“I think some of the hold-up is pure politics. Congress may not want to do anything prior to the fall elections,” says Richard Geddes, director of the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy.
Max Zhang, associate professor in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, says the air quality crisis in Beijing is the result of a "perfect storm" of factors — increased emissions with the onset of spring and sandstorms from Mongolia.
Though it was Xi Jinping who extended the invitation to Kim, China’s president likely felt forced into orchestrating the visit after Trump’s sudden decision to meet with Kim, according to Andrew Mertha, an expert on Chinese politics at Cornell University.
“Asking about citizenship on the Census is controversial because it is believed that such questions can suppress response among immigrant and other populations,” says Kathleen Weldon, director of data operations and communications at Cornell's Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
Ifeoma Awunja, a sociologist who researches the use of health data in the workplace, warns how data collected from employees “could be sold to basically anyone, for whatever purpose, and recirculated in other ways.”
While Facebook let slip data profiles on millions of people, “it’s much more than that,” says James Grimmelmann, law professor. “Trying to pin down any one breach as being the source of all the privacy harms out there is futile.”
The U.S. Congress will debate a move toward cash-based aid this year when lawmakers vote on a new Farm Bill. “A conservative estimate is that we sacrifice roughly 40,000 children’s lives annually because of antiquated food aid policies,” says Christopher Barrett, an expert on food aid.
Gerald R. Beasley, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell, pens this op-ed about how to preserve information on the deleted accounts of fake news that future historians may need to understand current events.
A recent study by Renata Ivanek, associate professor of epidemiology at the College of Veterinary Medicine, found that water troughs on farms are a conduit for the spread of toxic E. coli in cattle.
Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies artificial intelligence, is quoted in this story about the first fatality caused by a self-driving car.