Category Archives: Culture

Fighting Violent Gang Crime with Math

UCLA mathematicians working with the Los Angeles Police Department to analyze crime patterns have designed a mathematical algorithm to identify street gangs involved in unsolved violent crimes. Their research is based on patterns of known criminal activity between gangs, and represents the first scholarly study of gang violence of its kind.

The research appears today on the website of the peer-reviewed mathematical journal Inverse Problems and will be published in a future print edition. (more…)

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How Do Muslim Americans Use Popular Culture?

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Facing “Islamophobia” and widespread hostility, Muslim Americans have adopted cultural techniques to make their voices heard, according to Michigan State University faculty who will use a grant to conduct a yearlong study of Islam-inflected culture.

MSU’s Muslim Studies Program and Asian Studies Center were recently awarded $100,000 from the Social Science Research Council for “Migrations of Islam.” (more…)

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Native Americans Stuck in a Political Irony

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Domestic violence against Native American women and pollution of American Indian land – mostly at the hands of non-Native Americans – are just two of many issues that could destroy the American Indian way of life, according to a Michigan State University law professor. (more…)

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Who’s More Likely to offer a Bribe?

*U of T professors show collectivism and bribery linked*

Why are some places more prone to bribery and corruption than others?

Part of the answer seems to be the level of collective feeling in a society, according to research by Pankaj Aggarwal, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) professor of marketing in the Department of Management, and Nina Mazar, University of Toronto professor of marketing. (more…)

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Online Housing Discrimination Primarily Done by Roommate-Seekers, Based on Familial Status, MU Study Finds

COLUMBIA, Mo. – As more and more people use websites like Craigslist to find roommates and advertise apartment vacancies, the opportunities increase for housing discrimination law violations. Rigel Oliveri, an associate dean for faculty research and development and associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law, found that discriminatory online housing ads are almost always posted by people seeking roommates, and are primarily based on familial status.

In a study published in the Indiana Law Review, Oliveri reviewed 10,000 housing advertisements from 10 major U.S. cities. Despite a huge number of housing ads placed daily on Craigslist in cities across the country, Oliveri found relatively few instances of illegal housing discrimination. Of the 10,000 ads she reviewed, she found that only five percent were potentially problematic or illegal. (more…)

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