EUREKA!

EUREKA!

NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH

Outspoken

Men dominate classroom talk.

Men speak about 1.6 times more than women in college classrooms, according to a recent study in Gender & Society. Sociology prof Janice McCabe and ethnographer Jennifer J. Lee ’17 found that men interrupt, speak out without raising their hands, and prolong discussion more often than women. By contrast, even when female students have a correct answer to a prof’s question, they are apt to answer in a question format and to speak more deferentially. Lee collected data in nine classes that she observed for a total of 95 hours. How professors control their classes can alter the dynamic, but “the chilly climate still persists in classrooms today,” says McCabe, “in subtle and not so subtle ways.”

Hidden in a Haystack

Fake words foil hackers.

Intellectual property theft plagues drug designers and military tech firms and typically goes undetected for months, says cybersecurity prof V.S. Subrahmanian. A new data protection system called WE-FORGE (for word-embedding fake online repository generation engine) substitutes phony words for similar words in technical documents to foil hackers. Subrahmanian likens it to hiding a golden needle in a haystack. An algorithm measures how close a crucial word in a document is to a fake replacement that is plausible enough to mislead an adversary. Subrahmanian’s team is now at work on how to generate fake data to plant in charts, formulas, and diagrams. The research appeared in ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.

Nancy Schoeffler