Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer unprecedented opportunities to learn at scale. Within a few years, the phenomenon of crowd-based learning has gained enormous popularity with millions of learners across the globe participating in courses ranging from Popular Music to Astrophysics. They have captured the imaginations of many, attracting significant media attention – with The New York Ti...

Serious games, persuasive games, news games – these are all terms used for games which let players gain an experiential understanding of real world issues through play. Many in this growing class of games deal with social causes; recent examples include Peacemaker, about solving Middle East peace, The Redistricting Game, about congressional redistricting and redistricting reform, and the online...

In 2003 an unusually forthcoming U.S. battalion commander told the New York Times how he would win Iraqi hearts and minds: “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”[1] To Roger Petersen, an MIT political scientist, this statement epitomizes the problem with Western military intervention–a proble...

Journalists have a propensity to select online comments for publication according to editorial conceptions of quality content. This work considers various criteria for identifying quality user contributions for publication, evaluates how these criteria manifest in New York Times “Picks” comments, and operationalizes three such criteria computationally. Results indicate that many of the criteria...

Data.gov is a website that provides US Government data to the general public to ensure better accountability and transparency. Our recent work on the Data-gov Wiki, which attempts to integrate the datasets published at Data.gov into the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud (yielding ”linked government data”), has produced 5 billion triples covering a range of topics including: government spending, env...

People face a problem similar to that faced by algorithms that manage the memory of computers: trying to organize information to maximize the chance it will be available when needed in the future. In computer science, this problem is known as “caching”. Inspired by this analogy, we compared the properties of a model of human memory proposed by Anderson and Schooler (1991) and caching algorithms...

This paper explains people’s preferences for ethnic and racial diversity in higher education through a model based on self interest. Although all citizens from the majority group value diversity and their own education in the same way, their preferences for the level of diversity as well as the means of achieving it depend on their competitive positions in university admissions. High-income maj...

We introduce the task of identifying information-dense texts, which report important factual information in direct, succinct manner. We describe a procedure that allows us to label automatically a large training corpus of New York Times texts. We train a classifier based on lexical, discourse and unlexicalized syntactic features and test its performance on a set of manually annotated articles f...

The End of Science Revisited O ne of my most memorable moments as a science journalist occurred in December 1996, when I attended the Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm. During the white-tie banquet for 1,500 presided over by Sweden's King and Queen, several prizewinners stood to give brief speeches. David Lee of Cor-nell University, a winner in physics, decried the " doomsayers " who were cl...

On January 12, 2010, an earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti, reducing much of the capital city of Port-au-Prince to rubble. In the days afterward, as the casualty estimates grew by the hundreds of thousands and the international community turned its attention toward rebuilding the ravaged country, pundits pontificated on the uphill battle faced by a country that had suffered as many ma...