Penn in the News

Kenneth Shropshire of the Wharton School suggests how Major League Baseball can attract a youthful audience through technology.

Doctoral candidate Nora Becker of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School comments on the money women are saving via contraceptive coverage.

Research about employee ranking from Iwan Barankay of the Wharton School is highlighted.

Steve Arnold of the Perelman School of Medicine reflects on treating a patient suffering from dementia.

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.

A recent ruling on the legality of unpaid internships may require closer coordination between employers and colleges, experts say. Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that unpaid internships may be legal as long as the intern is the "primary beneficiary" of the intern-employer relationship. The ruling also emphasized that the purpose of the internship should be educational.

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.