Prof. Anna Stansbury speaks with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast about her research on the labor market and worker power. “In my work, when I'm trying to measure worker power," says Stansbury, "I'm trying to say, ‘What would a given worker be paid in a kind of market situation without that power? And then how do different factors give that worker the ability to share in the profits of the firm?’"
Prof. Christopher Knittel speaks with Andy Uhler of Marketplace about gasoline process and the crack spread, the difference between the cost of oil and the cost to refine it. “Increases in the crack spread that we’ve seen recently has been just supply and demand,” said Knittel.
Wired reporter Will Knight spotlights a study by researchers from MIT and other universities that finds judges are turning to Wikipedia for guidance when making legal decisions. “The researchers also found evidence that the use of Wikipedia reflects an already stretched system,” writes Knight. “The legal decisions that included Wikipedia-influenced citations were most often seen in the lower courts, which they suspect reflects how overworked the judges are.”
Researchers from CSAIL and elsewhere have found that Irish judges are using Wikipedia articles as a source in their rulings, reports Shane Phelan for Independent. “This work shows that Wikipedia reaches even farther than that, into high-stakes, formalized processes like legal judgments,” says research scientist Neil Thompson. “The worst outcome would be for a judge’s reliance on Wikipedia to lead them to decide a case differently than they would have if they had read either an expert secondary source or the cited precedent itself.”
Researchers from CSAIL, Cornell University, and Maynooth University have released a study concluding that judges in Ireland are utilizing Wikipedia articles to help inform their decisions, reports Colleen Hagerty for Popular Science. Based on their findings, the researchers suggest “the legal community increases its efforts to monitor and fact-check legal information posted on Wikipedia.”
Professor William Oliver, graduate students Bharath Kannan and Tim Menke, Principal Research Scientist Simon Gustavsson, Shereen Shermak MBA ’97, Youngkyu Sung PhD ’22, and former research scientist Jonas Bylander founded Atlantic Quantum, a company that aims to improve the basic hardware behind quantum computing, reports Ariyana Griffin for Forbes. “The focus on Atlantic Quantum is building hardware that improves the ‘coherence’ of quantum computation, which reduces the errors that are the major speed bump for these machines,” writes Griffin.
A new analysis by Prof. Anna Stansbury and University of Michigan graduate student Richard Schultz finds that two thirds of U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics have a parent with a graduate degree, reports Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post. Stansbury notes that she worries some of the terminology used in courses like Econ 101 “like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive. And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”
Lecturer Bill Fischer writes for Forbes after speaking with Prof. Annika Steiber, director of Menlo College’s Silicon Valley RenDanheYi Research Center, about the organizational changes General Electric Appliances (GEA) has made in recent years. “GEA, today, represents what has turned-out to be a successful major organizational turnaround,” writes Fischer.
Prof. Simon Johnson has been working with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s economic advisors to build a plan for Ukraine, reports Daniel Flatley for Bloomberg. “The plan, as Johnson sees it, would leverage the interest that insurance companies and other firms have in facilitating the oil trade and use it to enforce the ban,” explains Flatley.
Prof. Tom Kochan speaks with Inside Intelligence reporter Christina Obolenskaya about the expectations for unionized workplaces and how that will impact retailers. “The most critical thing is to listen and treat the workforce with respect, allowing employees to shape how they come back to work,” says Kochan. “Having a dialogue with the larger team, managers and supervisors need to collaborate on how much flexibility they can provide their employees while still meeting company quotas.”
Writing for The Conversation, John Reilly, co-director emeritus of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, outlines a roadmap for how the U.S. can meet the Biden administration’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions 50% by 2030 below 2005 levels. “By exploiting declining costs of zero- and low-carbon energy sources in a more aggressive and focused way, the U.S. can meet its target within eight years,” writes Reilly, “all while substantially reducing its dependence on fossil fuels, including high-priced gasoline, and cutting back the air pollution, climate and health impacts resulting from their combustion.”
Keri Pearlson, executive director of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan consortium, and Prof. Stuart Madnick write for The Wall Street Journal about how managers should build and equip their organizations for cyber threats. “It is more effective to build a cybersecurity culture – an effort that goes beyond training and gets employees to see security as part of their job,” write Pearlson and Madnick.
Associate Provost Richard Lester and Prof. Noelle Selin speak with Tiziana Dearing, host of Radio Boston, about MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges. “To me, the Climate Grand Challenges effort really represents that we’re kind of at a frameshift when thinking about the climate problem. It’s not just a problem that some people can work on,” says Selin. “A climate challenge is a whole of society challenge, and therefore it really has to be a whole of MIT challenge.” Lester adds he hopes the challenges will “inspire a new generation of students to roll up their sleeves, put their shoulders to the wheel and help us solve this problem.”
Prof. Simon Johnson and Oleg Ustenko, economic advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky write for The Los Angeles Times about the importance of restarting the Ukrainian economy as the fighting continues. “The good news is that the European Union, the United States and other allies have already committed substantial resources to support Ukrainians, including when they leave the country as refugees,” write Johnson and Ustenko. “What is needed now is to adjust how those resources are deployed, to encourage these refugees to return home when it is safe to do so.”
Graduate student Tse Yang Lim and his colleagues used federal data on use and death of opioid use and overdose in the United States to build a model that “successfully replicated how certain factors and interventions affect use, treatment, relapse and overdose deaths over 20 years,” reports Sara Reardon for Nature. “Lim hopes that the model will help policymakers and other scientists think about the big picture rather than just how a particular community or demographic is affected,” writes Reardon.