Examines

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain It's not exactly comforting that the United States is running up against its debt limit, as officials announced this week, nor is there immediate cause for concern for the average taxpayer, says University of Michigan economist Daniil Manaenkov. Manaenkov, an economic forecaster at U-M's Research…

Uber, which has operations in 72 countries, is a household name of the gig economy. Credit: Creative Commons, CC BY The ever-expanding gig economy has brought with it the rise of the independent contractor, from delivery drivers to personal shoppers and dog walkers. Compared to traditional employees, independent contractors are classified as self-employed and do not benefit from a minimum wage, paid time off, or other…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The rise of the far right in Western democracies in recent years has revived interest in how these movements and parties engage in politics. Given the generalizations that indicate that these ideologies are only constructed based on hate speech, two researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) argue that this political tendency in Spain also uses love and other positive feelings…

On the Shelf The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music By Tom Breihan352 pages$24.66If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. In February 1964, Paul McCartney boarded a plane for his first transatlantic trip to New York. Things definitely appeared to be on the upswing. He and his Beatles bandmates were booked to play the popular “Ed Sullivan Show” and two sets at famed Carnegie Hall.…

Regional evolution of the number of in-flowing researchers into the field of semiconductors in the US (height of bars). Panels A–D correspond to time periods 1954–1970, 1970–1986, 1986–2002, and 2002–2020, respectively. Credit: Complexity Science Hub To find out how many scientists a region needs to become a leader in a discipline, researchers at Complexity Science Hub tracked millions of scientists moving across the globe.…

The study looked at the variation in attitudes towards parenting across two samples of participants from different backgrounds, and found that cultural attitudes about parenting seem to relate to infant experience in some ways, but not others. Credit: Holden et al., CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Mothers in the samples from the U.K. and Uganda have different attitudes toward parenting, but while on a group…

It was a nightmare born out of a pandemic: a silent killer that arrived from a faraway land, rapidly spreading a delirious fever across the domestic population and leaving its hosts in an anaemic stupor.By channelling contemporary fears around infectious diseases in the wake of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic, the 1922 expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu founded an entire genre of vampire horror movies and inspired claw-fingered monsters that would spook generations to come, from Freddy Krueger to the Babadook.A hundred…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain At the United Nations, an ombudsperson reviews who is on the list of terrorists from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. If someone feels that they have been wrongly placed on the list and should be removed, they can request that their case should be reviewed. Since the establishment of the office in 2010, 63…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain As automated facial-expression analysis, or AFEA, becomes increasingly able to recognize facial behavior in everyday life, it will become increasingly important to understand what causes the technology to work incorrectly, as well as anticipate problems that could arise when it does work correctly. …

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain With reading and math scores plummeting during the pandemic, educators and parents are now turning their attention to how kids can catch up. In the following Q&A, Susanna Loeb, an education economist at Brown University, shines a light on the best ways to use tutoring to help students get back on track.…