In a groundbreaking Cornell-led study illuminating the extensive scope of mass incarceration in the U.S., nearly 1 in 2 Americans have had a brother or sister, parent, spouse or child spend time in jail or prison – a far higher figure than previously estimated.The study is the first to accurately measure the share of Americans – 45 percent – who have ever had an immediate family member jailed or…
Tapan Mitra, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics and a leading economic theorist of his generation, died of cancer Feb. 3 in Ithaca, New York. He was 70.Mitra wrote or edited more than 150 publications in economic theory and applied mathematics. A prolific researcher, Mitra made definitive, pioneering contributions to the efficiency and equity of intertemporal allocation of resources,…
Search engine rankings can glorify or torpedo a reputation in minutes. Scoring systems decide whether a person gets a loan. Online hiring platforms calculate which applicants get a job interview. And automated decision systems pick which students get into which schools.With big data, machine learning and digital surveillance pervasive in all facets of life, they have the potential to create…
How will the rise in sea levels due to climate change affect the fiscal health of U.S. cities? Can virtual reality help architects “try out” a building’s design before construction has even started? How do social processes affect artificial intelligence in high-stakes areas such as sentencing for criminals and job applications? And why do so many people find informal conversation so stressful…
It’s a little-known fact of U.S. history that in the early 1800s, while most African-Americans were enslaved, freed black men in some states had the right to vote.As the country grimly inched closer to the Civil War, states began to take that right away. These restrictions came with an expansion of voting rights for others, as requirements that a voter must own property were removed for white men…
When Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. was a public defender in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, he defended a 15-year-old named Brandon, who was charged with possessing a small amount of marijuana and a gun.Through the story of that boy, Forman, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, outlined the key points of his award-winning book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and…
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, housed at Cornell, has been awarded a grant to provide an easily searchable portal on the public’s views about health dating back to 1935.The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded the Roper Center a $1.43 million grant to construct a Health Opinion Database that will allow researchers, students, media, nonprofits, policymakers and the public…
Cornell researchers are taking a new approach to understanding how voters’ attitudes about immigration, race and gender influence contemporary U.S. politics.An innovative study using three waves of surveys will show how voters’ views on those topics influence the midterm elections in November and whether those attitudes shift leading up to the elections.“We’re especially interested in race,…
When the United Nations and other international players rebuild war-torn countries, they frequently require that women have greater representation in the country’s security forces. The idea is integrating women helps improve peace and security for everyone.But critics of these gender-equity reforms often suggest that women harm the cohesion of the police force.A new study shows those critiques…
Democratic nations are supposed to fight shorter, smarter wars. So why have the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan lasted for more than 15 years?A new book by Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, argues that part of the reason is the lack of a war tax – a special levy historically paid by the American people during times of war.“Taxing Wars: The American Way of War Finance and the…
Distinguished astrophysicist, renowned science writer and accomplished academic leader Ray Jayawardhana has been named the 22nd dean of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, Provost Michael Kotlikoff announced June 26.Currently dean of the Faculty of Science and professor of physics and astronomy at York University in Toronto, Jayawardhana investigates the origins and diversity of planetary…
According to a radical new model of emotion in the brain, a current treatment for the most common mental health problems could be ineffective or even detrimental to about 50 percent of the population.Since the 1970s, hundreds of studies have suggested that each hemisphere of the brain is home to a specific type of emotion. The neural system for emotions linked to approaching and engaging with the…
In developed and less developed countries alike, many worry about why laws are so often ignored. But there’s a converse question that may be even more puzzling: Why are laws obeyed at all?It’s a question that Cornell professor Kaushik Basu, one of the world’s leading economists, answers in his latest book, “The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics.” In the process, he offers a…
The campus community has expressed strong interest in and engagement with a report from a faculty committee tasked with identifying organizational structures that might position Cornell’s social sciences for excellence in the next 10 to 15 years, say key administrators after holding 23 listening sessions with stakeholders.The organizational structures report is part of an extended review of the…
When Carisa (Triola) Steinberg ’97 was growing up, no one in her family had attended college. They didn’t expect her to, either. Her grandfather had college funds only for the boys in the family.
She applied to Cornell anyway and was accepted – with full funding.
“I cannot thank this institution enough for being need-blind,” she said. “If Cornell hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able…
Forsaken dreams. Romantic interests not pursued. Securing a job near home rather than an adventurous position overseas.Our most enduring regrets are the ones that stem from our failure to live up to our ideal selves, according to new Cornell research.Psychologist Tom Gilovich and a former Cornell graduate student have found people are haunted more by regrets about failing to fulfill their hopes,…
More than 100 students who participated in three business competitions and a demonstration embodied the spirit of entrepreneurship at the annual Celebration conference at Cornell April 18-20.“The quality is always going up,” said Zach Shulman ’87, J.D. ’90, director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell, which hosts Celebration. “Students are thinking about starting companies earlier, so they tend to be…
Short-term relief from deportation can have beneficial effects for immigrants – but it doesn’t solve all their problems.That was one of many conclusions four Cornell social scientists outlined April 12 in King-Shaw Hall as they described three years of research examining how having temporary protected status (TPS) shapes immigrants’ experiences at work and school. The lecture was the capstone…
Why is expertise that used to be authoritative now sometimes dismissed as “fake news”? Is it possible to save an endangered language by bringing a native speaker to Cornell to document it? And what does it mean to work in a Bosnian weapons factory when the source of one’s livelihood is lethal to others and the environment?These are a few of the questions Cornell social sciences faculty are…
A faculty committee charged with exploring opportunities to position the social sciences at Cornell for excellence in 10 to 15 years has issued a report that will serve as the basis for campuswide discussion over the coming months.The report from the Committee on Organizational Structures in the Social Sciences is part of an effort launched by Provost Michael Kotlikoff in January 2016 to…
Researchers trying to figure out how to get more black and Latino students into science, technology, engineering and mathematics usually focus on those students’ college years.In a new study that capitalizes on data from the National Center for Educational Statistics and methods that address causality, Cornell sociologists looked at an earlier portion of the pipeline – in high school, when…
Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS) is once again offering a dream semester to the university’s most promising young social scientists, giving them time, money and resources to concentrate on their research at a crucial point in their careers.The ISS has announced its 2018-19 cohort of 15 faculty fellows. For a semester, each will receive an office at the ISS, partial relief from…
Myron Rush, a Kremlinologist whose careful lexical analysis of public leadership statements determined that Nikita Khrushchev had won the power struggle to succeed Joseph Stalin, died Jan. 8 of kidney failure at his home in Herndon, Virginia. The professor emeritus of government died a week after his 96th birthday.His book “The Rise of Khrushchev” described a predictive analytic technique that…
Toppling a widespread assumption that a “lactation” hormone only cues animals to produce food for their babies, Cornell researchers have shown the hormone also prompts zebra finches to be good parents.Lowering the hormone prolactin in zebra finches reduces the time and attention both males and females spend taking care of their chicks, the study found. The research was published Jan. 3 in…
Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars.Why does the size of a population of speakers have opposite effects on vocabulary and grammar?Through computer simulations, a Cornell cognitive…
Are supporters of President Donald Trump increasing in prejudice? What’s the best way to end violence in Liberia during elections? Is Colombia ready for a sustainable boom in cocoa production?
These are a few of the questions Cornell social science faculty are answering, thanks to small grants from the Institute for the Social Sciences.
“We emphasize support for cutting-edge,…
The algorithm is having a cultural moment. Originally a math and computer science term, algorithms are now used to account for everything from military drone strikes and financial market forecasts to Google search results.“People outside of computer science and math have come to describe these and other phenomena as ‘algorithmic,’ ascribing complex matters to a single, somehow magical entity that…
The concept of “race” – the idea that humans are naturally divided into biologically distinct groups – has been definitively proven false. But the 21st century has seen a disturbing increase in scientists inaccurately presenting race as the reason for racial inequality, says an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and law.“Social scientists absolutely should engage with this rise of racial science…
For decades researchers have known kids who grow up in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to face a slew of difficulties in childhood, from higher rates of teen pregnancy and health problems to less education.A new Cornell study now shows a child’s neighborhood also impacts her economic well-being into adulthood.As the first study to use national data to examine this issue on a modern…
David A. Usher, retired associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, died Oct. 6 at his home in Dryden, New York. He was 80, one month shy of his 81st birthday.Usher joined the Cornell faculty in 1965 and taught generations of students the basics of organic chemistry until he retired in June 2016. He also taught general chemistry courses for nonscientists and science majors, organic…
Roger H. Farrell, professor emeritus of mathematics, died Sept. 28 at Hospicare in Ithaca. He was 88.Farrell, who joined the Department of Mathematics at Cornell as an instructor in 1959, spent his entire career at Cornell.An expert in mathematical statistics, Farrell worked in the application of decision theory methods to statistical problems. This work on decision theory methods involved…
Richard Thaler, professor of economics at Cornell for nearly two decades, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Oct. 9 for work he began at Cornell.Joining the Cornell faculty in 1978, Thaler was a young assistant professor who had decided to try to make a go of research on a new scholarly concept, behavioral economics, that married psychology and economics. He went looking…
At the height of the Great Recession, psychologist Amy Krosch noticed a troubling trend: people of color seemed to be getting much harder hit than the white population on a number of socioeconomic indicators. She wondered whether something about the psychological effects of economic scarcity might be making pre-recession racial disparities even worse.So Krosch, Cornell assistant professor of…
Martha E. Pollack plumbed the depths of Cornell history and spoke to current times in her inaugural address Aug. 25, following her installation as the university’s 14th president.Quoting a speech written during the dark days of World War II by Cornell historian Carl Becker, Pollack said there is just as much need today for universities to “maintain and promote the humane and rational values” that…
In a new opinion piece in a major publication, Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology, describes how the study of language has fragmented into many highly-specialized areas of study that tend not to talk to each other. He calls for a new era of integration in the paper, published July 31 in Nature Human Behaviour.The crux of the problem is each area of study proceeds in isolation from each…
On the heels of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a new Cornell study finds that climate-science labels do matter.The U.S. public doubts the existence of “global warming” more than it doubts “climate change” – and Republicans are driving the effect, the research found.In a nationally representative survey, 74.4 percent of respondents…
Doctors have a specific definition of what it means to be overweight or obese.But that’s not how it works on the beach, on Tinder or at the workplace.In the social world, people’s gender, race and generation matter a lot for whether they are judged as “thin enough” or “too fat,” according to a new Cornell study.In other words, “it looks like obesity is in the eye of the beholder,” said co-author…
When we learn to read, we say one word at a time. But how does the brain actually put words together when we read full sentences?An international team of researchers, including a Cornell cognitive scientist, reports physiological evidence showing how the brain combines words into phrases in real time during reading.“Phrase structure indeed appears as a major determinant of the dynamic profile of…
Suggesting that science is not immune to political partisanship, new research shows liberals and conservatives share an interest in science but have stark differences in the types of scientific books they read.An analysis of online book sales found people who bought liberal political books also tended to buy books on basic sciences, such as physics and astronomy. In contrast, purchasers of…
The 2018 U.S. News & World Report ranking of graduate schools is out, and Cornell has again landed in the top 10 for English and engineering programs.At No. 4 in the nation, biological/agricultural engineering jumped two spots from last year’s ranking. Other engineering categories ranked in the top 10 were: computer engineering, No. 7; industrial/manufacturing/systems engineering and…
The Ithaca campus and Weill Cornell Medicine-New York welcomed three special young guests recently: high school students from Qatar, visiting the United States for the first time to get a sneak peek into the world of academic medicine.“I never really liked biology until yesterday,” said Jassim Al-Mansoori after a lecture on modern biology by Mark Stephen Roberson, professor of physiology in…
Forty-seven Cornell faculty and graduate students will be among the 4,600 sociologists to descend on Seattle Aug. 20-23 for the American Sociological Association’s 111th annual meeting. Nearly 600 sessions and 3,000 research paper presentations will address society’s most pressing problems.In the age of social media, the face-to-face contact sociologists get at the meeting has substantial merit,…
America has been talking about racial segregation and its effects for decades. Now another kind of separation is grinding away at America’s neighborhoods: income segregation, where people are separated by their wealth, or lack of it.More than one-third of families in large metropolitan areas now live in neighborhoods of concentrated affluence or concentrated poverty, and middle-class…
… of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. The $70,000 fellowships are the oldest source of support for education … one of two sociologists selected for the 2016 cohort. The fellowships are administered by the National Academy of … of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. The $70,000 fellowships are the oldest source of support for education …
The real estate maxim about the importance of location is true for teenagers too. Their intellectual and physical health depends on location, location, location.Teens living in disadvantaged neighborhoods face a higher risk of obesity and reduced cognitive ability, according to new research by a Cornell sociologist. In addition, adolescent girls in the most disadvantaged environments are more…
The survival of the fittest might just be the survival of the steadfast instead.Having a positive attitude could be evolutionarily advantageous, according to Cornell researchers who simulated generations of evolution in a computational model. Their study was published May 4 in PLOS ONE.The findings offer scientific support to the ancient philosophical insights from China, Greece and India, which…
This election year, the mainstream media are trying to figure out what’s behind the rise of outsider presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and what voters think about immigration, a female president, terrorism, the influence of Wall Street and a host of other issues.They will find clues to those questions and legions more at the world’s largest public opinion archive, the Roper…
So long, good Samaritans.In the first study of its kind, Cornell sociologists have found that people who have a medical emergency in a public place can’t necessarily rely on the kindness of strangers. Only 2.5 percent of people, or 1 in 39, got help from strangers before emergency medical personnel arrived, in research published April 14 in the American Journal of Public Health.For African…
The voices shaping the important conversations of our age, from racial unrest to income inequality and the war on cancer, are now a little more diverse, thanks to a group of Cornell faculty members.Twenty women and underrepresented minority faculty members have been publishing opinion pieces in the mainstream media – including The New York Times, Ebony, The Hill and Time magazine. Their success…
Would you kill an innocent person to save five others?If, like most people, you said no, it may be because following moral rules such as “don’t kill innocent people” sends a powerful social signal that you are trustworthy.New research suggests people perceive those who hold fast to these moral rules – even when breaking them might lead to better overall consequences – as more trustworthy and…
