Michael Blanding

2 months ago | brownalumnimagazine.com | Michael Blanding

Climate change coverage by its nature tends to be gloomy—a relentless march of temperature and sea level rises tending toward seemingly inevitable collapse. While that clear-eyed realism is important, says Brown ecology professor Stephen Porder, it can be paralyzing as well.

Mar 21, 2025 | betterworld.mit.edu | Michael Blanding

“People rarely make decisions in isolation,” he says. “They make decisions with algorithms providing them with suggestions.”That goes beyond using Netflix’s recommender engine to choose a movie or accepting Amazon’s suggestion of products “you might also like.” Machine learning has now pervaded every profession. “Judges decide which defendants should await trial in jail based on predictions from algorithms; doctors decide which patients to treat using algorithmic recommendations,” Rambachan says.

Mar 21, 2025 | betterworld.mit.edu | Michael Blanding

Some economists have speculated that women are inherently worse at negotiating or fear they won’t get a job or promotion if they advocate for higher pay. Nina Roussille, the Gordon K. Lister and Donald K. Lister Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics, has a different explanation: They simply don’t know how much to ask for.

Mar 13, 2025 | indianewengland.com | Michael Blanding

By Michael BlandingWorking Knowledge Via The Harvard Gazette(Editor’s note: This article is reprinted here with permission from the Harvard Gazette. The article is originally published in Working Knowldege of the Harvard Business School.)With the help of artificial intelligence, creative ideas for solving global challenges are flooding into innovation hubs and crowdsourcing platforms.

Jan 28, 2025 | forbesindia.com | Michael Blanding

"The manager is supposed to act in the best interests of the firm, but personal interests can take precedence," Zaman says. The solution, his research shows, is to conduct more transparent performance evaluations and foster a culture of trust within organizations, where employees have a sense of belonging to the organization and can comfortably talk to their colleagues rather than work in silos.