“Our starting motivation for these projects was to try to understand how legislators make decisions and whether connections are a factor when they vote,” Battaglini explains. “But once you’ve addressed these abstract general questions, they can have implications in other contexts. If you know how to estimate social connections using observables, you can use that to predict social connections in many different situations. For instance, banks interact by lending money to each other and so forth. If we have a banking crisis, these connections may actually help propagate shocks, so knowing about them may help predict how the shock on one bank may affect another bank.”
Provided
In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
