Harrison White '50, PhD '55, “a theoretical physicist-turned-sociologist who upended the study of human relations and society” has died at age 94, reports Michael Rosenwald for The New York Times. “With his background in physics, Professor White viewed humans as nodes within social networks,” writes Rosenwald. “Those networks operated in complex ways that shaped economic mobility, financial markets, language and other social phenomena.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with New York Times reporter Carly Lewis about the psychological implications of receiving and sending voice memos as a method of communication. “Voice memos are essentially no risk,” says Turkle. “People are losing the capacity for empathetic conversations, which is how we connect with each other. We need to practice that. People are so worried about showing too much of themselves.”
In this opinion piece for The Huffington Post, Sloan senior lecturer Otto Scharmer argues that GDP is an unqualified metric for measuring a country’s success. “We are trapped in a way of thinking that says “bigger is better,” that higher GDP is the solution to our problems,” writes Scharmer, even though we’ve seen that “GDP growth is no salve for deepening inequality across the globe.”
Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News writes that MIT researchers have found that Latin Americans are less likely to be approved for work authorizations in the U.S. than immigrants from other areas. Researchers found that authorization disparities “disappeared in cases when officials looked more closely at supporting documents.”
Fusion reporter Ted Hesson writes about a new study, co-authored by MIT Professor Emilio Castilla, examining labor certifications for U.S. immigrants. The researchers found that “Asian and Canadian immigrants have a much better chance of being approved for a work visa than immigrants from Latin America.”