employees leaving their jobs, reports James Reid for Forbes. “A strong, healthy culture is the execution engine of an organization, which makes it the most valuable asset any organization can possess,” writes Reid.
Researchers from MIT have narrowed down four pathways for companies to digitally transform, reports Joe McKendrick for Forbes. “The pathways pursued depend on corporate culture, internal limitations, and even the fears of business leaders themselves,” writes McKendrick.
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. David Rand explores how social media platforms could channel partisan motivations to help moderate the spread of misinformation online. “Combating misinformation is a challenge requiring a wide range of approaches,” writes Rand. “Our work suggests that an important route for social media companies to save democracy from misinformation is to democratize the moderation process itself.”
Prof. Diana Henderson, Prof. Daniel Jackson, Prof. David Kaiser, Prof. S.P Kothari, and Prof. Sanjay Sarma have released a new white paper “summarizing their ideas for a new type of undergraduate institution,” writes David Rosowsky for Forbes. “The authors have done a commendable job identifying and assembling some of the proven high-impact practices each of these types of higher educational institutions can offer,” writes Rosowsky.
MIT has been named one of the top 10 best colleges in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, writes Celia Fernandez for CNBC.
Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan has launched a cyberattack prevention course for business leaders, reports Sydney Lake for Fortune. “Board members must be knowledgeable participants in cyber leadership,” says Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan. “Board members need a set of frameworks, a language, some examples, and actionable insights so they have an independent way to interpret and understand what their organization is doing to be cybersecure.”
Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Andrew Duehren about how European governments are beginning to experiment with new ways to control energy prices.“Especially with the European energy-market policy interventions, what policy makers do not want to do is exacerbate these problems with their policies, and my fear is that is what these proposals would do,” says Knittel.
In this opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Prof. Simon Johnson suggests that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) decision to reduce production quotas, which was seemingly done in an effort to support Russia, will drive up oil prices worldwide. “The likelihood of Russian defeat in Ukraine, increasing daily with Ukrainian advances, will change the global picture for oil considerably, and OPEC members need to decide whose side they are on for what comes next,” writes Johnson.
Prof. Nathan Wilmers and his colleague have used multiple measures of earnings to trace income inequality in the U.S., reports Tim Fernholz for Quartz. “After decades of increase since the 1980s, they found that income inequality peaked in 2012 and has held steady or perhaps even fallen since,” explains Fernholz.
Researchers from Sloan have released a survey “detailing how 600 board directors worldwide view the cyber threats facing their companies,” reports Sam Sabin for Axios. “Competing perceptions of the threat landscape could make it difficult for CISOs to get board members to support their plans for securing their organizations,” writes Sabin.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, writes for Forbes about the three major risk factors to consider when planning where to live in retirement. “Retirement planning can’t control the weather,” writes Coughlin. “However, critically and realistically assessing our personal resilience and how to best prepare for the possible risks of where I live, is a critical element to thinking about how I will live in older age.”
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Michael Coden, associate director at MIT’s Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, underscores the importance of cyber-resilience rather than cyberprotection. “In contrast to cyberprotection, cyberresilience anticipates that a cyberattack will succeed. It has in place methods for rapid detection, cushioning the effects and quickly restoring systems to their pre-attack state,” writes Coden.
Forbes reporter Marija Butkovic spotlights Alicia Chong Rodriguez MS ’18, Founder and CEO of Bloomer Tech, for her work in building a cardiovascular disease and stroke database that can generate non-invasive digital biomarkers. “We envision a world where the future of AI in healthcare performs the best it can in women,” says Chong Rodriguez. “We also have created a digital biomarker pipeline where our digital biomarkers can explain, influence, and even improve health outcomes for women.”