Consequential – Details, episodes & analysis

In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a cohort of young Westerners flocked to Moscow, including many idealists who were eager to support the evolution of a democratic Russia. 

Today, Russia is on the other side of the looking-glass, nearing the one-year anniversary of the unprovoked invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine. Russian citizens now find themselves conscripted into a military accused of human rights crimes on the warfront. And at home, the Kremlin's propaganda, brutality, and corruption abound. 

If there is a bright, shining light of democracy, Russia is a chilling place far from it.  

Today on the show: How did this happen? And what additional policy response is needed as Russia and Ukraine enter their second year of this waking nightmare?

Our guest is Sarah Mendelson, a former UN Ambassador, an expert in global development, human rights, and foreign policy, and the head of Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College in Washington, DC. She was also once one of those up-and-comers who moved to Moscow in the early 90s. 

Mendelson reminds us that while the world is rightfully focused on protecting Ukrainians, Vladimir Putin's war has also made victims of Russians, and those who advocate on their behalf.

This episode featured recordings from the documentary film, "Putin Forever?," courtesy Kirill Nenashev.

To learn more about our guest and see the sources we referenced for this episode, visit: https://hnz.cm/consequential 

In June, President Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law. While full of good news for gun-reform advocates, this law—which was inspired by mass shootings—has been criticized for not actually doing much to address them. In this episode, a closer look at gun-death statistics suggests that’s not exactly the case. Importantly, the new law does at least begin to close gaps in protections against domestic homicides, which are the lion’s share of mass killings in this country. 

Still, we have a long way to go.

With this crucial first step behind us, what comes next for gun reform? The University of Michigan’s April Zeoli, an expert in domestic violence and gun laws, and Carnegie Mellon’s Dan Nagin, a criminologist and professor of public policy and statistics, share their wish lists.

UPDATE: As we prepared to publish this episode, on February 2nd, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the restraining-order gun restriction is unconstitutional. While Texas and Louisiana have their own state laws on this that are still valid, it is now legal in Mississippi for domestic abusers under restraining orders to own a gun. Zeoli warns the ruling will put families in danger. Zeoli warns the ruling will put families in danger.

For more information—including a recent op-ed coauthored by Zeoli, a 2020 TedTalk about her research, and videos of Dan Nagin addressing Congress with the NSF-funded workshop’s recommendations, visit our website. 

While infrastructure may have taken center stage in this year's policy discussions, the United States has been trying to figure out what to do about our infrastructure for a long time. This week's episode looks at the current state of our infrastructure, as well as past and future infrastructure reform, with guests Price V. Fishback, Jodi Sandfort, and Ramayya Krishnan.

What are the long-term impacts of targeted investments in our physical and human infrastructure? Beginning November 24, Season 4 of the Consequential Podcast will examine how policymaking in such areas as public transportation, energy, and workforce development will affect our future.

In the age of the Internet, a lot of information is at our fingertips. But is it accessible, reliable and up-to-date? In the season finale of Consequential, we're discussing information inequality with guests Asia Biega, Stephen Caines, and Myeong Lee.

Natural language processing is the branch of artificial intelligence that allows computers to recognize, analyze and replicate human language. But when it’s hard enough for humans to say what they mean most of the time, it’s even harder for computers to get it right. Even when they do, we might not like what we hear. In this week’s episode looks at sentiment analysis, search engine prediction, and what AI and human language can teach us about each other, with guests Alvin Grissom II of Haverford College and Alexandra Olteanu of Microsoft Research.

Open source software is the infrastructure of the Internet, but it is less diverse than the tech industry overall. In this deep-dive on gender in open source, we speak to CMU’s Laura Dabbish and Anita Williams Woolley about what’s keeping women from participating in open source software development and how increased participation benefits society as a whole.

From helping to identify tumors to guiding trading decisions on Wall Street, artificial intelligence has begun to inform important decision-making, but always with the input of a human. However, not all humans respond the same way to algorithmic advice. This episode of Consequential looks at human-in-the-loop AI, with guests Sumeet Chabria, David Danks, and Maria De-Arteaga.

The Enron emails helped give us spam filters, and many natural language processing and fact-checking algorithms rely on data from Wikipedia. While these data resources are plentiful and easily accessible, they are also highly biased. This week, we speak to guests Amanda Levendowski and Katie Willingham about how low-friction data sources contribute to algorithmic bias and the role of copyright law in accessing less troublesome sources of knowledge and data.

Peer review is the backbone of research, upholding the standards of accuracy, relevance and originality. However, as innovation in the fields of AI and machine learning has reached new heights of productivity, it has become more difficult to perform peer review in a fast and fair manner. Our hosts are joined by Nihar Shah to unpack the question of automation in the scientific publication process: could it help, is it happening already, and what does it have in common with the job application process?