Smart homes are a critical component of the developing smart energy grid. Smart home technologies make it easier for homeowners to reduce their energy consumption, and these features alleviate stress on the grid during periods of high electricity demand. As su... More »
Approximately one in every five dollars spent by Medicare is spent during a patient’s last twelve months of life, with most of this spending used to pay for inpatient medical care and physician costs. Despite taking up 20 percent of its budget, end-of-life cas... More »
All WiFi signals travel over frequency ranges in the wireless spectrum, and those ranges are getting increasingly crowded as people use more internet-enabled devices and require more data usage. These frequency ranges, called “bands,” can only handle so much t... More »
The 2016 presidential election was a watershed moment in American politics. Political polarization reached its highest ebb in decades, fueled in part by individuals’ self-guided consumption of media matched to their own political ideologies. During and after t... More »
In recent years, over 100 cities have committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Two states, Hawaii and California, have also adopted 100 percent renewable energy goals, which they aim to achieve by 2045. As cities and states move towa... More »
Extremist groups have a new recruiting tool: online media. Organizations including hate groups, violent jihadist groups and far-right political groups have increasingly turned to the web—and to social media, in particular—for the purposes of identifying sympat... More »
The effective design, implementation and evaluation of public policies rely on accurate socioeconomic data. It would be impossible, for instance, to implement a poverty alleviation program without knowing who the relevant target populations are, where they liv... More »
In 2018, West Virginia became the first state in the U.S. to test blockchain-enabled internet voting on mobile devices for a federal-level general election. Overseas voters from 24 West Virginia counties were able to cast their votes via an app instead of requ... More »
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many pundits and politicians have denounced “fake news” as a new, corrosive force in public discourse. While it is commonly agreed that a well-informed public is vital for democracy, attempts at regulating news can be... More »
Assessing the likelihood that a defendant will reoffend in the future is a vital task in the criminal justice system. Judges weigh the risk of recidivism when making decisions about bail and sentencing, and their conclusions can have a significant impact on de... More »
Since 2014, more than half of all fish consumed by humans have been farmed rather than caught in the wild. Aquaculture — which includes the farming of not only fish, but also mollusks, shellfish, algae, seaweed and more — has grown exponentially for decades an... More »
In 2012, the average resident of San Francisco supported about $76,000 in gross domestic —about $19,000 more than the average in Chicago. That gap has widened to more than $29,000 today. San Francisco’s economy is growing nearly three times faster on a per cap... More »