Weekly Media Update

Week of July 17, 2026

How Social Networks Reshaped Society and Politics

What are the effects of social media on our social, political, and personal lives? How do echo chambers deepen polarization, and how do algorithms fuel extremism? A new book by Sandra González-Bailón and journalist Jordi Pérez Colomé documents how digital technology has upended political power over the last three decades. “We challenge the idea that algorithms alone control what we see,” says González-Bailón.

Meet the New Vice Dean of Wharton’s EMBA Program

Technology is reshaping the way organizations operate, and the new Vice Dean of Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives, Kevin Werbach, brings deep expertise in navigating those changes. Werbach has spent more than three decades studying emerging technologies, from the early days of the internet to today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape. Now, he’s focused on what comes next; not just for business, but for the executives preparing to lead it.

Breaking Down Randomness, Win Probability, and Competitive Balance Across Sports
7/15: Wharton Moneyball | Eric Bradlow and Shane Jensen

Understanding Belief, Misinformation, and the Power of Public Support Through Education
7/13: The Spark | Dolores Albarracín

The Cashier Was the Control System
7/13: Gad's Newsletter | Gad Allon

ChatGPT Now Threatens Medicaid Funding for Hospitals Nationwide: Error Rate Unpublished
7/13: Tech Times | Cary Coglianese

The Benjamini--Hochberg Procedure Can Fail to Control the FDR for Correlated Two-Sided Gaussian Tests
7/13: arXiv | Edgar Dobriban

A Crash Course in AI
7/13: Omnia | Bhuvnesh Jain and Chris Callison-Burch

A Black-Box Reduction From Regret to Multi-Level Coverage
7/11: Forecasting as a New Frontier of Intelligence @ ICML 2026 | Edgar Dobriban

Human-AI Collaborative Uncertainty Quantification
7/11: Statistical Frameworks for Uncertainty in Agentic Systems @ ICML 2026 | Hamed Hassani

When to Trust the Cheap Check: Weak and Strong Verification for Reasoning
7/11: Statistical Frameworks for Uncertainty in Agentic Systems @ ICML 2026 | Hamed Hassani

Modeling Self-Exciting Diurnal Processes With Applications to Smartphone Use in Populations With Affective Disorders
7/9: Journal of Applied Statistics | Ted Satterthwaite

Dynamics of Gradient Descent With Large Step Size Near a Manifold of Flat Minima
7/9: arXiv | René Vidal

DfE Standards Must Guide the Sector, Not Tell Us What to Do
7/8: Tes Magazine | Cary Coglianese

Trump Push to Slash Regulatory Red Tape Opens a Crucial Chapter
7/8: Bloomberg Law | Cary Coglianese

DiPhon: Diffusion on Graphons for Scalable Graph Generation
7/8: arXiv | Alejandro Ribeiro

Beginnings: Risk in a New Republic
7/7: Business Insurance | Tom Baker

Optimal Designs With Robust Inference for Binary Treatment Effects
7/7: arXiv | Abba Krieger

Graph Convolutional Attention: A Spectral Perspective on Graph Denoising and Diffusion
7/7: arXiv | Alejandro Ribeiro

Generative Diffusion Models of Stochastic Graph Signals
7/7: arXiv | Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti and Alejandro Ribeiro

Depression Symptoms and Relational Patterns in 187k ChatGPT Histories
7/6: arXiv | Lyle Ungar

A Hierarchy of Policy Learning Problems
7/3: arXiv | Hamsa Bastani

Engagement-Driven Differences in Acoustic Features During Online Reading Comprehension Conversations
6/29: EDM 2026 | Lyle Ungar

Dynamic Climate Risk and the Vulnerability Ratchet
6/24: SocArXiv | Erol Akçay

Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz: A Conversation
6/4: NetSci 2026 | Duncan Watts

HALO: Language-Conditioned Overhead Monocular Aerial Exploration and Navigation
5/11: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters | Vijay Kumar

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