Opinion piece from Robert A. Friedman, clinical psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, on the right kind of stress. The right kind of stress can be beneficial and is particularly important for young people, whose brains and bodies are uniquely sensitive to the impact of experience. 

Piece by Julia Powles, a research fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, on the General Data Protection Regulation. Under the GDPR, it will now be difficult for any large data operation not to know what data it has, where it is held and what it’s doing with it.

Labor relations professor Kate Bronfenbrenner comments on Hoffa’s fading mystique. “At first it was scary to take him on, and then there was a realization that, one by one, the old mob guys had been taken out. They no longer have the power they did.”

The pressure to publish before earning a doctorate has been gradually building for decades, but the dismal job market since the Great Recession has amped it up. ILR professor Ronald Ehrenberg says the bigger demands necessitate extra time to finish degrees and place more demands on departments too.

Ecology and evolutionary biology professor Drew Harvel searches out animals that match handcrafted glass masterpieces to gauge the health of ocean invertebrates.

Human resource management professor Jamie Perry comments on the potential positive results from a one-time training session. eCornell’s diversity training program that Lisa Nishii created is mentioned as a way for executives to take steps toward improving their company culture.

Communications professor Brooke Erin Duffy says the feminized nature of social media employment is connected to its “characteristic invisibility, lower pay, and marginal status” within the tech industry. Duffy believes the influx of women in these roles is the reason salaries and status remain low.

Researchers from Cornell University plan to explore why some areas along the Alaskan-Aleutian subduction zone are hotbeds for earthquakes, while others are relatively quiet. Professor Geoff Abers comments on the similarity between the Kodiak region and Aleutian Islands. 

Denise Young Smith, executive-in-residence at Cornell Tech in New York City, says, “One woman is great, but one woman can’t do it; two sometimes can’t do it. But when you start to have three, when you start to have four, then you start to be able to shift the conversations that happen in those rooms.”

Cornell sociologist Daniel Lichter suggests that if the demographic profile of poverty remains constant, by 2050 over 70 percent of America’s poor will be from today’s minority groups. 

Opinion piece from Weill Cornell Medicine faculty members Mark M. Souweidane and Jeffrey P. Greenfield on allowing patients with a terminal diagnosis – who have run out of effective treatment options – access to a drug that might help, even without FDA approval.

Monday’s ruling means that companies can keep workers from launching class-action lawsuits over issues from wages and overtime pay to discrimination and sexual harassment. ILR professor Alex Colvin says this ruling illustrates that employees have fewer rights than they think.