• In environmental disasters, families experience conflict, denial, silence

    Environmental disasters affect individuals and communities; they also affect how family members communicate with each other, sometimes in surprising ways; the researchers say that the findings were, in some ways, counterintuitive

  • Formation of hate groups associated with presence of big-box stores

    In a new research, economists say that the presence of big-box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target, may alter a community’s social and economic fabric enough to promote the creation of hate groups; the researchers say that the number of Wal-Mart stores in a county is more significant statistically than factors commonly regarded as important to hate group participation, such as the unemployment rate, high crime rates, and low education

  • Post-communist depression

    A new study reveals how a radical economic policy devised by Western economists put former Soviet states on a road to bankruptcy and corruption

  • NCAA tournament math: an alternative selection method

    Researchers propose a math-based method for placing teams in the NCAA March Madness tournament – a method which will reduce team-travel distances in early rounds and which could reduce travel costs by $1 million while increasing attendance in the games

  • New methodology evaluates risk of scarce metals

    China produces more than 95 of the world’s rare Earth metals, making governments and businesses around the world uneasy; researchers develop a methodology ti answer two important questions: how do we know what is scarce? If we know a metal is scarce, how do we know whether we should worry about it?

  • Researchers: new forms of torture leave “invisible scars”

    Use of torture around the world has not diminished but the techniques used have grown more complex and sophisticated; a new study suggests that these emerging forms of torture, which include various types of rape, bestiality, and witnessing violent acts, are experienced by people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom

  • Brain's failure to appreciate others may permit atrocities

    A person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that is critical for social interaction; this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus “dehumanizing” their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings; this also may help explain how propaganda — depicting Tutsi in Rwanda as cockroaches and Hitler’s classification of Jews in Nazi Germany as vermin — has contributed to torture and genocide

  • Cyber-attackers think as regular crooks

    An engineer and a criminologist are applying criminological concepts and research methods in the study of cybercrime; their work has produced recommendations for IT managers to use in the prevention of cyber attacks on their networks

  • Game to improve defense, homeland security decision making

    Raytheon BBN Technologies has been awarded a $10.5 million multi-year contract to develop serious games that result in better decision-making by teaching participants to recognize and mitigate the effects of their own biases when analyzing information used to make decisions

  • Fighting terrorism by changing narratives

    DARPA’s “Narrative Networks” project aims to find out how susceptible some people are to “narratives” (oral stories, speeches, propaganda, books, etc.) which might dispose them to engage in terrorist actions — and then replace such offer such people “better” narratives

  • Arab Spring is different thing for different people

    New research shows true picture of what and who is behind the political uprisings; although the idea of the “Arab Spring” is accepted by a large proportion of people in Arab countries, the reasons they are aligning themselves with it are very different and have grown more diverse the longer it has gone on

  • Behavioral observation as a security method questioned

    Agencies in charge of airport security believed they had a good idea: why not add behavioral observation of passengers as an added layer of security on top of the various screening and scanning machines already placed at airports around the United States; experts question the method’s efficacy

  • Belief that others can change could bring peace

    Psychologists find that members of groups engaged in conflict are more willing to compromise if they believe people are capable of changing; when researchers presented Israelis and Palestinians with evidence that groups of people are capable of change, the information increased the subjects’ willingness to compromise on key political issues

  • DHS "pre-crime" detectors draw criticism

    A plan by DHS officials to use automated machines to identify people before they commit a criminal or terrorist act is drawing sharp criticism from privacy advocates; DHS is currently developing intention detectors under the Future Attributer Screening Technology (FAST) program; the FAST security checkpoints are outfitted with a sophisticated suite of sensors that are designed to identify several physiological indicators like heart rate or the steadiness of a person’s gaze

  • Designing a more effective crystal ball

    A new model for crowdsourcing predictions called Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES) is transforming the way future events are forecast — combining the collective knowledge of many individual opinions in a unique way that improves accuracy beyond what any one person or small group of experts could provide