This month’s installment of The Evidence explores how leading ethics experts are responding to the urgent dilemma of gender bias in AI. In 2014, Maria Perez-Ortiz completed work on a machine-learning model to help doctors prioritize liver transplant waiting lists. Two years later, Perez-Ortiz discovered a critical issue: the model was assigning hardly any transplants to women. For Perez-Ortiz, now UNESCO co-chair in artificial intelligence, this discovery was a wake-up call. She realized that “AI is simply a microcosm that reflects the world.” In other words, AI entrenches inequalities and amp ..read more

Major components of modern society are set up to manage and control criminals and what they perpetrate. The police, laws, and their operation are a major part of any economy. The prison system and other forms of punishment, or attempts to rehabilitate offenders, use massive resources. Then there is the large-scale commercial enterprise of insurance and protection against crime. On top of this, it is impossible to turn on the television, enter a bookshop, or search the internet without coming across crime fact and fiction. What would society be without crime? But beyond all these consequences o ..read more

On May 5, 2023, a 19-year-old hiker named Matthew Read headed out on a roughly 12-mile trek in an underpopulated part of Glacier National Park in Montana. Read, a chemical engineering student, had stopped in Glacier while driving home to Michigan, and the pine-surrounded path he embarked on was known for its big views of the Livingston Range, a set of jagged peaks to the east. He would get a longer look at them than he anticipated. By Sunday, two days later, the young hiker had yet to return. That afternoon, national park rangers started a ground search; that night, a helicopter team scanned f ..read more

Thanks to a new collaboration between the United States government’s Office of Management & Budget and the General Services Administration (GSA), a new opportunity to engage is federal evidence is now open for applications. The President’s Management Agenda Learning Agenda: Public Participation & Community Engagement Evidence Challenge is dedicated to forming a strategic, evidence-based plan that federal agencies and external researchers can use to solve big problems. This project is expected to create new and innovative tools for government evaluation of community engagement and publi ..read more

Diane M. Bergeron discusses the transformative effects of bereavement and the motivation behind her article, “Monday Mourning: A Call for the Study of Bereavement in the Workplace,” which was recently published in the Journal of Management Inquiry. Someone once asked what motivated me to pursue this research. Beyond grandparents, I’ve experienced two significant bereavements. When I was 17, my young brother was hit by a car. Fifteen years ago, one of my sons died. There is so much that people don’t understand about bereavement, which is exacerbated by societal misconceptions (e.g., the ‘f ..read more

Courtney Geritz and Maria Raciti reflect on the inequalities that prompted their article, “Enhancing Equity in Australian Higher Education using Fuzzy Trace Theory,” which was recently accepted in the Australasian Marketing Journal. Educational inequality is a wicked problem in Australia and abroad. This inequality is particularly prevalent with regional and remote (RR) university students, who are underrepresented in higher education. The Australian government formally identifies RR students as an equity group due to the complex challenges they face in their transition to university, resultin ..read more

University researchers in the UK, across all disciplines and at all career stages, are struggling to take action against climate change despite wanting to do so. Many academics worry about climate change but face several barriers to changing their habits, including the pressure to travel. In one case, a climate researcher conducting fieldwork abroad wanted to use slower and more sustainable forms of transport rather than fly back to work at a research institute in Germany. He was fired. As large institutions and centers of knowledge, universities play an important role in tackling cl ..read more

In a previous post, I examined the claims of advocates of interventions to reduce airborne transmission of COVID-19 that they were the heirs to a long tradition of work on ‘bad air.’ In context, however, ancient Greek and Roman writers meant something very different from the present notion of infective particles moving through space on air currents. The same is true of miasmatic theory, which is also claimed as a precursor of the movement to reform ventilation standards. This was not, as some claim, unjustly dispensed with in the latter part of the 19th century but displaced, after a long stru ..read more

How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that the part of the brain that activates when something contradictory is encountered in the amygdala – “that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. This is why confirmation can be so strong, it’s so hardwired within us, we see evidence we don’t like as being like attacked by a tiger.”  In this Social Science Bites podcast, Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School and author of ..read more

As Generation Z students continue to enter the classroom, they bring with them a host of new challenges. This generation of students is more independent, less collaborative, and they are natives to all things digital. To help provide insight into what makes Generation Z so unique, different, and creative from prior generations of students, our Sage Faculty Partners will offer an exclusive webinar on these topics. This event will be held on April 12, 2024, from 1-2 PM ET. Registration for this webinar can be found here. The post Webinar: iGen: Decoding the Learning Code of Generation Z appeared ..read more