EUREKA!

EUREKA!

notebook

CAMPUS

[NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH]

Confirmed Women were supremely polarized.

“Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation reminded us of how sharply women disagree about how allegations of sexual misconduct should be handled and even about what it means to identify as a woman in U.S. politics today,” says Jim Woo Kim, a postdoctoral fellow in the quantitative social science program. The confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh polarized public trust in the U.S. Supreme Court and motivated women to vote, according to Kim’s analysis. Kim surveyed 4,000 U.S. voters before and after the U.S. Senate floor vote to measure the influence of the confirmation proceedings. He found that Republican-leaning women were more likely to vote for the Republican Party and they viewed the Supreme Court more favorably after the confirmation. Independent women were motivated to vote for Democrats, and Democratic-leaning women increasingly mistrusted the Supreme Court.

Bible Code

Research unlocks “divine dataset.”

»> A team of computer scientists turned to the Bible to develop algorithms that can convert English texts into different styles for different audiences. The researchers used 34 stylistically distinct English-language versions—from the King James Bible to the Bible in Basic English—to produce 1.5 million translation pairings of 31,000 sacred verses. This data enabled algorithms to learn how the same source material can be translated into different styles within the same language. “The Bible is a divine dataset to work with,” says professor Dan Rockmore, contributing author on the study, published in Royal Society Open Science. “Humans have organized Bible texts for centuries, so we didn’t have to put our faith in less reliable alignment algorithms.” In the future, Bible-generated algorithms could help translate complex works of literature into simplified versions for young readers or nonnative English speakers.