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New Gadgets, Old Behavior

Submitted by RullI on Sep 10, 2012

Smart phones may be new, but we use them to communicate in ways that reflect evolutionary patterns, according to research by Janos Kertesz, who recently joined the Center for Network Science as a professor and researcher.

“We use high-tech gadgets, thinking they’re so far from our instincts, but they’re not,” says Kertesz.

Studies Examine Political Bias in Media

Submitted by RullI on Aug 24, 2012
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In most democratic societies, traditional media are meant to keep political powers in check but what happens when a newspaper or television channel adopts the rhetoric of a party or ideology? CEU political scientist Gabor Toka and his colleague Prof. Marina Popescu of the University of Essex analyzed data from Popescu’s online survey about standards of reporting in leading national media in Europe. To see how media bias impact citizens, they complemented their source on the former with data from the 2009 European Election Study.

New Book Examines the Progress of Capitalism in 11 Former Socialist States

Submitted by SharkeyC on Jul 13, 2012
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The fall of the Soviet Union over 20 years ago ushered in new political and economic ideologies and institutions to its former states, places where “many scholars doubted that the seeds of capitalist democracy would ever take root,” said CEU Professor of International Relations and European Studies Bela Greskovits.

Historical Study Examines Educational Patterns of Over 1 Million Students

Submitted by SharkeyC on Jun 8, 2012
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 Through an international project funded by the European Research Council, CEU History Professor Victor Karady and his colleagues traced the educational patterns of the emerging middle classes in the Carpathian Basin along with two Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.

Study Eliminates Ethnicity as Possible Cause of Test-Score Gap

Submitted by SharkeyC on May 23, 2012
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More economists than people might expect focus on measuring such things as equality and quality of life, which are traceable to factors including education and skill level, says Associate Professor Gabor Kezdi. Kezdi, who teaches in CEU’s economics department, and his colleague Gabor Kertesi from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, are two such economists. In a joint project, they investigated the test-score gap between Roma and non-Roma eighth graders in Hungary and found that it is substantial both in both reading ability and mathematic reasoning.

Scholars Rethink Responses to Hate Speech

Submitted by SharkeyC on May 8, 2012
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Peter Molnar, senior research fellow in CEU’s Center for Media and Communication Studies, co-edited a book on hate speech that is being published this month. In The Content and Context of Hate Speech: Rethinking Regulation and Responses, scholars analyze hate speech and its effects and consider potential responses, including criminal-law bans and punishment.

IMPACT Study Assesses the Efficacy of Corporate Social Responsibility Programs

Submitted by SharkeyC on Apr 24, 2012
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CEU Business School Professor Peter Hardi is leading CEU's participation in the IMPACT (Impact Measurement and Performance Analysis of CSR) project, the European Commission's largest-ever research and knowledge-development initiative on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Hardi is a professor of business ethics and corporate social responsibility and director of CEU’s Center for Integrity in Business and Government and Center for Business and Society.

Study Asks ‘Are Women Poorer Than Men?’

Submitted by RullI on Apr 10, 2012
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As countries in Central and Eastern Europe continue to develop after state socialism, CEU Associate Professor of Gender Studies Eva Fodor wants to know how this so-called progress is affecting gender inequality among the poor. In some countries like Estonia and the Czech Republic, women far outnumber men among those who are destitute, but this is not true everywhere.

Tamara Steger Investigates the Environmental Aspects of Occupy Wall Street

Submitted by RullI on Mar 26, 2012
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Late last year, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences and Policy Tamara Steger was transfixed by Internet videos showing hundreds of people descending on Wall Street to protest social inequality. From her office in Budapest, she wondered how the Occupy Wall Street movement might represent a new kind of social activism.

“Was it really any different from how people had been talking about social and environmental justice issues?” she says. “Were people thinking differently about these issues now?”

Study Busts Myth of Welfare Magnet Migration

Submitted by SharkeyC on Mar 12, 2012
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Stereotypes and the narratives that accompany them are often hard to dispel. But Martin Kahanec, associate professor in CEU's Department of Public Policy, is using statistical analysis to quell the widely held belief that immigrants move to countries that offer liberal welfare benefits in order to abuse social systems.