In the News
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October 19, 2020
“Back in the day, this was something that would take you weeks to do with pen and paper. Now, my laptop can draw one computer-simulated map in a minute,” said Jowei Chen, associate professor of political science, who helped North Carolina fix its gerrymandered legislative districts by writing a computer program to draw more equitable maps.
The Economic Times -
October 19, 2020
“Costs are high and values aren’t going up that much yet. The gap is still there and community development organizations have been looking for financing to fill that financing gap for years now. In the past, I feel like they were more successful than they are now,” said Margaret Dewar, professor emerita of urban planning, on efforts to preserve and rehabilitate blighted homes to sell or rent to Detroit residents.
Detroit Free Press -
October 16, 2020
Prosecutions of environmental crimes have “plummeted” during the Trump administration, according to a new report by David Uhlmann, director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program. His research shows that the first two years of the Trump administration had a 70 percent decrease in criminal prosecutions under the Clean Water Act and a decrease of more than 50 percent under the Clean Air Act.
The New York Times -
October 16, 2020
“I think we’ve been conditioned to assume that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved,” said Florian Schaub, assistant professor of information, and electrical engineering and computer science, on the thousands of people employed to transcribe recordings of Amazon Echo users.
South China Morning Post -
October 16, 2020
Instead of “radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed,” the First Amendment now serves “authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections,” wrote Catharine MacKinnon, professor of law, in “The Free Speech Century,” a 2018 essay collection.
The New York Times Magazine -
October 15, 2020
“We are still deep in a hole,” said Gabriel Ehrlich, director of the Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics, of the COVID-19 impact on the state’s economy. “That is why we expect it to take time. The gains we have seen so far have mostly been a mechanical recovery as businesses come back online, and we get some jobs back. But in terms of small business closures, it’s hard to know how many are permanent.”
The Detroit News -
October 15, 2020
“There is just no getting around social distancing, so it’s hard for me to envision a scenario where we can effectively design a space that could still have the same pre-pandemic capacity. Sure, we can design spaces as Band-Aids in the time of COVID, but if you really want to think about design innovation, it’s better if we design for the longer term,” said Andrew Ibrahim, assistant professor of surgery, and architecture and urban design.
Architectural Digest -
October 15, 2020
“I don’t think we will ever eliminate concussions from any sport. It’s just the nature of the human condition — if you’re going to participate in any physical activity, then you’re going to be at risk. I think there are things that have been done that have improved concussion risk in management for that matter, but I still think there’s a lot of room to go,” said Steven Broglio, professor of kinesiology and director of the Michigan Concussion Center.
MLive -
October 14, 2020
The historic surge in third-party voting in Michigan in 2016 likely had to do with Hillary Clinton’s striking unpopularity. “One of the key factors was white men in Michigan who voted overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton four years ago swung back to Biden in (the 2020 primary),” said Robert Yoon, lecturer in communication and media. Jonathan Hanson, lecturer in public policy, said fewer voters plan to vote for a third-party candidate this year: “People who are against Trump know that voting for a third-party candidate could indirectly help Trump because of how close the election was in 2016.”
MLive -
October 14, 2020
More college-age Americans are choosing not to drink alcohol than they did nearly two decades ago and alcohol abuse has decreased by roughly half among adults 18-22, according to research by Sean Esteban McCabe, professor of nursing and director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health.
CNN
