In Short: Affluence on College Campuses; Selfie Fix

Elite colleges are sometimes maligned as hotbeds of liberalism, but in the area of economic thought, they may be reinforcing a conservative status quo. That’s the finding of politics professor Tali Mendelberg and graduate students Katherine McCabe and Adam Thal, who examined the effect of AFFLUENCE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES in the United States. They found that students at more affluent colleges held more conservative views on capital-gains taxes, unemployment, and other economic issues than those at less affluent colleges — whether or not they were themselves rich. The paper, published in the American Journal of Political Science in July, concludes that those views are formed, at least in part, by exposure to affluent classmates.

Let’s face it: It’s hard to look good in a SELFIE. The camera’s close proximity causes faces to look unflatteringly distorted: noses look longer, ears smaller, and foreheads more sloping than in reality. But there’s hope: Computer science doctoral student Ohad Fried has developed a new online photo-editing tool to reorient selfies, subtly adjusting pictures to appear as though they were taken from several paces away, rather than at an arm’s length. Fried presented a paper on his technique at the July conference of the Association for Computing Machinery. Other applications for the software could include 3-D anaglyphs, like the “live” portraits from the Harry Potter books. The paper was co-written with computer-science professor Adam Finkelstein and Google’s Dan Goldman and Eli Schectman.

Peter Arkle