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.
With big data, machine learning and digital surveillance pervasive in all facets of life, they have the potential to create racial and social inequalities – and make existing discrimination even worse.
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? These are a few of the questions Cornell’s social science faculty are exploring this fall, thanks to funding from the Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS). The ISS’s Fall 2018 Small Grant Awards are designed to support faculty as they develop new research and seek external funding.
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.
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.
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.
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 book by Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, argues that part of the reason for America's current long-running wars is the lack of a war tax – a special levy historically paid by the American people during times of war.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The report identified ways to better connect faculty, provide faculty with support and improve Cornell's external visibility and recruiting power in the social sciences.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 for a job that would allow him to pursue it.
At the height of the Great Recession, psychologist Amy Krosch noticed that people of color seemed to be getting much harder hit than the white population on a number of socioeconomic indicators.
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 preserve democratic society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kendra Bischoff, assistant professor of sociology and the Richard and Jacqueline Emmet Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been chosen as a 2016 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.
The $70,000 fellowships are the oldest source of support for education research, nationally and internationally, for those who have recently earned doctoral degrees.
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 likely than boys to become obese, he found.
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.
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.
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.
