In new research pub­lished in the journal Sci­ence, David Lazer, Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Political Sci­ence and Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences, and his col­leagues ana­lyzed the effec­tive­ness of global-​​scale data­bases of news articles in understanding and predicting worldwide events. While Lazer and his team under­scored that these sys­tems hold great promise, they found these sys­tems wanting—falling short when tested for reli­a­bility and validity. The article, “Growing pains for global monitoring of societal events,” by Wei Wang, Ryan Kennedy, David Lazer, and Naren Ramakrishnan, makes recommendations for improvements would enable researchers to build models anticipating everything from the escalation of conflicts to the progression of epidemics. Read the abstract and access the full article here.