News and Issues

From Mumbai to Menlo Park, Facebook is swamped with complaints about "inappropriate" posts, each of which must be manually reviewed by an employee. Yet rather than take down the offending content, the social network has tapped the emotional intelligence of UC Berkeley psychologists, among other top minds, to resolve disputes over posts that don’t clearly violate the company's community standards. more »

"How are law enforcement personnel and partners in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry being trained to identify potential trafficking situations – not just child sex trafficking, but that of adults as well? These are questions governments should be grappling with every day, and especially when a major gathering is on the horizon. And these are some of the specifics we’re watching for as we approach additional major sporting events." more »

Julia Sneden writes: We love to watch falling snow, or, on a clear night, the moonlight and shadows in our whitened yard. Bright winter sun in the morning reveals that the birdfeeder wears a toboggan cap of snow, which doesn’t bother the voracious finches and cardinals and chickadees perched on nearby branches, taking turns driving one another away from the feeding ports. But winter comes with a fine balance of plusses and minuses. I have a friend who has recently begun treatment for a condition called "Seasonal Affective Disorder," sometimes referred to as SAD. more »

Janet Yellen took office as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 3, 2014. She and her Nobel Prize-winning husband, wrote a paper on the fair wage-effort hypothesis, in that workers proportionately withdraw effort as their actual wage falls short of their fair wage. Such behavior causes unemployment and is also consistent with observed cross-section wage differentials and unemployment patterns. more »