Housing tends to be a key part of household wealth, but despite its importance, it has been difficult to measure the value of a property. In a new article, researchers studied the impact of a popular machine learning pricing algorithm on the U.S. housing market. The study found that, overall, the algorithm benefitted the market.

 ‘Angry’ citizens often experience a lack of trust in politics and democracy. Governments are doing everything they can to involve this group in democracy again with referendums and participatory budgets. Research by Rosa Kindt shows that this is having an effect: these meetings provide satisfaction and a feeling of being heard, especially among right-wing populist citizens. Kindt’s PhD defence will take place on 1 April at Radboud University.

People with autism are typically diagnosed by clinical observation and assessment. To deconstruct the clinical decision process, which is often subjective and difficult to describe, researchers used a large language model (LLM) to synthesize the behaviors and observations that are most indicative of an autism diagnosis. Their results, publishing in the Cell Press journal Cell, show that repetitive behaviors, special interests, and perception-based behaviors are most associated with an autism diagnosis. These findings have potential to improve diagnostic guidelines for autism by decreasing the focus on social factors—which the established guidelines in the DSM-5 focus on but the model did not classify among the most relevant in diagnosing autism. 

A new type of ‘vaccine scepticism’ has been uncovered by researchers at Lancaster University, who examined a nine-million-word corpus of tweets looking at vaccine comparisons and evaluations.

A new history of women stockbrokers, authored by a Lancaster University professor, captures the stories of the businesswomen who fought against the odds to establish successful brokerages across the country and, in the process, challenged society's beliefs about women and money.