In the News
-
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 -
October 14, 2020
“We see that younger and younger consumers of social media are being targeted for conspiracy theories and extremist groups and things like that,” said Cliff Lampe, professor of information, who noted that social media algorithms filter out other viewpoints, leading people into extremes.
WXYZ (Detroit) -
October 13, 2020
Throughout the history of Western painting, imagery of flies can symbolize death, rot, decay, corruption and “painting’s power to deceive the eye,” says Celeste Brusati, professor emerita of the history of art, who was quoted in a story about the much-talked-about fly that landed on the head of Vice President Mike Pence during the vice presidential debate.
The Washington Post -
October 13, 2020
Factors that contribute to high-quality in-person instruction — a course where you get some interaction and attention from an instructor — are necessary for high-quality remote learning, said Kevin Stange, associate professor of public policy: “When you’re enrolling in college, you are buying some of my time. If you put 1,000 people into a classroom and you buy a thousandth of my time, you’re going to get a lot less of that.”
MarketWatch
