The issue: The media plays a well-documented role shaping public opinion and policy preferences. In a democracy, it is generally important that a government have public support before engaging in a foreign ground war.
Economists who study international development often focus on measuring countries’ aggregate and per-capita volumes of output. However, the mix of industries and products — the diversity within an economy — is an important and under-appreciated variable in predicting potential growth, according to scholars at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The general responses of presidential campaigns to challenges and moments of great risk can seem haphazard; decision-making may appear to depend entirely on the character of the specific candidate and campaign. But as a scholar at Columbia University argues in a 2011 study, “presidential campaign management is potentially far more predictable than it at first appears.”
Recent weeks have brought a deluge of new findings about the digital media space, crowned by the Pew Research Journalism Project’s 2014 State of the News Media report.
Questions about how social media platforms may drive users into “filter bubbles” — increasingly like-minded communities whose views are reinforced and become more extreme — have been swirling for several years now. As the debate has developed in popular discourse, scholars and data scientists have continued to make insights on what is often referred to in the academic literature as online “homophily,” or colloquially as the “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon.
A May 2014 White House report on “big data” notes that the ability to determine the demographic traits of individuals through algorithms and aggregation of online data has a potential downside beyond just privacy concerns: Systematic discrimination.
