September 2015

[Commentary] After over two months of growing poll numbers, Donald Trump has suddenly experienced a notable drop-off -- visible in the Pollster polling averages as well as the Real Clear Politics average. So why are Trump’s polling numbers declining?

As I’ve argued before, changes in people’s preferences almost always require changes in the information they’re receiving. For Trump, media coverage has been crucial in motivating his surge. Now, media coverage is arguably motivating his decline. There is a correlation. An initial surge in news coverage after Trump announced his candidacy on June 16 creates an initial surge in polling. Then, further increases in news coverage coincide with increases in Trump’s polling numbers -- likely in a self-reinforcing cycle. But right before his apparent decline in the polls, there was a decline in his share of news coverage. Just as news coverage helped create Trump’s surge in the polls, it appears to be helping create his decline. We’ll see if that continues.

[John Sides is an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He specializes in public opinion, voting, and American elections]

Wind turbines and jet engines don’t always make people think of software applications -- unless you’re General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, that is. At GE, the company specializes in big, industrial products like locomotives. But its new product is a little more Silicon Valley: An app store. Immelt said the company plans to launch an app store by the end of 2015 to complement the kinds of industrial products it builds.

These apps won’t look like the consumer apps you’re likely used to, of course, but they’ll offer ways for those in industries tied to manufacturing to better learn from the machinery they use every day. At launch, the store is expected to have close to 5,000 apps, but Immelt expects that number to jump to 500,000 by 2020. The idea is that products that roll out of GE’s manufacturing efforts are full of data just waiting to be collected and then analyzed.

Does online hate speech ripple into the real world in the form of offline hate crimes? A study scheduled to publish in the next issue of MIS Quarterly sought to answer this question. Its authors say that their results show a strong correlation between increased rates of racially motivated hate crimes and areas that saw significant increases in broadband access. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota and NYU's Stern School of Business, determined that depending on the year in question, every 65 percent increase in broadband in a given American county correlated with an uptick in racially charged hate crimes that ranged from 70 to 270 percent.

"[Our research team] thought that the issue of racial hate crimes is of great importance -- the fact that such crimes are reported so often in news says a lot about this," said study co-author Jason Chan. "Over the years, I saw many instances in which the Internet was used and misused for such purposes, and I thought that a link between the two might be present, which sparked the motivation to begin this work." The correlation appears strongest when an American county has greater levels of segregation and sees more queries for racially charged search terms. However, the study also determined that the growing number of hate crimes appears not to stem from established hate groups actively recruiting members through the Internet, nor through coordinated, multi-person hate crime activities -- instead, "lone wolf" activities appear to dominate.