In the News
-
October 20, 2020
“That the Mcity Driverless Shuttle research project resulted in high levels of consumer satisfaction and trust among riders … underscores the importance of robust preparation and oversight to ensure a safe deployment that will build consumer confidence,” said Mcity Director Huei Peng, commenting on a report that found 86 percent of riders of Mcity’s driverless shuttles said they trusted the technology after their trips.
The Detroit News -
October 20, 2020
“There is loneliness, and it’s gotten worse. … Frankly, the residential experience could become so suboptimal that it’s not worth the lift. The idea of putting thousands of people together in tight quarters is difficult. College campuses aren’t meant for social distancing, they’re meant for togetherness,” said Preeti Malani, U-M’s chief health officer and professor of internal medicine and infectious diseases.
Fortune -
October 20, 2020
Ken Kollman, professor of political science and director of the Center for Political Studies, said Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 were two of the least popular major party presidential candidates since serious polling began in the 1950s: “Voter dislike for each was intense. In Michigan, Clinton had a more difficult time compared to previous Democratic candidates connecting with blue-collar workers, African Americans and Latinos.”
Detroit Free Press -
October 19, 2020
“It’s a very unusual object,” said Oleg Gnedin, professor of astronomy, commenting on a strange, newly measured clump of stars orbiting the nearby Andromeda galaxy that has the lowest level of heavy chemical elements ever seen in one of these mysterious star clusters. It also is surprisingly massive, challenging theories for how such clusters and some galaxies form.
Science News -
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
