In a recent interview, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was asked why it’s so difficult to prosecute cases against police officers. “Just think about all the cop shows you may have watched in your life,” he replied. “We’re just inundated with this cultural message that these people will do the right thing.” While two of...
The rapid politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen in messages members of the U.S. Congress sent about the issue on the social media site Twitter, a new analysis found. Using artificial intelligence and resources from the Ohio Supercomputer Center, researchers conducted an analysis that covered all 30,887 tweets that members sent about COVID-19 from...
Experts have documented that political polarization is intensifying in the United States. However, a Penn State sociologist now suggests that this separation isn’t just more intense, but it is also growing broader, coagulating into an ideological slick of opinions. In the study of data from a national opinion survey, Daniel DellaPosta, assistant professor of sociology...
High-profile police shootings and deaths of black men in custody – or even while out jogging – bring cries of racism across the country. The May 25 death of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis and the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia on Feb. 23, 2020 by a white...
As part of their efforts to slow the outbreak of coronavirus, governments, research institutions and industry are developing contact tracing apps to record interactions between people. The apps warn users if one of the people they have been recorded as being in contact with is later diagnosed with COVID-19 so they can take appropriate steps...
An independent investigative as well as an international offender database are needed to tackle allegations of abuse in elite youth sport properly, urges a McMaster University expert, in an editorial published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Much is being done to protect young athletes, but “there are still significant gaps,” says Margo Mountjoy,...
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, debates have raged about the reach of so-called “fake news” websites and the role they played during the campaign. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour finds that the reach of these untrustworthy websites has been overstated. To assess the audience for “fake news,” researchers at Dartmouth, Princeton and the University...
For all its shortcomings, the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country remains an important barometer of its economic health, strongly influencing both private and public spending. Though conceptually simple as the total dollar value of all goods and services produced within a specified time frame, calculating GDP is tricky in practice and can be...
A rusting chain-link fence represents a “color line” for the dead in Columbia, South Carolina. In Randolph Cemetery, separated by the barrier from the well-manicured lawn of the neighboring white graveyard, lies the remains of George A. Elmore. A black business owner and civil rights activist, Elmore is little remembered despite his achievement. But a...
Speculation about where laws come from ranges from crediting judges and legal scholars to God. However new research co-authored by a University of Central Florida researcher and appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour offers evidence that criminal laws come from an intuitive and shared, universal sense of justice that humans possess. “We sometimes think of the...
