‘The stem-cell genie is out of the research bottle,’ columnist William Safire wrote on July 16 in the New York Times editorial page, continuing, ‘If we command it sensibly, this unexpected servant will help us lead much healthier, longer lives.’ Safire is not alone in having these expectations. Since research using embryonic stem cells has been dragged into the limelight of public debate, its s...

For the most part, it is the wretched of the earth who do the world's tailoring. Made in Bangladesh competes with Made in Honduras, Made in the Philippines, Made in Macao, Made in Any Steamy Reservoir of Third World Unemployment: those places where plentiful labor lacks the leverage to command high pay, and the most pitiful thing about the jobs is how hard it is to get them. (New York Times, 2001)

Despite the current growing popularity of the computer science (CS) major, women remain sorely underrepresented in the field, continuing to earn only 18% of bachelor’s degrees. Understanding women’s low rates of participation in CS is important given that the demand for individuals with CS training has grown sharply in recent years. Attracting and retaining more women to high-paying fields like...

Recent studies have documented that the contagion of information and behaviors in social networks is generally quite limited. We examine whether this pattern characterizes exogenous demand shocks diffusing in a product network. To this end, we analyze a unique series of demand shocks induced by mass-media book reviews on the Oprah Winfrey television show and in the New York Times. Our identific...

D. W. Carstensen ([email protected]) and J. M. Olesen, Dept of Bioscience, Aarhus Univ., Ny Munkegade 114, DK-8000 Aarhus, Denmark. DWC also at: Depto de Botânica, Laboratório de Fenologìa, Plant Phenology and Seed Dispersal Group, Inst. de Biociências, Univ. Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Avenida 24-A n° 1515, 13506-900 Rio Claro, São Paulo, Brazil. – B. Dalsgaard and C. Rahbek, Center f...

The publication of Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys in early April, 2014, generated an intense month-long wave of publicity surrounding high frequency trading (HFT) firms, much of it unfavorable. In a typical example, Paul Krugman, writing in a New York Times editorial that appeared just after publication of Flash Boys, conflated HFT trading practices with the proliferation of complex derivatives prod...

Economic and cultural globalization and the attendant concerns for poverty and inequality have captured public imagination and become a focus of international discussion in recent years in a way few other topics (except for international terrorism) have. The events around the theme often have their own drama and also a touch of irony. Just to take an example from two reports in the newspaper on...

A ccording to Apple, “ ... certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords, and security questions.”1 Didn’t we cover defensive privacy tactics in my January column?2 Color me dazed and confused! Hacking in cyberspace? Nothing like that’s ever happened before. (I’ve got another heads-up for you iPhone users—Siri talks about you behind your back. I’...

In this paper, we present NEAT, a prototype system that provides an exploration interface to news archive search. Our prototype visualizes search results making use of two kinds of temporal information, namely, news articles’ publication dates but also their contained temporal expressions. The displayed timelines are annotated with major events, harvested using crowdsourcing, to make it easier ...

Educational equality has been an important and relevant issue in recent years, especially as tuition increases at colleges and universities make it increasingly difficult for low and middleincome families to afford education for their children. There are even more issues of educational equality that come into play once a student matriculates at a chosen school. This paper focuses on this area, ...