Penn in the News

Dean John Jackson of the School of Social Policy & Practice is cited in this article about the NAACP’s annual convention, which starts in Philadelphia this Saturday.

Imagine a world where you’re driving to campus, and before you get there, your car tells you to park in one lot because it already knows another is full. That could soon be the reality at Carnegie Mellon University, where researchers have teamed up with Google to place wireless sensors around the campus to connect everyday items with the web. The idea is to make life more convenient, and to provide useful data about the campus, said Anind K. Dey, the project’s lead investigator and an associate professor at the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Last month, New York became the second state to require colleges to note on a transcript if a student was suspended or dismissed for sexual assault. Though the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is sometimes erroneously cited by colleges as preventing them from sharing such details on a college transcript, no laws prevent colleges from doing so. Few colleges are required to, however. That’s starting to change, with growing state and federal interest in the requirement leading to laws like those recently -- and easily -- passed in New York and Virginia.

Kermit Roosevelt of the Law School is quoted about gun safety and gun-control laws.

Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School comments on the Chinese stock market.

Mary Frances Berry of the School of Arts & Sciences discusses the Confederate flag removal from the South Carolina State House grounds and what is next in terms of addressing race relations.

Ask colleges’ Title IX coordinators today about their responsibilities, and you’ll hear a long list. They’ll talk about sexual-assault prevention, investigations, and educational programming. Or the sometimes dizzying complexities of the federal gender-equity law called Title IX, which are prompting more colleges to devote whole offices to compliance.

Sarah Gordon of the Law School and the School of Arts & Sciences talks about the origin of the political import of displays like the Ten Commandments monument.

The average amount that college students spend on course materials appears to be declining. But not necessarily because textbooks are cheaper. A growing number of students, surveys show, simply skip buying required course materials. A survey of undergraduates on 23 campuses by the National Association of College Stores, expected to be released on Thursday, found that students spent an average of $563 on course materials during the 2014-15 academic year, compared with $638 the year before.

Mitchell Lazar of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about leading a research team studying anti-diabetes drugs called thiazolidinediones (TZDs).