In his book The Longevity Economy, MIT AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin notes that on the rare occasion that aging is discussed, views of the elderly are mostly wrong. “The main point that Coughlin is making,” writes Joshua Kim for Inside Higher Ed, is that, “[r]ather than years of decline, life after 65 (or 75 or even 85) can be full of possibility, exploration, and learning.”
Squadbox, developed by graduate student Amy Zhang, allows a user’s “squad” to sift through online messages and scan for contextual harassment language that software might miss. “Squadbox currently only works with email,” Shannon Liao writes for The Verge. “[B]ut the team behind it hopes to eventually expand to other social media platforms.”
Graduate student Amy Zhang, has developed an application, known as Squadbox, that seeks to disarm internet harassers by enlisting the help of a user’s friends, who act as inbox “moderators.” “According to what the harassed person has specified beforehand, the moderator can delete any abusive messages, forward on clean messages, or send along messages with tags,” writes Katharine Schwab for Co.Design.
Research affiliate Jimena Canales writes for NPR’s "Cosmos & Culture" blog about historical perceptions of the possibility of time travel, including the idea that a refrigerator could reverse time. Canales ultimately concludes that, “if you want to really travel in time, you might try the old fashion way of doing it: Turn to history and literature.”
Sean Illing of Vox speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her insights on how the digital world is impacting our human relationships. “I’m not anti-technology,” said Turkle. “I’m pro-relationships and pro-conversations and pro-communities and pro-politics. I want people to be media-savvy and to use it to their best advantage.”
A recent study from Media Lab graduate student Joy Buolamwini addresses errors in facial recognition software that create concern for civil liberties. “If programmers are training artificial intelligence on a set of images primarily made up of white male faces, their systems will reflect that bias,” writes Cristina Quinn for WGBH.
Research scientist Bryan Reimer speaks to WBUR about the ramifications for the autonomous vehicle industry in response to the recent fatality caused by a self-driving Uber. “As we look forward…we need to work together in ways through policy, technology development, advocacy, to set a pathway to safety,” Reimer says.
Researchers from the Media Lab and Sloan found that humans are more likely than bots to be “responsible for the spread of fake news,” writes Paul Chadwick for The Guardian. “More openness by the social media giants and greater collaboration by them with suitably qualified partners in tackling the problem of fake news is essential.”
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle shares her thoughts on research from the Media Lab and Sloan that identifies “fake news” as traveling six times faster than factual news. “The difference between social media and ‘the media’ is that the gatekeeper model…does care more about the truth than ‘the narrative,’” McArdle writes.
Jordan Webber of The Guardian addresses the rise of “fake news”, citing research from the Media Lab and Sloan. “I believe that social media is a turning point in human communication,” said Sloan Prof. Sinan Aral. “I believe it is having dramatic effect on our democracies, our politics, even our health.”
Larry Greenemeier of Scientific American writes about a study from researchers at Sloan and the Media Lab that finds “false news” is “70% more likely to be retweeted than information that faithfully reports actual events.” “Although it is tempting to blame automated “bot” programs for this,” says Greenemeier, “human users are more at fault.”
Robin Young and Femi Oke of WBUR’s Here and Now highlight research from Sloan and the Media Lab that shows how quickly false news travels the internet. “We [also] found that false political news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than any other type of false news,” says Prof. Sinan Aral.
Researchers from Sloan and the Media Lab examined why false news spreads on Twitter more quickly than factual information. “Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones,” writes Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic. “Fake news prospers, the authors write, ‘because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’”
Prof. Sinan Aral writes for The New York Times about research he co-authored with Postdoc Soroush Vousaghi and Associate Prof. Deb Roy, which found that false news spreads “disturbingly” faster than factual news. “It could be, for example, that labeling news stories, in much the same way we label food, could change the way people consume and share it,” writes Aral.
A study co-authored by Prof. David Autor finds that over the past five decades, automation has helped increase total employment, but wages have not increased, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath. According to Autor, the findings help explain “why inequality between the world’s wealthiest and everyday workers has increased.”